28 ms·

Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

317 points by recycleme 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- kyriakos 13y ago
  maybe even this will be gone by the time the final version comes out.
- yahelc 13y ago
  Nope. IE Conditional Comments were removed in IE10. http://www.sitepoint.com/microsoft-drop-ie10-conditional-comments/ http://www.sitepoint.com/microsoft-drop-ie10-conditional-com...
  - dubfan 13y ago
    They dropped conditional comments, but it still supports the @cc_on conditional compilation trick. I've had to use this to target some regressions that popped up in IE10.
kyriakos 13y ago
this is good news. it will no longer stop IE users from visiting those sneaky sites who block users for using IE. it also makes it clear that Microsoft is finally serious about making a good browser that people WANT to use. now if they make their developer tools anywhere as good as firebug they'll have a winner. hiring some of the firebug team might be a good idea.
- shade 13y ago
  It seems they are in fact making some major upgrades to the developer tools, as described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/bg182632(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/bg182632(v=vs.85)... Some of it appears to be parity with existing dev tools for other browsers, but it looks like some very welcome improvements.
- dpratt 13y ago
  In all seriousness, I really do think that MSFT has an uphill battle when it comes to having non-enterprise web developers adopt IE as their primary platform for development. I'm sure that IE 11 is/will be a perfectly fine browser and comparable to Chrome/Firefox, but they still have the requirement that you must use Windows. I have no problem targeting IE11 as an end-user platform for my apps, especially now since it appears that it's a very good , if not great, browser, but I have absolutely zero desire to use Windows as a day-to-day OS for development. A large portion of the tooling that I (and I suspect a vast majority of other engineers) require either doesn't exist on Windows, or if it does, it's crippled or hacky. Essentially, moving to IE over Chrome/Firefox nets me little to no appreciable gain, and comes with a huge negative problem of drastically impacting my productivity.
  - kyriakos 13y ago
    call me crazy but I am a web developer not working for the enterprise and using windows 8 as main OS. If the dev tools of IE were superior to the competition be sure I'd be using it for development. I am sure I'm not a unique case.
  - jeffasinger 13y ago
    Developing for IE10 kind of makes sense right now, if you're on a windows machine. IE10 is one of the most picky browsers about certain things, so you can catch potential problems early by doing that.
- k3n 13y ago
  There will still be methods of determining whether the browser is IE or not; that's virtually impossible to hide. It will require a little more effort, but every browser is full of tell-tale bugs and other implementation nuances that can be used to uniquely identify it. It could even be as easy as detecting support for CSS vendor prefixes or similar.
portmanteaufu 13y ago
TL;DR MS doesn't want isIE() javascript functions to return true for IE11. While feature detection is a better practice than browser detection, you can search for "Trident" in the user agent string instead of "MSIE" if you must.
Aardwolf 13y ago
If they change the UA, why didn't they take this opportunity to get rid of these ridiculously long UA's that mention competing browser brand names, and just make their UA string the following: "Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0"
- lucian1900 13y ago
  Because apparently lots of websites still (mistakenly) check for "Mozilla" and "Gecko".
  - Aardwolf 13y ago
    This is over 15 years ago that IE was related to Mozilla. These "lots of websites", is this about websites from 1995, or modern ones?
    - mattbasta 13y ago
      Unfortunately, yes. Every mom-and-pop PHP-based website that was done by a teenager in the last 15 years probably still does this at some level. There are also plenty of old web servers out there that look for those headers to decide how to respond (to account for browser bugs).
    - mtts 13y ago
      Modern ones. Checking for "Mozilla" is one (admittedly not very good) way to check if you're dealing with a browser or with some other kind of user agent, such as a search engine bot or something like that.
      - cgore 13y ago
        I think all the search engines do Mozilla too though. From my server logs: cgore.com:80 218.94.63.53 - - [02/Jul/2013:16:40:57 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3708 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
Toshio 13y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong. If a web developer is hell-bent on detecting ie, they could look for the presence of the activex API (like jQuery currently does in order to provide a uniform AJAX interface).
- ajross 13y ago
