9 ms·

Microsoft begs Web devs not to make WebKit the new IE6

51 points by e1ven 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mtgx 14y ago
Isn't that a bit like saying don't make Linux a monopoly? Things are a lot better with an open source "monopoly" than a proprietary one. In fact I'd say an open source monopoly is even preferable.
- spauka 14y ago
  Not at all. It's saying use standards when there is a standards compliant alternative, because it's both better coding practice and because it means you won't be screwing over your users and you won't be screwing over developers who wish to write alternative implementations.
- Kerrick 14y ago
  Gecko is also open source, and the same Webkit-only mindset that breaks new Trident (IE10) and Presto (Opera) also breaks Gecko (Firefox).
taterbase 14y ago
These are two very different scenarios. Developers never had a chance to help IE grow. IE stagnated because it was locked up and Microsoft was happy with it's state. Webkit is open and being worked on by many people in many different places. Webkit can grow with help from outside of itself. IE could not.
- bmelton 14y ago
  Agreed on all points, and to add another: Webkit is in use by more than one competitor. There are the occasional shootouts between Chrome and Safari to be obvious, and so long as both wish to be preferred by their users, they'll both continue to innovate or, at the very least, prevent the stagnation that IE6 became.
  - ernesth 14y ago
    > Webkit is in use by more than one competitor. As was IE6: maxthon and some other browsers used IE6's engine. And Maxthon users loved it because it was innovating.
    - r00fus 14y ago
      Browser shells don't count. We're talking rendering engine here. Trident (IE6's engine) was fully controlled by Microsoft and until Chrome Frame came out (and promptly not adopted at all) there was no way to change the rendering engine in Internet Explorer.
    - bmelton 14y ago
      As r00fus mentioned, I think that's giving Maxthon a little more credit than deserved. The 'core' of IE6 was still IE6, and adding a bunch of fluff around it didn't change that. As such, the IE6 engine, the thing that mattered, went untouched. That isn't to say that Maxthon wasn't awesome, it was. But it also wasn't nearly as pervasive as even Safari is really.
ck2 14y ago
Don't worry Microsoft, there is a version of chrome that runs inside internet explorer without special privileges. Problem solved.
- wluu 14y ago
  Uh, not on the mobile. They're talking about Windows Phone 8, which has a derivative of IE10 running on that phone OS.
  - ck2 14y ago
    There is already chrome for ios, give Google a year to make it for Windows Mobile. If IE wants to stick around it needs to come up to HTML5 standard, not drag everyone else down to their level.
    - kevingadd 14y ago
      Chrome for iOS is not Chrome. It's Safari with a reskin and worse performance.
  - zachrose 14y ago
    Man, I hear all this about not leaning on Webkit, and I would actually like to try a Windows Phone for a while, but remembering that it has IE just sends shudders down my web developer spine.
    - ygra 14y ago
      Just for the record: IE10 ≠ IE6.
      - zachrose 14y ago
        I've been hurt before, and don't know if I'm ready to trust again.
caiob 14y ago
This is SO NOT like that in A LOT of ways.
flipstewart 14y ago
Front end developers should be including unprefixed declarations along with the prefixed. That's common knowledge. But the real issue here is how damn long it takes for declarations to become standard... border-radius is just now reaching that point and how long has it been? And sure there are plenty of historical cases backing up how long these things take, but we should be out of that now. We use git. We're agile. We iterate. Why don't the folks making the browsers, and more so, the folks making the rules catch up?
- nivloc 14y ago
  `border-radius` has been usable for about a year on everything except IE. `-webkit-border-radius` has little reason to exist, and is only around for token backwards compatibility.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    People put it in there to keep the vampires at bay.
- gsnedders 14y ago
