4 ms·

It hasn't outgrown it's monstrous reputation and it will probably never. IE has long gaps between updates so it will always quickly fall behind. Software can st

It hasn't outgrown it's monstrous reputation and it will probably never. IE has long gaps between updates so it will always quickly fall behind. Software can still install toolbars and change your default search engine. IE is not open source. IE 11 does not implement X standards for business reasons, where X is WebRTC, some missing CSS thing, touch events, etc. You can't test for IE except on Windows. IE's developer tools are terrible. IE is used by people bad with computers and corporations with bad IT departments. For me to care about IE, it would: have to be available on Mac OS X. have to have bigger market share in mobile just have more people using it in general (because frankly it's not used much by any of the people we care about). have much, much better development tools Our development cycle is to develop in Chrome Canary, and proactively test and fix for Firefox. We don't test in IE but fix IE issues when someone complains about something not working in IE and if we have the time or think it's important enough.

warfangle 13y ago
IE11 has touch events, they're just a different api /than everyone else/.
Piskvorrr 13y ago
I have come to terms with this - since most of the compatibility issues can be papered over nowadays, and there are viable alternatives - all I was hoping for was "write and debug once, give it a quick look in A-grade browsers, fix minor quirks", without the usual "...and then spend double the time fixing IE's idiosyncrasies."
strmpnk 13y ago
Many of these points are partial truths or at least not as damning as it might seem. IE has had long gaps in the past because of IE being tied to larger updates and many people having invested in old technology depending on them changing that slowly to allow time to change. The IE team at MicroSoft is clear that they intend to do more regular releases and push updates out automatically. While it won't be monthly like other vendors, it's certainly a huge change from where it was. Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too. I recently tried Windows again for the first time in about 13 years and I'll tell you that I was caught off guard. Toolbars ended up in Chrome AND IE. Not sure if this is a browser problem as much as a software installation problem. Wish I would have learned about Chocolately earlier. Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a browser. It's possibly important in other aspects but you should be complaining about other browsers then. Many include lots of proprietary code on top of open engines like WebKit (i.e. Safari is really not all that open source) and then custom engines like Opera mobile. WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch events. Touch events were a proprietary outgrowth of the early mobile web. While they've become defacto for mobiles, it's a limiting API that doesn't really help unify the way we handle input at all. MSFT released a vendor extension called pointer events which is a much better API that has now been proposed as a standard. It handles touch, mouse pointers, pen digitizers, and has space to interpret more kinds of devices. Much better than where touch events left us. It's sad that more developers don't demand this unified API either since it makes it far easier to implement cross-input-device friendly content. I haven't spent much time with the IE developer tools but it seems that MicroSoft now provides free VMs that can be installed to run IE for development (http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools) and their developer tools seem to have been improved (most people now just complain they want chrome's developer tools everywhere). So what is left is that I see people either stuck in the past or thinking that this whole thing is IE vs everyone else. IE's got the same problems as many other browsers. We just pick our check list with bias by telling all browser vendors they should just become Chrome. What's the point in an "open" ecosystem if people just demand we all do things exactly one way defined largely by one vendor which happens to develop these "standards" as proprietary extensions just like IE has for all sorts of things (XHR anyone?). >_<
- belluchan 13y ago
  strmpnk, what the fuck? > Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too. Chrome does not have toolbars. You cannot build a toolbar with Chrome, the browser has no extensions API to build such a thing. You also cannot programmatically install extensions. Windows software cannot install extensions into Chrome, barring some kind of malicious exploit or vulnerability in Chrome, Chrome will ignore them. They have to be installed by the user from the Google Web Store or via the developer tools, which has to be done manually. I'd like to hear if anything I've said in the previous paragraph is wrong, I have never seen a toolbar in Chrome ever. You can't even build it into the website with scripts because of how those APIs work and anyway websites could detect that and I've never seen it. > WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch events. This is bullshit, as we've built WebRTC into our application and it works perfectly in Chrome and Firefox. In addition there are entire businesses based around WebRTC availability so, you are mistaken here. > Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a browser. It matters to developers who build websites. I can debug my application all the way into the Chrome source, and have had to when JIT ruined my JavaScript. Even 6 month updates are way too long, and I doubt that we'll see updates in that time frame anyway. The IE VM tools are slow and horrible, it's not usable, I've tried it. It's no replacement for native development and we're not going to support it. Maybe some draconian soulless corporation has made browser vm's an option to their poor mac engineers, but fuck if I'm going to do that. Your entire apologist response is factually incorrect or misleading. It's very misinformed and one-sided (although I also come across one-sided). Weird post anyway.
  - strmpnk 13y ago
    belluchan, slow down a little before you assume I'm just making shit up. Toolbars as in default search and browser plugins which do layer on buttons on the UI. I'd count that as a toolbar. Happened to me just last week when I installed software on Windows 8.1. Chrome definitely is just as prone to infected additions. Count me as surprised. Re: WebRTC, how long has that actually worked? WebRTC is still under development. It if worked in the last few months chances are it didn't work the same way before. Chances are it won't keep working that way later. It's exciting tech, I love WebRTC but calling it a missing feature before it's landed for a few months is kind of asking for a bit much, even for Firefox and Chrome (audio APIs, MathML, JavaScript language features, &c). The fact these two browsers interoperate at all is because of a ton of hard work they put into collaborating to make things work. Of course, "work" being defined by what is easiest for their current implementations to change. Still, you probably assumed I was trying to bash WebRTC, I'm not but it's very new tech in terms of the current interoperable feature set. Give it six months and then come back to complain. I'm glad you solved your Chrome issues with tracing C++ code. Sucks when that happens. I don't see how this makes supporting IE entirely impossible and super painful. You have so many fewer variables in play with the IE release cycle that it's hard to complain. I've had Chrome bugs that triggered on only certain builds on certain operating systems that took me a ton of work to reproduce. Looks like the problem reported here is not hitting everyone either but it's already narrowed down to only a few possible versions and operating systems. To make things worse, Chrome didn't have much help on debugging on mobile devices for a long time. It was quite hard to get an accurate rendering and runtimes with complete debugging. The IE VM isn't slow here. I just downloaded and tried it to write this comment. I get WebGL and all running in my VM. Not sure what you're talking about. Felt fast to me. Anyway... I'm not an apologist. I build software and honestly most of these rants I see are complete FUD. They show either ignorance about what options are available or the bias of choosing one flavor of proprietary over another. I don't care if you use or support IE or not (I don't use IE nor do I run Windows on anything but one machine to play some old games I like).