  Of course. They're not trying to make it impossible to detect IE. They're trying to make sure that all the "IE mode" quirks and workarounds out there in the wild don't get triggered on IE11 and break things. Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko and they want to take advantage of all the standards-compliant layouts that developers are producing. But the only way to do that is to break with the past and not support all the madness inherited from legacy IE versions.
  - dualogy 13y ago
    > Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko I think that was the professed and proclaimed goal for every IE version since 8, or maybe even back at 7? I keep hearing that for years, and what this intention delivers in the end is yet more "IE modes": n "browser modes" times 2 "document modes". Quirks mode. "Compatibility view." So for IE 11, web developers would have two choices: test your page in a total of 10 IE mode-combinations. Or just serve "the Crawler/Geocities version of our site" to IE users no matter what version they're using. Which is of course what MS/IE wants to avoid. But hey they could just pull an "Apple Inc." and license WebKit, or pull a "Google Inc." and make your browser auto-updating. Without prompts, progress indicators or restarts, just as invisible and efficiently as Chrome does by default. Presto, no more headaches with IE for BOTH users AND web devs. Maybe some MS egos would get a little dent, maybe some enterprise consultancy shops would have to cut down on man-days sold for IE-specific work. Ah yes. I can see why IE won't go this way any time soon---or only way after it has been finally and fully obsoleted even in the remotes of backwater net-cafes and even the slowest of Enterprise-IT depts...
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
hawkharris 13y ago
I was impressed when I saw their well-crafted commercials explaining the new IE, but I was still a little skeptical. I wanted to see some real action on their part to compensate for all the development headaches IE has caused me. With moves like this, it seems they're walking the talk.
thesis 13y ago
Really tired of all the different versions of IE. Why oh why can't it just be "Internet Explorer" without all these individual versions that pigeonhole themselves?
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Because of the "brilliant" decision to integrate the IE engine way too deep into windows to the point of unseverability. So you get one-two IE versions per OS lifecycle. Enjoy ...
  - trafficlight 13y ago
    At the very least they could push real updates more than once a Service Pack.
    - yuhong 13y ago
      They have to support all these versions for the lifecycle of the underlying Windows version. Trivia: I personally reported a security bug in IE6/7 that was fixed in the May 2013 security update.
  - comex 13y ago
    I like how this was such a big issue when Microsoft did it, but nobody cares that there is a systemwide WebKit.framework on OS X that various applications use internally. I know there are some differences, but it's pretty much the same thing.
    - TylerE 13y ago
      Maybe because Webkit is open source and was developed independently?
      - ksk 13y ago
        What does it being open source have anything to do with it? People didn't like it when MS did it because it introduced additional unwanted bloat in the OS that was annoying to decouple.
louischatriot 13y ago
That's very good news. Microsoft often get a lot of criticism for their products, most on IE. But they are still able to make bold moves that go in the right directions. That's not the case for all companies their size.
marizcombinator 13y ago
Just use webkit already...
- recursive 13y ago
  Fix the old bad monoculture with a new shiny monoculture.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    I'd take a mono-culture over terrible IE (6-8) any day of the week. The problem was never a mono-culture - the problem was IE6 was closed off to non-windows OSes, and stopped progressing. If IE6 had been available as a portable open source project that could be run on linux/android/anything and had continued to include new features, we'd all still be using IE. The problem with IE was failure to provide value, and nothing at all to do with some mythical 'mono-culture' argument. You can say that a mono-culture encourages something like IE6 - but since Webkit is open source, that can't actually happen.
    - underwater 13y ago
      IE11+ changing rendering engines wouldn't magically fix all the IE6 - 8 installs out there. Wishing that history had played out different isn't really productive.
  - VeejayRampay 13y ago
    WebKit is LGPL and BSD licensed though. I don't care about a monoculture if it's a culture where everyone gets to modify the innards for the greater good.
    - raylu 13y ago
      The problem isn't making changes to the source. The monoculture or de-facto standards come up because those are the rendering engines used by users. You can make WebKit or Trident a billion times better but it won't matter to web developers or users until users adopt the new code.
