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.
> I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past.
As a person who seems to defend Microsoft quite often on HN, I can't shake the feeling that if they get to first place in anything, they'll become massive tools once again.
I like seeing them as the underdog, it forces Microsoft to be kinder and more free, but I think innovation and progress would be seriously hindered (once again) if they grabbed the crown in a particular space.
Take, for instance, SQL Server. It's become quite an interesting and capable platform over the last decade. It used to be that Microsoft took the stance that hardware improvements were the customer's benefit, so they'd license per socket, full stop.
They used to mock Oracle with their licensing depending on what kind of CPU and how powerful it was.
Latest SQL Server? Yep, you pay depending on the CPU vendor (AMD or Intel) and the type of chip.
The only good open source SQL RDBMS I'm aware of is Postgres.
The moment Postgres has the feature range of SQL Server (SSIS, SSRS, SSAS), supports the same HA features without hassle, and is generally even half as easy to manage, I'll switch. Meanwhile, life's too short for me to want to become a "real" DBA.
SQL Server has some extra tools, as you've pointed out. You can probably find open source tools equally as powerful (and, by definition, more flexible) to perform those tasks. Granted, you may have to invest some time finding and learning those tools - but really, that's just life. Sometimes it's worth putting in the effort [1].
I've found that the main difference is how you work as a developer. If you're happy using a clicky interface to get your work done, more power to you. I need to be able to script everything I do, because I don't like to repeat myself. The rigmarole of restoring a db from a backup in SQL Server is just insane compared to the 4 second command I could issue at the terminal for postgres.
I know it's going to sound like a total exaggeration but I literally can't use MS products for more than a few hours at a time because of the pain I get in my arm from using the mouse. And trust me, it's not just because I don't know my way around - I spent years developing on that platform (and will never go back).
SQL Server gives you both. They have a UI for everything, and everything you do has an option to script. So you might go through the whole wizards for replication, then when done, save off a T-SQL script. To my knowledge, there's nothing that requires the UI; it's there just to make things easier. Then on top of that, they expose an API you can use for further automation, if T-SQL isn't to your liking.
Your example is particularly odd:
RESTORE DATABASE bla FROM DISK = 'file.bak'
The docs are quite comprehensive, with lots of useful examples[1].
MS deserves some flak for UI-only, but SQL Server isn't one of those products (at least since 2005). MS products in general are also becoming much more scriptable, as Powershell access is becoming a requirement for new products.
I prefer a clicky interface for things I'm not going to do often (like configure a new cluster) or things I don't want to commit to memory or have to look up. Anytime I need to repeat, I either read docs and construct a command, or if it's a complicated thing, I'll use the wizard to generate a base script and modify as needed.
It feels like using the mouse is the tradeoff for using Microsoft products. I use Visual Studio and SQL Sever at work, and they are such a productivity boost, but I hate how often I have to use the mouse. The problem is many of the benefits of using their products perks would be difficult to navigate around with a keyboard.
At times it's frustrating how often you have to use the mouse, but other times it's so great compared to any alternative ways (that I know of).
Yes one thing that always amused me at microsoft was how often they would talk about how much better their tooling experience is. It's not. Being able to go into roo or ror or whatever else and generate huge amounts of scaffolding and get tons of upfront work down with out only a few keystrokes beats the socks off of an obtuse and clunky sql and ide interface where some portions work well and some portions look like remnants of the early nineties.
After googling all the acronyms, I would like to know what features you believe SSIS, SSRS, SSAS and HA give you can not get from Postgres with drop in replacements.
Except maybe for that everything is already integrated and "just works".
What I'm asking is if you can specify some elements of the stack you mentioned, that is hard to replicated or unique to SQL Server?
Well first, integrated and "just works" are pretty high on the importance scale. Searching for PG clustering gets me a wiki with a matrix of different solutions, with apparently the main suggestion being DRBD. So just to start off, I've got to evaluate a number of third party products or start quizzing community members to figure out which is the most likely to survive or put me in a good position.
They might not be "hard to replicate" or unique, but having great options in-box, that are extremely simple to configure - that's worth a ton. If I was running a large-scale operation and SQL Server was costing me millions a year, things might be different.