warfangle 13y ago

IE11 has touch events, they're just a different api /than everyone else/.

Piskvorrr 13y ago

I have come to terms with this - since most of the compatibility issues can be papered over nowadays, and there are viable alternatives - all I was hoping for was "write and debug once, give it a quick look in A-grade browsers, fix minor quirks", without the usual "...and then spend double the time fixing IE's idiosyncrasies."

strmpnk 13y ago

Many of these points are partial truths or at least not as damning as it might seem. IE has had long gaps in the past because of IE being tied to larger updates and many people having invested in old technology depending on them changing that slowly to allow time to change. The IE team at MicroSoft is clear that they intend to do more regular releases and push updates out automatically. While it won't be monthly like other vendors, it's certainly a huge change from where it was. Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too. I recently tried Windows again for the first time in about 13 years and I'll tell you that I was caught off guard. Toolbars ended up in Chrome AND IE. Not sure if this is a browser problem as much as a software installation problem. Wish I would have learned about Chocolately earlier. Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a browser. It's possibly important in other aspects but you should be complaining about other browsers then. Many include lots of proprietary code on top of open engines like WebKit (i.e. Safari is really not all that open source) and then custom engines like Opera mobile. WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch events. Touch events were a proprietary outgrowth of the early mobile web. While they've become defacto for mobiles, it's a limiting API that doesn't really help unify the way we handle input at all. MSFT released a vendor extension called pointer events which is a much better API that has now been proposed as a standard. It handles touch, mouse pointers, pen digitizers, and has space to interpret more kinds of devices. Much better than where touch events left us. It's sad that more developers don't demand this unified API either since it makes it far easier to implement cross-input-device friendly content. I haven't spent much time with the IE developer tools but it seems that MicroSoft now provides free VMs that can be installed to run IE for development (http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools) and their developer tools seem to have been improved (most people now just complain they want chrome's developer tools everywhere). So what is left is that I see people either stuck in the past or thinking that this whole thing is IE vs everyone else. IE's got the same problems as many other browsers. We just pick our check list with bias by telling all browser vendors they should just become Chrome. What's the point in an "open" ecosystem if people just demand we all do things exactly one way defined largely by one vendor which happens to develop these "standards" as proprietary extensions just like IE has for all sorts of things (XHR anyone?). >_<