tomelders 13y ago
I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past. As such, they have a higher bar to jump over if they want me to acknowledge that they have created a "modern" browser. They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. And only then will I even consider giving them a ounce of recognition. Not that Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) cares what I think, but that's the price I've set in order for MS to pay off the debt it's worked up over the years as I wasted weeks, possibly months of my life getting things to work in their turd of a.... a.... a looking-at-the-web-kind-of-application-thing. I wont even call it a browser. Or better yet, I wish IE was thrown away and forgotten about, and like Voldemort, it's name would only ever be heard in hushed whispers lest it's evil spirit be awoken. It would become a ghost story web developers tell their web developing kids; "Be standards compliant, or IE6 will come and get yoooOOOOU!". But then I'm old and cranky. The kids will probably love IE19b Custard Pro Home Edition and they'll rally behind it to get IE back to the number 1 slot because it's somehow retro and cool, and I'll laugh in their spotty faces when IE regains it supremacy and Microsoft turns around and shits in their stupid faces all over again, and the internet becomes a desolate wasteland where Bing is the only search engine and the top hit is always an Encarta entry. Wow, I'm in a special kind of a bad mood today.
- ripter 13y ago
  I feel the same way. I've wasted so many hours on IE specific bugs that they have to really prove themselves before I'll even consider trusting them again.
- BillyMaize 13y ago
  I feel the same way about everything MS has produced/is planning on producing in the near future. IE, Windows 8, Xbox One, Microsoft Office, the list just goes on.
  - sixothree 13y ago
    Everything about Windows 8 to me just feels like a kick in the groin from Microsoft. For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development; yet it seems they've shoved it into the back seat and likely next into the trunk of deprecation.
bsimpson 13y ago
I was at CES last year, and the showing of the IE team was my favorite part of the trip. They were a bunch of younger guys who basically said "We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things in our name. We're changing that, and we're here to tell you about it." They seemed like really cool dudes. I even went over to the mall to try a Surface when they came out. Then, I realized Windows 8 is still Windows and walked out empty handed. The stuff MS is doing with Metro and touch is really interesting (as were tablet PCs before that), but I feel like they're still building on three decades of crufty sands. It's time for their System 9 -> OS X transition.
- chadzawistowski 13y ago
  Windows 8 may still be Windows, but WinRT is very much the System 9 -> OS X transition. Windows 8 supports both the old Win32 APIs and the new WinRT APIs.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    That was going to be my comment as well... The WinRT kernel was started "fresh" to be mostly compatible, without the weird crufty legacy support. I think the biggest things holding back RT is that it's only on locked down ARM platforms, and low-level SDKs aren't widely available. I would speculate that RT will become the main windows kernel by Windows 10. Then again, I'm less likely to even be running Windows by then (4-6 years).
    - bskap 13y ago
      WinRT isn't a kernel, it's a shell. It's like saying that Android is going to replace Linux.
    - timthorn 13y ago
      You might (understandably) be conflating WinRT and Windows RT. One is ARM only, the other is not.
  - mratzloff 13y ago
tracker1 13y ago
"By finally removing the evidence of past mistakes..." I think it's worth pointing out that these removed bits aren't evidence of past mistakes at all. They're left over from a time before the standards were defined by the W3C. At this point, and it is about time, they should rightly be removed, and the standard/common way should prevail. That doesn't mean a given feature was rooted in a mistake. I think the biggest issue is you should only target a given browser when you have to. Once in a while you come across a bug that only presents itself in a specific browser and version. A good thing about frequent/forced updates is you have to support older browsers less and less. Unfortunately XP was locked out at IE8, and Vista at IE9... Vista won't go away for at least 4-5 more years. I think the biggest danger in the older versions of IE tied to windows is that those people don't upgrade. It's just in the past 2 years that IE6 & IE7 can safely be ignored. I remember the IE4-6 days... back then, IE was better... Where they deserve the vitriol is when it comes to letting their browsers stagnate for close to 6 years. And finally, with IE10/11 are they even catching up. It really bugs me that they put so much attention into accelerated