Everything is awesome until you stop doing general stuff. Once I started digging into more complex MDX queries in SSAS (calculated fields) the story started to be quite different.
I have been doing Win dev since 1993 so I could tell you a lot of stories...
Right, there is more than one sort of pain. There is the pain your developers feel when they work with something painful, and there is the pain managers feel when they have to justify "not buying IBM" when something goes wrong (something will go wrong regardless, that is the nature of the beast).
That article from codinghorror is absolutely brilliantly written. But it's true, I wish there was a counter somewhere about how many millions/billions were lost by web developers trying to make things look like a webpage inside IE. I will call the new version IE too because I know that it will suck, it will. They have good programmers, they bring pc to the masses, I give them that but they have no clue about design or user experience and intuitiveness, they never have and never will. It's just a coorporation with strict bureaucracy where a good developer gets absolutely nothing done.
I thought it was interesting when Microsoft bought Skype. Skype built their whole backend on postgresql and were one of the major contributors to the clustering and hot failover features as well as putting up some nice management utilities. that's why o think the Skype purchase was so strategic. they not only got cross platform messaging with video and phone, they got the primary developers who were adding top end features to an open source project.
In a way it has happened already with the XBox. After (in my opinion) winning the previous generation of console wars, they set out to ignore their main audience to appeal to the ones their marketing team has decide to target. The only thing I really liked seeing from MS recently was Sharepoint 2013, which really is very good, especially for developers.
Really? I'd actually be interested to hear more about Sharepoint. My experience with it is getting to be awhile ago, and it was VERY unpleasant. What does it do for developers now?
The single biggest thing for me was the framework for deploying "apps" through azure. You can create webparts or other bits of functionality that can be reused but hosted externally on Azure. There is a self-hosted option where the URL is a generated one but has a trust setup already; but there is also the option to use your own azure hosting but you need configure the trust yourself. One other thing I liked is that there is no more need for a SharePoint Designer - there is a new method of designing sites that is way more configurable than in the past. You can configure almost everything, but as it always is, you will find that you need to do quite a bit of research on your own to get things 100%.
All in all though, it is a very solid offering from MS that nobody really talks about. One of the main pain points from the past is that everyone thought it was a CMS when really it was a document management system. Now it actually can be both. There is a talk on YouTube from the unveiling of 2013 that is well worth a watch (although it is over an hour long)
You program "Apps" for it that work very much like Facebook Apps. It's all web standards: get an oath token with sufficient scope from the user and then use the new _api to get data in and out.
.net, Azure and javascript are supported and documented best, but you can use any language and run SharePoint apps on any platform.
At least in American slang "a tool" is synonymous with someone who is rude, uncaring, and generally arrogant. A "massive tool" is someone who takes all of those properties up a level.
Excerpted from Urban Dictionary: "The tool is usually someone who is unwelcome but no one has the balls to tell them to get lost. The tool is alwasys making comments that are out-of-place, out-of-line or just plain stupid. The tool is always trying too hard to fit in, and because of this, never will."
I have cursed at working around IE quirks more times than I can remember, but I don't dump all the blame on Microsoft.
Why is this the top comment, it is just a rant/whine? What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web?
Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not, and by in large they haven't. Then it becomes Microsoft's fault for not forcing them to upgrade. I don't think people need all their choices made for them. Why is it not web developer's fault for continuing to develop for outdate browsers? or computer manufacturers' fault for not loading a different, more consumer oriented default browser? or the users themselves for not taking a few minutes to update or download an alternative browser?
> What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web?
Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and GP fears the same will happen again if they're allowed to gain dominant position again.
> Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then
I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did.
Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC.
The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.
Exactly. The web had to bend to IE, not the other way around.
The fact that that bending resulted in IE6 still being able to mostly display websites today is not any sort of testament to IE6's quality as a browser.
Yep, a couple that I've found include no support for cursor: none (even though IE9 supports it), and a rendering bug around using gradient backgrounds on tr:hover.
I'm not even doing that much actual web work right now and still I stumbled over Chrome, Opera and Safari bugs in the last year. IE 10 works surprisingly well, the only thing I had less problems with was FF.
