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"Microsoft could potentially add some new, interesting features to the JavaScript standard".... Scary! Don't do it Microsoft—don't screw this up again. We spen

"Microsoft could potentially add some new, interesting features to the JavaScript standard".... Scary! Don't do it Microsoft—don't screw this up again. We spent ten years dealing with your "add some new, interesting features to the ??? standard," and we won't tolerate ten more. Standards are there for a reason. Do as you will, but don't break compatibility with the greater web.

ssmoot 14y ago
They did invent Ajax (AFAIK). So it's not all bad. And IIRC Canvas was in Safari before it became standard (it is now right?). I don't think vendor specific extensions are necessarily a bad thing. The bigger issue with IE was just that it stagnated so long. If the IE6 to IE10 cycle, which happened over just a few years, would have happened when it should of, I don't think we'd have nearly as much to complain about when it came to browsers. The Java situation was a bit different I guess, but honestly that may have a lot more to do with the state of non-MS platforms not really having an analogue to the J/Direct and RNI stuff? Wasn't really into Java at the time so I dunno if that's fair or not.
- calinet6 14y ago
  > They did invent Ajax (AFAIK). So it's not all bad. May be true—but the mechanism for XMLHTTPRequest (and async requests in general, through iframes or other ways) was around far before anyone had the bright idea to do anything with it, so it was more of a stroke of luck.
  - ssmoot 14y ago
    I think you misread me. They (AFAIK) invented the first XmlHttpRequest implementation years before anyone else. In fact, there's comments/submissions on this site describing developer experiences with AJAX on IE before anyone called it that. I'm not claiming MS coined the term AJAX. They didn't. I am claiming some bright people there saw the potential in it years before anyone else, and then released an actual implementation you could use. No idea who that was, if it was a lone shark sneaking it into the system, or if it was a team/management effort that saw the potential in the idea and ran with it, but that person deserves a cookie.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
eckyptang 14y ago
Erm Microsoft added a lot of good stuff over the years and provide a hell of a lot of test cases for HTML5. They are also conservative about adding features and when they do, they work. Chrome is far more worrying, especially with things like NaCl, store front and various far future standards being implemented without proper consultation and ratification with othe vendors.
- icebraining 14y ago
  How is NaCl, which at least is OSS, any worse than ActiveX was?
  - eckyptang 14y ago
    It's about the same, but everyone including Microsoft doesn't push ActiveX any more or that model as they admit that it's bad. Google are pushing it into Chrome as if it's the second coming. Also, fun facts: ActiveX was always an open well documented specification (based on COM) and was cross platform. It even worked on Solaris and HPUX with IE4 and on NT/MIPS!
  - barik 14y ago
    I'm not really sure why your comment was down voted, it seems like a reasonable question to me. Just because something is open source doesn't automatically make it better (or worse) than a proprietary (in the sense of closed source) solution [1]. But if it isn't adopted by all of the __other__ browsers, then you're back to the same situation of having a fragmented browser experience, reminiscent of the "best viewed in Browser X" issues, some of which continue to plague developers today. I think it's legitimate, at least for some concerns, to compare NaCL to ActiveX, and be mindful of these concerns so that NaCL does not repeat some of the mistakes of ActiveX. [1] An older HN thread brought up some of these concerns: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876282 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876282 with naclbox.com.
  - jonpaul 14y ago
    I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but it's my understanding that NaCl whitelists native instructions, whereas ActiveX is pure native that didn't run through any security hoops. Implication: NaCl is supposedly more secure.
acomjean 14y ago
One of the big things they seem to be pushing is the windows 8 store, and one of the platforms they offer is HTML and Javascript. To that end they have a large javascript api library of calls that seems to match the c++/C# ones... I don't know if these libraries would work outside the ms store environment. The whole thing reminds me a little of OSX dashboard widgets, but html/javascript have come a long way since then. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br211377.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br21137...

ssmoot 14y ago

They did invent Ajax (AFAIK). So it's not all bad. And IIRC Canvas was in Safari before it became standard (it is now right?). I don't think vendor specific extensions are necessarily a bad thing. The bigger issue with IE was just that it stagnated so long. If the IE6 to IE10 cycle, which happened over just a few years, would have happened when it should of, I don't think we'd have nearly as much to complain about when it came to browsers. The Java situation was a bit different I guess, but honestly that may have a lot more to do with the state of non-MS platforms not really having an analogue to the J/Direct and RNI stuff? Wasn't really into Java at the time so I dunno if that's fair or not.

calinet6 14y ago
> They did invent Ajax (AFAIK). So it's not all bad. May be true—but the mechanism for XMLHTTPRequest (and async requests in general, through iframes or other ways) was around far before anyone had the bright idea to do anything with it, so it was more of a stroke of luck.
- ssmoot 14y ago
  I think you misread me. They (AFAIK) invented the first XmlHttpRequest implementation years before anyone else. In fact, there's comments/submissions on this site describing developer experiences with AJAX on IE before anyone called it that. I'm not claiming MS coined the term AJAX. They didn't. I am claiming some bright people there saw the potential in it years before anyone else, and then released an actual implementation you could use. No idea who that was, if it was a lone shark sneaking it into the system, or if it was a team/management effort that saw the potential in the idea and ran with it, but that person deserves a cookie.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

eckyptang 14y ago

Erm Microsoft added a lot of good stuff over the years and provide a hell of a lot of test cases for HTML5. They are also conservative about adding features and when they do, they work. Chrome is far more worrying, especially with things like NaCl, store front and various far future standards being implemented without proper consultation and ratification with othe vendors.

icebraining 14y ago
How is NaCl, which at least is OSS, any worse than ActiveX was?
- eckyptang 14y ago
  It's about the same, but everyone including Microsoft doesn't push ActiveX any more or that model as they admit that it's bad. Google are pushing it into Chrome as if it's the second coming. Also, fun facts: ActiveX was always an open well documented specification (based on COM) and was cross platform. It even worked on Solaris and HPUX with IE4 and on NT/MIPS!
- barik 14y ago
  I'm not really sure why your comment was down voted, it seems like a reasonable question to me. Just because something is open source doesn't automatically make it better (or worse) than a proprietary (in the sense of closed source) solution [1]. But if it isn't adopted by all of the __other__ browsers, then you're back to the same situation of having a fragmented browser experience, reminiscent of the "best viewed in Browser X" issues, some of which continue to plague developers today. I think it's legitimate, at least for some concerns, to compare NaCL to ActiveX, and be mindful of these concerns so that NaCL does not repeat some of the mistakes of ActiveX. [1] An older HN thread brought up some of these concerns: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876282 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876282 with naclbox.com.
- jonpaul 14y ago
  I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but it's my understanding that NaCl whitelists native instructions, whereas ActiveX is pure native that didn't run through any security hoops. Implication: NaCl is supposedly more secure.

acomjean 14y ago

One of the big things they seem to be pushing is the windows 8 store, and one of the platforms they offer is HTML and Javascript. To that end they have a large javascript api library of calls that seems to match the c++/C# ones... I don't know if these libraries would work outside the ms store environment. The whole thing reminds me a little of OSX dashboard widgets, but html/javascript have come a long way since then. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br211377.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br21137...