canvas support before they finished a lot of CSS features that are more likely to be used. Gradients for example, the old ie gradients + rounded corners is broken even IE9, not sure about IE10-11 as I've taken to using SVG gradients as they are more consistent everywhere. It also sucks that running multiple versions of IE is pretty much impossible. ex: the scripting engine is always the newer version, so even using multiple IE's a live bug on the real version may not present itself. I know how/why we are here, that said I still don't think that we should call decisions past that weren't thought of by anyone as mistakes at the time as such now. I remember the v4 browser days (IE4/NN4 not HTML4), it wasn't near as pleasant as now even with IE8-10.
- com2kid 13y ago
  > Unfortunately XP was locked out at IE8, and Vista at IE9... I am on a laptop with a dedicated GPU and Windows 7, I am locked into IE9 due to driver issues. (I'll admit this is partially HP/AMDs fault for having cruddy drivers!)
Someone 13y ago
I foresee a funny side effect: IE 11 users visiting old sites will get "This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer" messages.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  This actually happens.
wnevets 13y ago
Good thing for the internets
- themstheones 13y ago
  I can't see why anyone in their right mind would be downvoting this comment. You can't down vote the truth.
  - wnevets 13y ago
    I agree.
t_hozumi 13y ago
The root of the problem is not IE specific behavior, but lack of auto-updating feature. If MS doesn't remove a barrier between versions, nothing will change.
- josteink 13y ago
  This was already addressed in msie10 or maybe possibly earlier. Auto updates are enabled by default.
  - ygra 13y ago
    I think they meant feature updates, not security updates. And those come not very frequently, but agreed, even then, they are automatic (unless some moron disabled Windows Update).
    - josteink 13y ago
      That was what I meant. IE now auto updates to the latest version. That means new features.
      - ygra 13y ago
        But you won't get shiny new features every six weeks, which I feel is what most of these comments are aiming at.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    ... and every IT department is forced to deploy a Group Policy which disables them.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      But they do the same for other browsers, so really it just puts everything on the level.
shayonsengupta 13y ago
Internet Explorer doesn't need to worry about this. No one ever calls them.
jtms 13y ago
I wont be calling it at all
cpeterso 13y ago
IE's "like Gecko" string is to more closely match WebKit's UA string (e.g. "... (KHTML, like Gecko) ..."), not Firefox's.
tcfunk 13y ago
The problem with Internet Explorer is fragmentation and length of life for versions. IE11 could be the greatest browser in the entire world, and it wouldn't matter until people are able to use it on Windows XP/7.
- wluu 13y ago
  Well, IE10 which shipped with Windows 8 eventually made its' way to Windows 7. And from what I've read, IE11 will also make it to Windows 7. Support for XP is ending on April 8th, 2014 at Microsoft. So there's no chance at all that IE11 will be ported on XP.
adamconroy 13y ago
Why do they even call it 'internet' explorer? It really is just a 'web' explorer isn't it?
- M2Ys4U 13y ago
  It used to have ftp and gopher support as well...
- joenathan 13y ago
  Why do they even call it Firefox? Where's the fox on fire?
  - adamconroy 13y ago
    Well firefox is obviously just an arbitrary name. IE is attempting to be a name that means something, except it's a misnomer.
IzzyMurad 13y ago
It's not a matter of the browser features anymore, but rather the company behind it. Say we all switch back to IE11 tomorrow... I am pretty sure Microsoft will abuse its power just like they did during IE6 era.
deathanatos 13y ago
That User-Agent isn't really valid. It's the "like Gecko". If you only read the BNF, then okay, it's valid. But the various sections are supposed to have semantic meaning — they're supposed to be products with optional versions and comments. Like, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) Means the product "Mozilla" with version "5.0", followed by a comment of "Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0". Thus their UA of… Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) like Gecko …includes the products "Mozilla", "like" and "Gecko". Like the article mentions, "like Gecko" has been done before: > Safari was the first browser to add “like Gecko” so that anyone sniffing for “Gecko” in the user-agent string would allow the browser through. And they put it in a comment, not as two separate products: > AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.
Fuxy 13y ago
Well that's nice and all but removing any way to identify it's IE 11 sounds like a bad idea tome. I don't quite thrust them to not make any more mistakes.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