belluchan 13y ago
strmpnk, what the fuck? > Software still installs toolbars on Chrome too. Chrome does not have toolbars. You cannot build a toolbar with Chrome, the browser has no extensions API to build such a thing. You also cannot programmatically install extensions. Windows software cannot install extensions into Chrome, barring some kind of malicious exploit or vulnerability in Chrome, Chrome will ignore them. They have to be installed by the user from the Google Web Store or via the developer tools, which has to be done manually. I'd like to hear if anything I've said in the previous paragraph is wrong, I have never seen a toolbar in Chrome ever. You can't even build it into the website with scripts because of how those APIs work and anyway websites could detect that and I've never seen it. > WebRTC isn't even half baked yet. Complaining that they don't release it to millions of devices as a feature is silly. It's great to see browsers experiment with new APIs that become standards... which leads me to: touch events. This is bullshit, as we've built WebRTC into our application and it works perfectly in Chrome and Firefox. In addition there are entire businesses based around WebRTC availability so, you are mistaken here. > Open source isn't something that makes the browser better at being a browser. It matters to developers who build websites. I can debug my application all the way into the Chrome source, and have had to when JIT ruined my JavaScript. Even 6 month updates are way too long, and I doubt that we'll see updates in that time frame anyway. The IE VM tools are slow and horrible, it's not usable, I've tried it. It's no replacement for native development and we're not going to support it. Maybe some draconian soulless corporation has made browser vm's an option to their poor mac engineers, but fuck if I'm going to do that. Your entire apologist response is factually incorrect or misleading. It's very misinformed and one-sided (although I also come across one-sided). Weird post anyway.
- strmpnk 13y ago
  belluchan, slow down a little before you assume I'm just making shit up. Toolbars as in default search and browser plugins which do layer on buttons on the UI. I'd count that as a toolbar. Happened to me just last week when I installed software on Windows 8.1. Chrome definitely is just as prone to infected additions. Count me as surprised. Re: WebRTC, how long has that actually worked? WebRTC is still under development. It if worked in the last few months chances are it didn't work the same way before. Chances are it won't keep working that way later. It's exciting tech, I love WebRTC but calling it a missing feature before it's landed for a few months is kind of asking for a bit much, even for Firefox and Chrome (audio APIs, MathML, JavaScript language features, &c). The fact these two browsers interoperate at all is because of a ton of hard work they put into collaborating to make things work. Of course, "work" being defined by what is easiest for their current implementations to change. Still, you probably assumed I was trying to bash WebRTC, I'm not but it's very new tech in terms of the current interoperable feature set. Give it six months and then come back to complain. I'm glad you solved your Chrome issues with tracing C++ code. Sucks when that happens. I don't see how this makes supporting IE entirely impossible and super painful. You have so many fewer variables in play with the IE release cycle that it's hard to complain. I've had Chrome bugs that triggered on only certain builds on certain operating systems that took me a ton of work to reproduce. Looks like the problem reported here is not hitting everyone either but it's already narrowed down to only a few possible versions and operating systems. To make things worse, Chrome didn't have much help on debugging on mobile devices for a long time. It was quite hard to get an accurate rendering and runtimes with complete debugging. The IE VM isn't slow here. I just downloaded and tried it to write this comment. I get WebGL and all running in my VM. Not sure what you're talking about. Felt fast to me. Anyway... I'm not an apologist. I build software and honestly most of these rants I see are complete FUD. They show either ignorance about what options are available or the bias of choosing one flavor of proprietary over another. I don't care if you use or support IE or not (I don't use IE nor do I run Windows on anything but one machine to play some old games I like).