Many individual customers you might be able to blame, but as a group, they are best considered as simply a Force of Nature with no capacity to accept responsibility. Many of them can't upgrade because their on old machines with old OSs, or because they're on a work machine and their company has policies about these things (which can probably also be traced back to Microsoft), or because they are just plain technically incompetent (and while one may decide to blame them for that, it's not fair to double-count when it makes them incapable of choosing to not use IE6, or 7, or 8). And those who can and do upgrade have little capacity to make any different in the rest of this enormous group. Since "consumers" as an aggregate are therefore incapable of fixing the problem, it makes little sense to lay all the blame on them.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is in a position to fix everything for the consumers, and they so far choose not to.
That was spectacular and joyful to read and I agree wholeheartedly. The sad thing is that when I was "designing for IE" as a young lad, I had no idea that's what I was doing. "The browser" was what came with the computer and that was Netscape and later IE. It took a while to wean myself off of :
if (document.all) { }
And when I discovered other continents to explore, I realized I was living in a desolate quarter of Antarctica.
If they really did come up with the Karaoke web standard, my opinion of them will likely soften. Until, of course, developers only start developing with the Non Participant variant, in which case, they can all die in a fire!
Thank you for putting into words exactly how I've felt lately. It's not just Microsoft's past that's turned me off them - patent trolling Android manufacturers and other recent activities have basically solidified in my head that I will not choose Microsoft if I have a choice.
I'd be willing to put the past behind me if they Just Stopped with all of this crap.
They will not stop, they have always been like this.
There's a reason seasoned nerds do not like Microsoft and it is not just because the nerds are raging Linux fanboys. It is because of actual experience dealing with MS over a couple of decades.
Sometimes MS comes out with something good but at a point (usually within 3 years) marketing will take over and run it into the ground.
As someone who's been doing web development since 1995, I have wasted an enormous amount of my life dealing with IE-specific bugs. This is enough for me to feel uncomfortable even thinking about Internet Explorer and has tainted me against Microsoft products in general...
When our company decided to stop supporting IE.. I had the best day of my life at work yanking out all of the 'kind of' working IE quickfixes/hacks we had used out of the source code. I couldn't agree more.
Do you remember NS 4.x and JSSS/translated CSS at all? I do. IE was many, many times better and easier to develop for. (And, frankly, their box model, equivalent to border-box, was the right way to go.)
This is how I feel not just about microsoft but about all closed-source software. It's great that it exists and wants to compete and keep the open source stuff on its toes but ultimately I prefer the top dogs to be the open source guys because I know if it ever does go off the rails it can be forked.
What you are saying is totally legit. Microsoft is a company, and as engineer/web dev/creative/whatever, choosing to rely on IE for development or anything else implies you trust the Microsoft brand to help you get something out of using their toolset. We've all been burned in the past by MSFT and even if their claims about a modern browser are true, and even if it ships today with the best codebase out of any browser, there is little evidence for any of us to suddenly start trusting the spirit behind this new push.
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.
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.
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.
Visual Studio does have quite a few improvements, specially in what concerns debugging asynchronous code and DirectX.
Unity is now a first class citizen for development of games on Windows.
Windows 8.1 brings quite a few new APIs, better interaction with .NET projections.
JIT, GC and ASP.NET improvements.
The message is, they could have thrown a RSS Reader attitude to .NET, instead they are paying developers to fix those issues.
As for paying for stuff, welcome to the commercial world. Microsoft is not the only vendor selling developer tools, although it looks like that when reading HN.
With MSDN subscriptions you get lots of those things for "free" for the timeframe the subscription is valid.
> I am an MSDN subscriber as are the other 100 people we employ. Definitely not free.
It is a matter of scale.
The type of companies I work for, the MSDN subscription is done at enterprise level. Sure it is expensive, but still cheaper than buying individual products, and gives the liberty to access new software versions.
It feels as if it was free, hence my quotes around free.
> Compare to the Java EE ecosystem.
True, in many things the Java ecosystem is more open source friendly, because the money comes from consulting or selling books, not from direct sale of tooling.
Ever tried to develop Eclipse Ecore plugins without buying the books from Eclipse Foundation?