317 points by recycleme 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

kyriakos 13y ago
maybe even this will be gone by the time the final version comes out.
yahelc 13y ago
Nope. IE Conditional Comments were removed in IE10. http://www.sitepoint.com/microsoft-drop-ie10-conditional-comments/ http://www.sitepoint.com/microsoft-drop-ie10-conditional-com...
- dubfan 13y ago
  They dropped conditional comments, but it still supports the @cc_on conditional compilation trick. I've had to use this to target some regressions that popped up in IE10.

kyriakos 13y ago

this is good news. it will no longer stop IE users from visiting those sneaky sites who block users for using IE. it also makes it clear that Microsoft is finally serious about making a good browser that people WANT to use. now if they make their developer tools anywhere as good as firebug they'll have a winner. hiring some of the firebug team might be a good idea.

shade 13y ago
It seems they are in fact making some major upgrades to the developer tools, as described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/bg182632(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/bg182632(v=vs.85)... Some of it appears to be parity with existing dev tools for other browsers, but it looks like some very welcome improvements.
dpratt 13y ago
In all seriousness, I really do think that MSFT has an uphill battle when it comes to having non-enterprise web developers adopt IE as their primary platform for development. I'm sure that IE 11 is/will be a perfectly fine browser and comparable to Chrome/Firefox, but they still have the requirement that you must use Windows. I have no problem targeting IE11 as an end-user platform for my apps, especially now since it appears that it's a very good , if not great, browser, but I have absolutely zero desire to use Windows as a day-to-day OS for development. A large portion of the tooling that I (and I suspect a vast majority of other engineers) require either doesn't exist on Windows, or if it does, it's crippled or hacky. Essentially, moving to IE over Chrome/Firefox nets me little to no appreciable gain, and comes with a huge negative problem of drastically impacting my productivity.
- kyriakos 13y ago
  call me crazy but I am a web developer not working for the enterprise and using windows 8 as main OS. If the dev tools of IE were superior to the competition be sure I'd be using it for development. I am sure I'm not a unique case.
- jeffasinger 13y ago
  Developing for IE10 kind of makes sense right now, if you're on a windows machine. IE10 is one of the most picky browsers about certain things, so you can catch potential problems early by doing that.
k3n 13y ago
There will still be methods of determining whether the browser is IE or not; that's virtually impossible to hide. It will require a little more effort, but every browser is full of tell-tale bugs and other implementation nuances that can be used to uniquely identify it. It could even be as easy as detecting support for CSS vendor prefixes or similar.

portmanteaufu 13y ago

TL;DR MS doesn't want isIE() javascript functions to return true for IE11. While feature detection is a better practice than browser detection, you can search for "Trident" in the user agent string instead of "MSIE" if you must.

Aardwolf 13y ago

If they change the UA, why didn't they take this opportunity to get rid of these ridiculously long UA's that mention competing browser brand names, and just make their UA string the following: "Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0"

lucian1900 13y ago
Because apparently lots of websites still (mistakenly) check for "Mozilla" and "Gecko".
- Aardwolf 13y ago
  This is over 15 years ago that IE was related to Mozilla. These "lots of websites", is this about websites from 1995, or modern ones?
  - mattbasta 13y ago
    Unfortunately, yes. Every mom-and-pop PHP-based website that was done by a teenager in the last 15 years probably still does this at some level. There are also plenty of old web servers out there that look for those headers to decide how to respond (to account for browser bugs).
  - mtts 13y ago
    Modern ones. Checking for "Mozilla" is one (admittedly not very good) way to check if you're dealing with a browser or with some other kind of user agent, such as a search engine bot or something like that.
    - cgore 13y ago
      I think all the search engines do Mozilla too though. From my server logs: cgore.com:80 218.94.63.53 - - [02/Jul/2013:16:40:57 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3708 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Toshio 13y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong. If a web developer is hell-bent on detecting ie, they could look for the presence of the activex API (like jQuery currently does in order to provide a uniform AJAX interface).

