3 ms·

The issue with IE 5 wasn't that the features were useless, it was that they were proprietary.

bawolff 3y ago
vs now where the features may be standardized, but almost the entire browser market share are things using the chrome rendering engine.
chrismorgan 3y ago
It’s a combination. The feature was a gimmick, and it shows in the design. Not one of the transitions is one you’d actually want to use on, y’know, a web page. No fade (only pixel fade, 12), no slide (only wipe, 4–7). And Page-Enter/Page-Exit was obviously the wrong primitive if you wanted to indicate any sort of relationship between pages, because it would only be “correct” if you navigated in one direction. Basically, it was obviously only even vaguely suitable for slide shows, and not very good even there. So: the feature was useless. But being proprietary was a part of that: if they’d proposed to Anyone Else “let’s add this thing”, Anyone Else would have said “that’s a stupid design, no one is going to use that well, let’s either do nothing or completely redesign the concept to be useful”. In fact, the feature is so bad that I suspect it was an idea from someone who didn’t know what they were doing but had power, and the developers put it in half-heartedly rather than resisting. If the developers had been serious about it, it’d surely have ended up with named rather than numbered transitions, and at least a couple of useful transitions rather than the useless ones it got, and some better arrangement for varying transition per link or by navigation direction.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
  > Not one of the transitions is one you’d actually want to use on, y’know, a web page. No fade (only pixel fade, 12), no slide (only wipe, 4–7). The hardware of the time couldn't do better.
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    This is the only explanation I’ve ever been able to imagine. It applied to PowerPoint’s slide transitions for a ridiculously long time too—I think it might have been 2007 before it finally got sensible transitions. But I find it difficult to believe. You could scroll through a web page smoothly, and a slide transition is the same thing. I’m not sure how that was supported technically in those pre-compositor days. Fade is a little more complex, as you’re needing to interpolate each pixel between two images rather than just translating a static double-sized image. Not sure about that one; at 1024×768@60Hz that is 47 million pixel calculations per second, touching up to 38MB of memory for the two bitmaps being interpolated between, and if the CPU had to do the interpolation, it probably couldn’t quite.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
      > You could scroll through a web page smoothly Not really, certainly not at 60fps. Hell, even in the late 2000's, smooth scrolling for web pages specifically was still held back by rendering performance, hence the iPhone having much more aggressive scroll deceleration for web content only. In any case, 90's OSes did all sorts of tricks to try to avoid doing this kind of animation because “2D acceleration” wasn't a guarantee. Recall that scrollbars didn't have instant feedback in the past (they scrolled when you let go of the mouse) and neither did window resizing. These transitions would have been designed to work reliably even on the lowest-spec Windows 95 machine, considering they're part of office software, not games.
      - chrismorgan 3y ago
        > scrollbars didn't have instant feedback in the past (they scrolled when you let go of the mouse) I believe that was only the case until Windows 3.11, and 95 scrolled constantly like it works now?

vs now where the features may be standardized, but almost the entire browser market share are things using the chrome rendering engine.

chrismorgan 3y ago

It’s a combination. The feature was a gimmick, and it shows in the design. Not one of the transitions is one you’d actually want to use on, y’know, a web page. No fade (only pixel fade, 12), no slide (only wipe, 4–7). And Page-Enter/Page-Exit was obviously the wrong primitive if you wanted to indicate any sort of relationship between pages, because it would only be “correct” if you navigated in one direction. Basically, it was obviously only even vaguely suitable for slide shows, and not very good even there. So: the feature was useless. But being proprietary was a part of that: if they’d proposed to Anyone Else “let’s add this thing”, Anyone Else would have said “that’s a stupid design, no one is going to use that well, let’s either do nothing or completely redesign the concept to be useful”. In fact, the feature is so bad that I suspect it was an idea from someone who didn’t know what they were doing but had power, and the developers put it in half-heartedly rather than resisting. If the developers had been serious about it, it’d surely have ended up with named rather than numbered transitions, and at least a couple of useful transitions rather than the useless ones it got, and some better arrangement for varying transition per link or by navigation direction.

TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
> Not one of the transitions is one you’d actually want to use on, y’know, a web page. No fade (only pixel fade, 12), no slide (only wipe, 4–7). The hardware of the time couldn't do better.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  This is the only explanation I’ve ever been able to imagine. It applied to PowerPoint’s slide transitions for a ridiculously long time too—I think it might have been 2007 before it finally got sensible transitions. But I find it difficult to believe. You could scroll through a web page smoothly, and a slide transition is the same thing. I’m not sure how that was supported technically in those pre-compositor days. Fade is a little more complex, as you’re needing to interpolate each pixel between two images rather than just translating a static double-sized image. Not sure about that one; at 1024×768@60Hz that is 47 million pixel calculations per second, touching up to 38MB of memory for the two bitmaps being interpolated between, and if the CPU had to do the interpolation, it probably couldn’t quite.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
    > You could scroll through a web page smoothly Not really, certainly not at 60fps. Hell, even in the late 2000's, smooth scrolling for web pages specifically was still held back by rendering performance, hence the iPhone having much more aggressive scroll deceleration for web content only. In any case, 90's OSes did all sorts of tricks to try to avoid doing this kind of animation because “2D acceleration” wasn't a guarantee. Recall that scrollbars didn't have instant feedback in the past (they scrolled when you let go of the mouse) and neither did window resizing. These transitions would have been designed to work reliably even on the lowest-spec Windows 95 machine, considering they're part of office software, not games.
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
      > scrollbars didn't have instant feedback in the past (they scrolled when you let go of the mouse) I believe that was only the case until Windows 3.11, and 95 scrolled constantly like it works now?