I am fully aware of it, my employer was a Java/C++ shop until 2009, date when we started delivery .NET solutions additionally.
On the world consulting world my employer targets, there are lots of commercial tools to chose from,
I'm with you. I've been an aficionado of WPF and WCF since day 1, and am always hoping that with every version WPF would get enhanced just a little closer to the DirectX wire, not completely replaced by that stunted Windows 8 XAML junk.
> 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.
Didn't we get that? Wasn't that ie6. What went wrong was the internet didn't go away and we didn't all want desktop software.
No I think we should all know how that story ends by now. The answer has got to be open source or open standards at the very least. We need to be in a place where your browser doesn't matter, there's 50 out there choose the green one if you like green.
You may be cranky, but you're obviously not that old. In ye olden times IE was actually the decent browser (that you didn't have to pay for). It's just that they won the browser wars and let things stagnate. Once they stopped leading they became followers (when they moved at all). This is not recent history. It is lore. But lore that the elder devs should know.
As an ex-'softie I can tell you that the engineers from IE were generally not happy with this situation. Or with all of the acrobatics to support non-standard crap. But I have yet to meet anyone who really understands how the winds of decision-making at Microsoft get their first breaths. Basically, it was situation == nobody happy, even most folks at the borg.
I apologize if my response isn't full of data. I don't understand how a troll post hit the top of the discussion page and thought it deserved a response, even a fluffy one full of hearsay.
This is my position as well. However I expect if IE becomes dominate, Microsoft will revert to monopolistic practices. On those grounds alone I will never accept IE, even if they pass your bar.
> 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.
I will add one more thing. They have to make the browser not just for Windows platform, but for all major platforms (Mac and Linux).
Well, the case of Opera's Presto engine being forced to die in the past few years proved that the holy grail of everything being fine and dandy if browser engines and websites follow web standards is a big lie.
Gmail sometimes shows "Gmail too slow? Switch to Chrome, a faster browser." for Opera uses and a similar message shows up on Youtube Google Docs.
Chrome and Firefox started their own take on HTML beta and experimental features and led to a race of broken standard support.
Too many standards are half baked, and are implemented by some browser makers in a half baked manner and are frequently rolled back in an incompatible way, HTML5 storage being just one example.
From "Judgment Day Arrives: Opera Implements the CSS3 Webkit Prefix" http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/
"In February 2012, we reported the minutes of W3C meeting where Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft discussed implementing -webkit prefixes in non-webkit browsers. The reason: some developers use only webkit prefixes — their sites look good in some browsers, but broken in others even when they offer the same level of CSS3 support. The issue is especially prevalent on mobile browsers and many developers fail to look beyond their high-end Apple or Android devices."
"Opera analyzed stylesheets from 10,000 popular websites to determine which CSS values/properties would receive -webkit aliases:"
Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features.
Take a look at this HN thread about a broken Google site and you see a lot of people defending non-standard HTML because it works on their choice of browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594913
These things are evidence of a currently broken web regardless of IE's involvement, with webkit being the new IE. And it actually explains how some of IE's features and bugs came about in the early 2000s resulted in pain for alternate browsers. Prime example of a great thing: XMLHTTPRequest was not part of a web standard.
Though Webkit is open source, I am a bit wary of Chrome's dominance as Google spends a ton of money to bundle it with everything and promote it at every chance over Firefox/Opera since they don't have to continue paying them hundreds of millions for being default and building a big moat for their search engine in the process against competing and future search engines.
> Chrome and Firefox started their own take on HTML beta and experimental features and led to a race of broken standard support
Personally I'm quite happy that Mozilla is engaging in this feature race, as Google lately is in the habit of pushing technologies that have the potential to fragment the web and break the fragile standards that we do have - and I'm talking specifically about replacements for Javascript, like Dart, PNaCl, but also about things like Web SQL Database [1]. This is why Mozilla is doing an awesome job in bringing balance, with things like asm.js or IndexedDB [2].
If you think about it, this is quite good, since standards aren't development in the vacuum, as you need experiments and prototypes released to the public for useful feedback. XmlHttpRequest itself started as an ActiveX extension. How can you make a standard out of something if you don't experiment? Also WebKit is the new IExplorer, that's why Firefox is so important.
> Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features.
It's regrettable really, but on the other hand they were also killed for not being open-source. Really, in this day and age, non open-source browsers don't make sense, unless you're Apple or Microsoft.
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.
Do you really think the fault is with a bunch of greybeards? More accurate would be:
"We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things because they were told to by people who still run the company. We're changing that, because we're being allowed to for now, and we're here to tell you about it."
Ballmer: "I know, let's have a bunch of kids at CES promoting this fictional younger / hipper image because Apple is destroying us."
Yes, the current IE team is extremely strong, and has only gotten smarter & stronger during the time I worked there. There's tons of meetings I've walked out of where we made a decision to do X rather than Y because "the standard says to do X" and it was the guiding principle for decision-making.
Because, sometimes, standards are wrong, purposefully allow implementation-specific choices, or are helplessly vague and everyone can't agree on the interpretation.
However, the right answer is usually to exceed the requirements of the standard in way that best benefits the consumer and meets business goals.
> But why was the non-standard way even an option?
People tend to have their own ideas on how things should be done. They should definitely be heard too. There is nothing wrong with questioning or doing things differently than current standards dictate as long as you have open, honest discussions.
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.
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).
Right. In addition, CarbonLib ran on OS 8/9, so developers could migrate their apps to Carbon but continue to build OS 9 and X apps from the same codebase.
"Another reason for the quality gap is that that we've been having trouble keeping talented people. Google and other large Seattle-area companies keep poaching our best, most experienced developers, and we hire youths straight from college to replace them. You find SDEs and SDE IIs maintaining hugely import systems. These developers mean well and are usually adequately intelligent, but they don't understand why certain decisions were made, don't have a thorough understanding of the intricate details of how their systems work, and most importantly, don't want to change anything that already works.
These junior developers also have a tendency to make improvements to the system by implementing brand-new features instead of improving old ones. Look at recent Microsoft releases: we don't fix old features, but accrete new ones. New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones.
(That's literally the explanation for PowerShell. Many of us wanted to improve cmd.exe, but couldn't.)"
"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.
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:
The "Mozilla" part of the user agent has been maintained for historical reasons, and could potentially break compatibility if removed. Originally it was used to detect frames. It may not be used in the majority of user agent sniffers these days, but I doubt Microsoft is interested in testing their luck removing it.
We have a real test case. Opera has identified directly as "Opera" not "Mozilla" since forever (unless you configure it otherwise), and at least 95% of websites work fine with it. And of the small minority that do fail in Opera, faulty user agent sniffing could represent only a fraction of those.
Opera 12.15 identifies as this for me:
Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.15
We could lose that historical crufty "Mozilla" and be fine. Opera has shown us the way.
Significantly more than 95%. Opera has been my main browser for the past 5 years, and in the beginning it wasn't all perfect, but I've had 0 problems on at least 99% of sites in the last 3 years. Opera filled the last holes and devs became better.
Interestingly, some high-profile applications such as Basecamp still suck in Opera, for no apparent reason.
> some high-profile applications such as Basecamp still suck in Opera, for no apparent reason
That's interesting, and I can see it being potentially self-perpetuating.
It's broken because Opera numbers are too low to allocate resources to fix, because nobody uses Opera on their site (more than once) because it's broken, because Opera numbers are too low...
I like the idea that in a thousand years, two pieces of code may well be asking one another: "What is the Navigator?" "Netscape", for absolutely no reason, in a piece of ancient, sealed code that no one but a classics scholar would touch.
I thought it was because (when the standard was defined) some web servers would only serve compliant content to Netscape browsers. edit: according to aclimatt, it was used for frames detection.
ASP.net used to do user agent sniffing extensively. It used it for feature detection, but also to serve different HTML and JavaScript to different browsers. I think it still does, actually, but I've not looked at it in a while.
Microsoft obviously thought that user agent sniffing was a great idea until pretty recently, because they use it a lot.
Use of user agent sniffing is built right into the framework, and also into Webforms (controls, server-side events, and the like). Often, completely different HTML and JavaScript is generated for different browsers (whether you want it to or not).