ajross 13y ago
Of course. They're not trying to make it impossible to detect IE. They're trying to make sure that all the "IE mode" quirks and workarounds out there in the wild don't get triggered on IE11 and break things. Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko and they want to take advantage of all the standards-compliant layouts that developers are producing. But the only way to do that is to break with the past and not support all the madness inherited from legacy IE versions.
- dualogy 13y ago
  > Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko I think that was the professed and proclaimed goal for every IE version since 8, or maybe even back at 7? I keep hearing that for years, and what this intention delivers in the end is yet more "IE modes": n "browser modes" times 2 "document modes". Quirks mode. "Compatibility view." So for IE 11, web developers would have two choices: test your page in a total of 10 IE mode-combinations. Or just serve "the Crawler/Geocities version of our site" to IE users no matter what version they're using. Which is of course what MS/IE wants to avoid. But hey they could just pull an "Apple Inc." and license WebKit, or pull a "Google Inc." and make your browser auto-updating. Without prompts, progress indicators or restarts, just as invisible and efficiently as Chrome does by default. Presto, no more headaches with IE for BOTH users AND web devs. Maybe some MS egos would get a little dent, maybe some enterprise consultancy shops would have to cut down on man-days sold for IE-specific work. Ah yes. I can see why IE won't go this way any time soon---or only way after it has been finally and fully obsoleted even in the remotes of backwater net-cafes and even the slowest of Enterprise-IT depts...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

hawkharris 13y ago

I was impressed when I saw their well-crafted commercials explaining the new IE, but I was still a little skeptical. I wanted to see some real action on their part to compensate for all the development headaches IE has caused me. With moves like this, it seems they're walking the talk.

thesis 13y ago

Really tired of all the different versions of IE. Why oh why can't it just be "Internet Explorer" without all these individual versions that pigeonhole themselves?

venomsnake 13y ago
Because of the "brilliant" decision to integrate the IE engine way too deep into windows to the point of unseverability. So you get one-two IE versions per OS lifecycle. Enjoy ...
- trafficlight 13y ago
  At the very least they could push real updates more than once a Service Pack.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    They have to support all these versions for the lifecycle of the underlying Windows version. Trivia: I personally reported a security bug in IE6/7 that was fixed in the May 2013 security update.
- comex 13y ago
  I like how this was such a big issue when Microsoft did it, but nobody cares that there is a systemwide WebKit.framework on OS X that various applications use internally. I know there are some differences, but it's pretty much the same thing.
  - TylerE 13y ago
    Maybe because Webkit is open source and was developed independently?
    - ksk 13y ago
      What does it being open source have anything to do with it? People didn't like it when MS did it because it introduced additional unwanted bloat in the OS that was annoying to decouple.

louischatriot 13y ago

That's very good news. Microsoft often get a lot of criticism for their products, most on IE. But they are still able to make bold moves that go in the right directions. That's not the case for all companies their size.

marizcombinator 13y ago

Just use webkit already...

recursive 13y ago
Fix the old bad monoculture with a new shiny monoculture.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  I'd take a mono-culture over terrible IE (6-8) any day of the week. The problem was never a mono-culture - the problem was IE6 was closed off to non-windows OSes, and stopped progressing. If IE6 had been available as a portable open source project that could be run on linux/android/anything and had continued to include new features, we'd all still be using IE. The problem with IE was failure to provide value, and nothing at all to do with some mythical 'mono-culture' argument. You can say that a mono-culture encourages something like IE6 - but since Webkit is open source, that can't actually happen.
  - underwater 13y ago
    IE11+ changing rendering engines wouldn't magically fix all the IE6 - 8 installs out there. Wishing that history had played out different isn't really productive.
- VeejayRampay 13y ago
  WebKit is LGPL and BSD licensed though. I don't care about a monoculture if it's a culture where everyone gets to modify the innards for the greater good.
  - raylu 13y ago
    The problem isn't making changes to the source. The monoculture or de-facto standards come up because those are the rendering engines used by users. You can make WebKit or Trident a billion times better but it won't matter to web developers or users until users adopt the new code.