  You know what? Most browsers are developed pretty much entirely in line with the agile manifesto; most have either quick releases or a permanently stable master branch (to use git parlance!). The issue isn't in shipping browsers which support unprefixed properties, the issue is: - Dropping prefixed forms (which is basically not happening in WebKit, as Apple is scared of breaking non-web content, and they have no way to tell who is using WebKit within an application for bundled content and who is using it for the web) which means web developers have no encouragement to move to the prefixed forms. - The convoluted specification of CSS which means people frequently find bizarre, bad interactions with other parts of the specification which people want to work out before shipping. - The inability to drop anything once shipped: once something is shipped in a web browser, sites often start relying upon it (even if it isn't interoperable, behind UA-sniffing), which makes it hard to drop (users don't like sites breaking, and most applications need users to have a viable business model), and hence makes a lot of pressure to get it right first time, giving very little space to iterate. - W3C policies which care about the patent policy and having a stable specification everyone can implement perfectly than about continual iteration.
cageface 14y ago
Hard not to enjoy the schadenfreude of a company begging developers to support web standards after holding the entire web hostage for years due to outright cynical negligence. Must be very tasty medicine for them. They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of IE6's reign is pure chutzpah.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of IE6's reign is pure chutzpah. In fairness, that appears to be what ars is saying, not what MS is saying.
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  To complete the circle of irony, it seems that some of the developers who were the loudest to shout about standards-compliant web design and development when IE held the reigns are now guilty of much the same thing - the number of sites (and indeed blogs that either implicitly or explicitly state the same) that seem to have been designed with a "Looks great in Safari on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone, ship it". For one (unnamed example), I recently built a launch page with a service that purports to do just that, provide a landing page of the "Coming Soon" variety, the ability to customize some links, provide some metrics, etc, and give your users a single page as a placeholder. The interface for this design - and more importantly the resultant page for end users - is utterly horrific, largely unusable in Firefox, Chrome and IE10.
  - derleth 14y ago
    > standards-compliant web design I persist in misreading this as standards-complaint web design.
  - EricDeb 14y ago
    I thought Safari and Chrome both use webkit? Shouldn't your site be at least usable in Chrome then?
jongalloway2 14y ago
You have to actually read the article, because it's a little different than the (kinda linkbaity) title implies. The root issue isn't about market share, it's about writing browser-specific code. That was a bad idea in 2002, and it's an even worse idea in 2012 now that we have the benefit of history and are so many polyfills. Writing --webkit-only code doesn't stick it to the man, it sticks it to the web ecosystem that we all swim in. I had long and frustrating arguments a decade ago with web developers who enjoyed writing IE-only code because they were upset about a Netscape bug they'd hit last month. They were sticking it to... everyone, a few years later. Bottom line: if you're a professional web developer, act like it.
- keeperofdakeys 14y ago
  The main problem is the CSS prefixes. Since features under them might be different, they need to exist separately, but developers tend to use them even if they aren't fully standardised yet.
  - curiousdannii 14y ago
    The problem discussed here isn't the use of CSS prefixed properties -- it's the use of ONLY CSS prefixed properties. Include prefixed properties and the official properties and when browsers drop the prefixes everyone is happy. Well, unless their initial implementation was non-standard. But even if that is the case, if you don't update your CSS, including the non-prefixed property won't hurt your design more than leaving it out will.
- yuhong 14y ago
  Reminds of people using "standard compliance" when "boat anchor" is meant.
  - jongalloway2 14y ago
    Example, please
    - 14y ago
chj 14y ago
Why can't they just use Webkit then everyone will be happy.
- pedalpete 14y ago
  Though I somewhat agree, having moz and ms using separate rendering engines does provide some opportunity for innovation.
- andyzweb 14y ago
  because khtml is shit
- pcwalton 14y ago
  There are, believe it or not, things that IE does better than WebKit. For instance, IE uses Direct2D (essentially the state of the art for vector graphics) for rendering.
  - chj 14y ago
    They can rewrite the renderer in D2D.
  - warfangle 14y ago
    Yet it doesn't use WebGL (essentially the state of the art for hardware-accelerated cross-platform three dimensional rendering in the browser).
    - pcwalton 14y ago
      Sure, there are lots and lots of things that WebKit does better than IE. I'm just pointing out that it's a tradeoff; it's not cut and dry in favor of WebKit.
randomfool 14y ago
And I beg Microsoft to make it easier for me to test on IE- release IE for OSX.
- Mythbusters 14y ago
  You can download a free VM that runs on OSX to test.
darren 14y ago
Sure would be nice to get IE10 support into Zepto.js. IE support is one of the main reasons we continue to use Jquery Mobile, but Zepto would meet our needs (with a bit of re-work) at a much smaller download size.
scotty79 14y ago
I wonder if they ever considered adopting webkit for IE. Is there any reason not to? Apart from MS pride.
- avsbst 14y ago
  The main reason IE doesn't adopt webkit is that IE's current purpose is to provide stability and backwards compatibility to enterprise customers. A large portion of corporations have custom built webapps to provide basic services like HR, Payroll, etc. and they rely on IE to provide consistent behavior for these services. Should they update their apps? Probably, but it costs money to build systems like that and most corporations don't want to drop money on something that already works perfectly fine. Adopting webkit would completely disrupt all of these services, and Microsoft would basically destroy its customer base/relations. Alternatively, Chrome is about pushing the boundaries of what's possible on the web. It's great for new companies, startups, and small developers, but as they move fast and implement new standards / functionality they also break stuff, and unlike Microsoft it doesn't really matter to the webkit dev team if a certain medium size corporation's old payroll app no longer works because of the latest chrome update. Different browsers serve different purposes, and IE's is to provide stability. Hence they don't adopt webkit. (I was an intern with IE this past summer and I asked the very same question minus the last part to my manager, and this was his response)
  - X-Istence 14y ago
    You can still use Webkit without requiring your browser to be bleeding edge. You can still update at the same glacial pace that IE has updated by using Webkit, shaking all the bugs out of it, and then releasing it. There is no requirement that it be exactly like Chrome. Look at Safari on OS X, that Webkit engine is not the same one that goes into Chrome. By the time that Safari is released Chrome is already several Webkit versions ahead.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    They could provide trident so corporations can safely live in IE6 world until they die or grow up and webkit by the default for rest of the users.
nivloc 14y ago
This sounds like a PR stunt. Un-prefixed declarations are everywhere. They're part of every framework, and what every developer tries first. Then comes -webkit, -o, -moz. IE hacks are far more widespread. filter? I've been looking for sites without un-prefixed declarations for an hour and come up short. If there is any merit to this, I'd love to hear it.
- achal 14y ago
  I was able to gather the following links which may be interesting: * IRC log of W3's meeting, where Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft bring up the possibility of being forced to support -webkit prefixes: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.h... * Article on Opera and -webkit prefix adoption: http://www.netmagazine.com/news/opera-confirms-webkit-prefix-usage-121923 http://www.netmagazine.com/news/opera-confirms-webkit-prefix... * Mozilla's analysis of -webkit usage on the web: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708406 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708406 There's a lot of data there. Raw data is here: https://bug708406.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=601449 https://bug708406.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=601... . Some processed data in a spreadsheet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=599084 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=599084 . You may want to view others as well. I haven't personally looked for sites that do this, but I use Firefox and have a Windows Phone, and in both cases I have found that I've ran into sites that were either Chrome only or simply looked terrible in my browser, not because of technical limitations, but because the developers had really only tested on Chrome. In some cases, I've ended up spoofing Chrome's UA in Firefox and found that sites still worked.
jonchang 14y ago
Did anyone actually bother to read the blog post[1] linked in the ars article? Nowhere does Microsoft "beg" anyone to do anything, and in fact IE6 is isn't even mentioned. Glad to see everyone is jumping on the anti-Microsoft gravy train though. [1] http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/11/15/adapting-your-webkit-optimized-site-for-internet-explorer-10.aspx http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/...