tomelders 13y ago

I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past. As such, they have a higher bar to jump over if they want me to acknowledge that they have created a "modern" browser. They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. And only then will I even consider giving them a ounce of recognition. Not that Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) cares what I think, but that's the price I've set in order for MS to pay off the debt it's worked up over the years as I wasted weeks, possibly months of my life getting things to work in their turd of a.... a.... a looking-at-the-web-kind-of-application-thing. I wont even call it a browser. Or better yet, I wish IE was thrown away and forgotten about, and like Voldemort, it's name would only ever be heard in hushed whispers lest it's evil spirit be awoken. It would become a ghost story web developers tell their web developing kids; "Be standards compliant, or IE6 will come and get yoooOOOOU!". But then I'm old and cranky. The kids will probably love IE19b Custard Pro Home Edition and they'll rally behind it to get IE back to the number 1 slot because it's somehow retro and cool, and I'll laugh in their spotty faces when IE regains it supremacy and Microsoft turns around and shits in their stupid faces all over again, and the internet becomes a desolate wasteland where Bing is the only search engine and the top hit is always an Encarta entry. Wow, I'm in a special kind of a bad mood today.

ripter 13y ago
I feel the same way. I've wasted so many hours on IE specific bugs that they have to really prove themselves before I'll even consider trusting them again.
BillyMaize 13y ago
I feel the same way about everything MS has produced/is planning on producing in the near future. IE, Windows 8, Xbox One, Microsoft Office, the list just goes on.
- sixothree 13y ago
  Everything about Windows 8 to me just feels like a kick in the groin from Microsoft. For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development; yet it seems they've shoved it into the back seat and likely next into the trunk of deprecation.

bsimpson 13y ago

I was at CES last year, and the showing of the IE team was my favorite part of the trip. They were a bunch of younger guys who basically said "We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things in our name. We're changing that, and we're here to tell you about it." They seemed like really cool dudes. I even went over to the mall to try a Surface when they came out. Then, I realized Windows 8 is still Windows and walked out empty handed. The stuff MS is doing with Metro and touch is really interesting (as were tablet PCs before that), but I feel like they're still building on three decades of crufty sands. It's time for their System 9 -> OS X transition.

chadzawistowski 13y ago
Windows 8 may still be Windows, but WinRT is very much the System 9 -> OS X transition. Windows 8 supports both the old Win32 APIs and the new WinRT APIs.
- tracker1 13y ago
  That was going to be my comment as well... The WinRT kernel was started "fresh" to be mostly compatible, without the weird crufty legacy support. I think the biggest things holding back RT is that it's only on locked down ARM platforms, and low-level SDKs aren't widely available. I would speculate that RT will become the main windows kernel by Windows 10. Then again, I'm less likely to even be running Windows by then (4-6 years).
  - bskap 13y ago
    WinRT isn't a kernel, it's a shell. It's like saying that Android is going to replace Linux.
  - timthorn 13y ago
    You might (understandably) be conflating WinRT and Windows RT. One is ARM only, the other is not.
- mratzloff 13y ago

tracker1 13y ago

"By finally removing the evidence of past mistakes..." I think it's worth pointing out that these removed bits aren't evidence of past mistakes at all. They're left over from a time before the standards were defined by the W3C. At this point, and it is about time, they should rightly be removed, and the standard/common way should prevail. That doesn't mean a given feature was rooted in a mistake. I think the biggest issue is you should only target a given browser when you have to. Once in a while you come across a bug that only presents itself in a specific browser and version. A good thing about frequent/forced updates is you have to support older browsers less and less. Unfortunately XP was locked out at IE8, and Vista at IE9... Vista won't go away for at least 4-5 more years. I think the biggest danger in the older versions of IE tied to windows is that those people don't upgrade. It's just in the past 2 years that IE6 & IE7 can safely be ignored. I remember the IE4-6 days... back then, IE was better... Where they deserve the vitriol is when it comes to letting their browsers stagnate for close to 6 years. And finally, with IE10/11 are they even catching up. It really bugs me that they put so much attention into accelerated canvas support before they finished a lot of CSS features that are more likely to be used. Gradients for example, the old ie gradients + rounded corners is broken even IE9, not sure about IE10-11 as I've taken to using SVG gradients as they are more consistent everywhere. It also sucks that running multiple versions of IE is pretty much impossible. ex: the scripting engine is always the newer version, so even using multiple IE's a live bug on the real version may not present itself. I know how/why we are here, that said I still don't think that we should call decisions past that weren't thought of by anyone as mistakes at the time as such now. I remember the v4 browser days (IE4/NN4 not HTML4), it wasn't near as pleasant as now even with IE8-10.

com2kid 13y ago
> Unfortunately XP was locked out at IE8, and Vista at IE9... I am on a laptop with a dedicated GPU and Windows 7, I am locked into IE9 due to driver issues. (I'll admit this is partially HP/AMDs fault for having cruddy drivers!)

Someone 13y ago

I foresee a funny side effect: IE 11 users visiting old sites will get "This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer" messages.

sliverstorm 13y ago
This actually happens.

wnevets 13y ago

Good thing for the internets

themstheones 13y ago
I can't see why anyone in their right mind would be downvoting this comment. You can't down vote the truth.
- wnevets 13y ago
  I agree.

t_hozumi 13y ago

The root of the problem is not IE specific behavior, but lack of auto-updating feature. If MS doesn't remove a barrier between versions, nothing will change.

josteink 13y ago
This was already addressed in msie10 or maybe possibly earlier. Auto updates are enabled by default.
- ygra 13y ago
  I think they meant feature updates, not security updates. And those come not very frequently, but agreed, even then, they are automatic (unless some moron disabled Windows Update).
  - josteink 13y ago
    That was what I meant. IE now auto updates to the latest version. That means new features.
    - ygra 13y ago
      But you won't get shiny new features every six weeks, which I feel is what most of these comments are aiming at.
- superuser2 13y ago
  ... and every IT department is forced to deploy a Group Policy which disables them.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    But they do the same for other browsers, so really it just puts everything on the level.

shayonsengupta 13y ago

Internet Explorer doesn't need to worry about this. No one ever calls them.

jtms 13y ago

I wont be calling it at all

cpeterso 13y ago

IE's "like Gecko" string is to more closely match WebKit's UA string (e.g. "... (KHTML, like Gecko) ..."), not Firefox's.

tcfunk 13y ago

The problem with Internet Explorer is fragmentation and length of life for versions. IE11 could be the greatest browser in the entire world, and it wouldn't matter until people are able to use it on Windows XP/7.

wluu 13y ago
Well, IE10 which shipped with Windows 8 eventually made its' way to Windows 7. And from what I've read, IE11 will also make it to Windows 7. Support for XP is ending on April 8th, 2014 at Microsoft. So there's no chance at all that IE11 will be ported on XP.

adamconroy 13y ago

Why do they even call it 'internet' explorer? It really is just a 'web' explorer isn't it?

M2Ys4U 13y ago
It used to have ftp and gopher support as well...
joenathan 13y ago
Why do they even call it Firefox? Where's the fox on fire?
- adamconroy 13y ago
  Well firefox is obviously just an arbitrary name. IE is attempting to be a name that means something, except it's a misnomer.

IzzyMurad 13y ago

It's not a matter of the browser features anymore, but rather the company behind it. Say we all switch back to IE11 tomorrow... I am pretty sure Microsoft will abuse its power just like they did during IE6 era.

deathanatos 13y ago

That User-Agent isn't really valid. It's the "like Gecko". If you only read the BNF, then okay, it's valid. But the various sections are supposed to have semantic meaning — they're supposed to be products with optional versions and comments. Like, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) Means the product "Mozilla" with version "5.0", followed by a comment of "Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0". Thus their UA of… Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) like Gecko …includes the products "Mozilla", "like" and "Gecko". Like the article mentions, "like Gecko" has been done before: > Safari was the first browser to add “like Gecko” so that anyone sniffing for “Gecko” in the user-agent string would allow the browser through. And they put it in a comment, not as two separate products: > AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.

Fuxy 13y ago

Well that's nice and all but removing any way to identify it's IE 11 sounds like a bad idea tome. I don't quite thrust them to not make any more mistakes.

deleted 13y ago

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