51 points by e1ven 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mtgx 14y ago

Isn't that a bit like saying don't make Linux a monopoly? Things are a lot better with an open source "monopoly" than a proprietary one. In fact I'd say an open source monopoly is even preferable.

spauka 14y ago
Not at all. It's saying use standards when there is a standards compliant alternative, because it's both better coding practice and because it means you won't be screwing over your users and you won't be screwing over developers who wish to write alternative implementations.
Kerrick 14y ago
Gecko is also open source, and the same Webkit-only mindset that breaks new Trident (IE10) and Presto (Opera) also breaks Gecko (Firefox).

taterbase 14y ago

These are two very different scenarios. Developers never had a chance to help IE grow. IE stagnated because it was locked up and Microsoft was happy with it's state. Webkit is open and being worked on by many people in many different places. Webkit can grow with help from outside of itself. IE could not.

bmelton 14y ago
Agreed on all points, and to add another: Webkit is in use by more than one competitor. There are the occasional shootouts between Chrome and Safari to be obvious, and so long as both wish to be preferred by their users, they'll both continue to innovate or, at the very least, prevent the stagnation that IE6 became.
- ernesth 14y ago
  > Webkit is in use by more than one competitor. As was IE6: maxthon and some other browsers used IE6's engine. And Maxthon users loved it because it was innovating.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    Browser shells don't count. We're talking rendering engine here. Trident (IE6's engine) was fully controlled by Microsoft and until Chrome Frame came out (and promptly not adopted at all) there was no way to change the rendering engine in Internet Explorer.
  - bmelton 14y ago
    As r00fus mentioned, I think that's giving Maxthon a little more credit than deserved. The 'core' of IE6 was still IE6, and adding a bunch of fluff around it didn't change that. As such, the IE6 engine, the thing that mattered, went untouched. That isn't to say that Maxthon wasn't awesome, it was. But it also wasn't nearly as pervasive as even Safari is really.

ck2 14y ago

Don't worry Microsoft, there is a version of chrome that runs inside internet explorer without special privileges. Problem solved.

wluu 14y ago
Uh, not on the mobile. They're talking about Windows Phone 8, which has a derivative of IE10 running on that phone OS.
- ck2 14y ago
  There is already chrome for ios, give Google a year to make it for Windows Mobile. If IE wants to stick around it needs to come up to HTML5 standard, not drag everyone else down to their level.
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    Chrome for iOS is not Chrome. It's Safari with a reskin and worse performance.
- zachrose 14y ago
  Man, I hear all this about not leaning on Webkit, and I would actually like to try a Windows Phone for a while, but remembering that it has IE just sends shudders down my web developer spine.
  - ygra 14y ago
    Just for the record: IE10 ≠ IE6.
    - zachrose 14y ago
      I've been hurt before, and don't know if I'm ready to trust again.

caiob 14y ago

This is SO NOT like that in A LOT of ways.

flipstewart 14y ago

Front end developers should be including unprefixed declarations along with the prefixed. That's common knowledge. But the real issue here is how damn long it takes for declarations to become standard... border-radius is just now reaching that point and how long has it been? And sure there are plenty of historical cases backing up how long these things take, but we should be out of that now. We use git. We're agile. We iterate. Why don't the folks making the browsers, and more so, the folks making the rules catch up?

nivloc 14y ago
`border-radius` has been usable for about a year on everything except IE. `-webkit-border-radius` has little reason to exist, and is only around for token backwards compatibility.
- astrodust 14y ago
  People put it in there to keep the vampires at bay.
gsnedders 14y ago
You know what? Most browsers are developed pretty much entirely in line with the agile manifesto; most have either quick releases or a permanently stable master branch (to use git parlance!). The issue isn't in shipping browsers which support unprefixed properties, the issue is: - Dropping prefixed forms (which is basically not happening in WebKit, as Apple is scared of breaking non-web content, and they have no way to tell who is using WebKit within an application for bundled content and who is using it for the web) which means web developers have no encouragement to move to the prefixed forms. - The convoluted specification of CSS which means people frequently find bizarre, bad interactions with other parts of the specification which people want to work out before shipping. - The inability to drop anything once shipped: once something is shipped in a web browser, sites often start relying upon it (even if it isn't interoperable, behind UA-sniffing), which makes it hard to drop (users don't like sites breaking, and most applications need users to have a viable business model), and hence makes a lot of pressure to get it right first time, giving very little space to iterate. - W3C policies which care about the patent policy and having a stable specification everyone can implement perfectly than about continual iteration.

cageface 14y ago

Hard not to enjoy the schadenfreude of a company begging developers to support web standards after holding the entire web hostage for years due to outright cynical negligence. Must be very tasty medicine for them. They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of IE6's reign is pure chutzpah.

mistercow 14y ago
>They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of IE6's reign is pure chutzpah. In fairness, that appears to be what ars is saying, not what MS is saying.
FireBeyond 14y ago
To complete the circle of irony, it seems that some of the developers who were the loudest to shout about standards-compliant web design and development when IE held the reigns are now guilty of much the same thing - the number of sites (and indeed blogs that either implicitly or explicitly state the same) that seem to have been designed with a "Looks great in Safari on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone, ship it". For one (unnamed example), I recently built a launch page with a service that purports to do just that, provide a landing page of the "Coming Soon" variety, the ability to customize some links, provide some metrics, etc, and give your users a single page as a placeholder. The interface for this design - and more importantly the resultant page for end users - is utterly horrific, largely unusable in Firefox, Chrome and IE10.
- derleth 14y ago
  > standards-compliant web design I persist in misreading this as standards-complaint web design.
- EricDeb 14y ago
  I thought Safari and Chrome both use webkit? Shouldn't your site be at least usable in Chrome then?

jongalloway2 14y ago

You have to actually read the article, because it's a little different than the (kinda linkbaity) title implies. The root issue isn't about market share, it's about writing browser-specific code. That was a bad idea in 2002, and it's an even worse idea in 2012 now that we have the benefit of history and are so many polyfills. Writing --webkit-only code doesn't stick it to the man, it sticks it to the web ecosystem that we all swim in. I had long and frustrating arguments a decade ago with web developers who enjoyed writing IE-only code because they were upset about a Netscape bug they'd hit last month. They were sticking it to... everyone, a few years later. Bottom line: if you're a professional web developer, act like it.

keeperofdakeys 14y ago
The main problem is the CSS prefixes. Since features under them might be different, they need to exist separately, but developers tend to use them even if they aren't fully standardised yet.
- curiousdannii 14y ago
  The problem discussed here isn't the use of CSS prefixed properties -- it's the use of ONLY CSS prefixed properties. Include prefixed properties and the official properties and when browsers drop the prefixes everyone is happy. Well, unless their initial implementation was non-standard. But even if that is the case, if you don't update your CSS, including the non-prefixed property won't hurt your design more than leaving it out will.
yuhong 14y ago
Reminds of people using "standard compliance" when "boat anchor" is meant.
- jongalloway2 14y ago
  Example, please
  - 14y ago

chj 14y ago

Why can't they just use Webkit then everyone will be happy.

pedalpete 14y ago
Though I somewhat agree, having moz and ms using separate rendering engines does provide some opportunity for innovation.
andyzweb 14y ago
because khtml is shit
pcwalton 14y ago
There are, believe it or not, things that IE does better than WebKit. For instance, IE uses Direct2D (essentially the state of the art for vector graphics) for rendering.
- chj 14y ago
  They can rewrite the renderer in D2D.
- warfangle 14y ago
  Yet it doesn't use WebGL (essentially the state of the art for hardware-accelerated cross-platform three dimensional rendering in the browser).
  - pcwalton 14y ago
    Sure, there are lots and lots of things that WebKit does better than IE. I'm just pointing out that it's a tradeoff; it's not cut and dry in favor of WebKit.

randomfool 14y ago

And I beg Microsoft to make it easier for me to test on IE- release IE for OSX.

Mythbusters 14y ago
You can download a free VM that runs on OSX to test.

darren 14y ago

Sure would be nice to get IE10 support into Zepto.js. IE support is one of the main reasons we continue to use Jquery Mobile, but Zepto would meet our needs (with a bit of re-work) at a much smaller download size.

scotty79 14y ago

I wonder if they ever considered adopting webkit for IE. Is there any reason not to? Apart from MS pride.

avsbst 14y ago
The main reason IE doesn't adopt webkit is that IE's current purpose is to provide stability and backwards compatibility to enterprise customers. A large portion of corporations have custom built webapps to provide basic services like HR, Payroll, etc. and they rely on IE to provide consistent behavior for these services. Should they update their apps? Probably, but it costs money to build systems like that and most corporations don't want to drop money on something that already works perfectly fine. Adopting webkit would completely disrupt all of these services, and Microsoft would basically destroy its customer base/relations. Alternatively, Chrome is about pushing the boundaries of what's possible on the web. It's great for new companies, startups, and small developers, but as they move fast and implement new standards / functionality they also break stuff, and unlike Microsoft it doesn't really matter to the webkit dev team if a certain medium size corporation's old payroll app no longer works because of the latest chrome update. Different browsers serve different purposes, and IE's is to provide stability. Hence they don't adopt webkit. (I was an intern with IE this past summer and I asked the very same question minus the last part to my manager, and this was his response)
- X-Istence 14y ago
  You can still use Webkit without requiring your browser to be bleeding edge. You can still update at the same glacial pace that IE has updated by using Webkit, shaking all the bugs out of it, and then releasing it. There is no requirement that it be exactly like Chrome. Look at Safari on OS X, that Webkit engine is not the same one that goes into Chrome. By the time that Safari is released Chrome is already several Webkit versions ahead.
- scotty79 14y ago
  They could provide trident so corporations can safely live in IE6 world until they die or grow up and webkit by the default for rest of the users.

nivloc 14y ago

This sounds like a PR stunt. Un-prefixed declarations are everywhere. They're part of every framework, and what every developer tries first. Then comes -webkit, -o, -moz. IE hacks are far more widespread. filter? I've been looking for sites without un-prefixed declarations for an hour and come up short. If there is any merit to this, I'd love to hear it.

achal 14y ago
I was able to gather the following links which may be interesting: * IRC log of W3's meeting, where Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft bring up the possibility of being forced to support -webkit prefixes: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.h... * Article on Opera and -webkit prefix adoption: http://www.netmagazine.com/news/opera-confirms-webkit-prefix-usage-121923 http://www.netmagazine.com/news/opera-confirms-webkit-prefix... * Mozilla's analysis of -webkit usage on the web: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708406 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708406 There's a lot of data there. Raw data is here: https://bug708406.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=601449 https://bug708406.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=601... . Some processed data in a spreadsheet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=599084 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=599084 . You may want to view others as well. I haven't personally looked for sites that do this, but I use Firefox and have a Windows Phone, and in both cases I have found that I've ran into sites that were either Chrome only or simply looked terrible in my browser, not because of technical limitations, but because the developers had really only tested on Chrome. In some cases, I've ended up spoofing Chrome's UA in Firefox and found that sites still worked.

jonchang 14y ago

Did anyone actually bother to read the blog post[1] linked in the ars article? Nowhere does Microsoft "beg" anyone to do anything, and in fact IE6 is isn't even mentioned. Glad to see everyone is jumping on the anti-Microsoft gravy train though. [1] http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/11/15/adapting-your-webkit-optimized-site-for-internet-explorer-10.aspx http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/...