Worse still - things built on top of ASP.net used user agent sniffing even more. For example, ClickOnce required that the browser report which versions of the .net framework are installed, and the server does different things depending on that information. IE's user agent strings can get very long, reporting the browser version, OS version, CPU architecture, various service pack levels or revisions for different things, half a dozen versions of .Net, Infopath, Windows Media Center, Zune software, whether it's a TabletPC or not, RTC API, and a whole bunch of other fragments that I don't even recognize (SLCC?), and even occasionally advertising that the browser has some malware installed.
It's nearly impossible to switch this stuff off in ASP.net, and the browser database is often out of date. So new browsers or browser versions are often served broken pages (because the "unknown browser" fallback doesn't actually work). This happened when IE 10 was released, for example. Existing browsers are often detected incorrectly, and served a degraded version of the page (happened a lot to Firefox and Opera, back in the IE 6 / IE 7 era).
At least in ASP.net MVC you can ignore the browser detection most of the time. You can't really disable it in ASP.net itself.
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.
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).
For compatibility reasons. Many websites render differently based on browser support/quirks, and use strings of text within the UA as cues to determine which direction they should take when handling those quirks.
Removing those cruddy bits of the UA would make it so that those pages would render incorrectly.
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.
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:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You're incorrect. And technically speaking the browser wasn't integrated with the OS (and never was), it was the rendering engine (shdocvw.dll and mshtml.dll). The Windows UI featured HTML elements that the OS rendered via this. The rendering engine is not itself connected to any TCP/IP stack, so remote exploits are impossible. But ofcource if you went to web sites with malicious HTML you could get ownzored because of bugs in the rendering engine.
Also you could delete the browser (iexplore.exe) but not the engine as the OS relied on certain UI elements that used this engine. Ofcource if you went ahead and deleted the DLLs anyway, you could make the OS work without the added HTML UI layer (as the judge in the MS antitrust case demonstrated). One could argue that this wasn't the "full" Windows experience but hey.. all that is water under the bridge now. The case is resolved and MS got slapped with a hefty fine.
I doubt it had anything to do with the source leak. Most security bugs these days are found via automated means - fuzzing, fault injection, etc.
But OTOH these bugs become useful in other ways. I believe there was an ios jailbreak method where you simply visit a website on your iphone (jailbreak.me? .com?) and your device is rooted/jailbroken due to a bug in Safari's PDF renderer.
Actually IE6 and older tied the IE user interface to the Explorer user interface which shared the same SHDOCVW. IE7 created IEFRAME to separate the Explorer user interface from the IE user interface, but it is still in system32, and so are all the other core IE components like MSHTML, WININET, etc...
Are you talking about the UI controls or the browser?iexplore.exe could be deleted at any time. Ofcource because explorer.exe also could handle URLs you could technically still browse via it. (Though I'm pretty sure that by default only URLs in the local/trusted zone were allowed)
And then I believe the help component also relied on the rendering engine. Although the hcp:// vulnerabilities were in the protocol handler (helpctr.exe) and the ms-help:// vulnerabilities were also in the protocol handler which allowed the attacker to bypass ASLR/DEP.
People had/have more than one reason for disliking it. One was that they were forcing their proprietary webbrowser product deeply into the OS for no reason other than to disadvantage any possible competition. If IE had been open, people could have competed by modifying and extending IE.
>If IE had been open, people could have competed by modifying and extending IE.
But who would have been ready to put in $100M in ~1995 on a browser besides Microsoft? Remember there was no money to make in the market. Whats interesting is MS actually made an offer to Netscape to bundle their browser with the OS before they started work on IE. Netscape was barely surviving by selling server software. Not to mention that they too broke standards much like IE - adding several non-standard CSS elements, tags, proprietary DOM, etc. Ofcource some of these Netscape specific tags later got introduced into the official spec, but they weren't at the time.
If you look at webkit which recently got forked - without Apple and Google, Webkit would immediately die. No amount of volunteers or the fact that it was open source would be able to keep it alive while being a realistic competitor to other browsers. New operating systems, new Web standards, new JS engine improvements would all pose immense challenges that require an organized commercial effort to tackle.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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...
- Apple didn't license WebKit. Apple created WebKit, by forking Konqueror's engine.
- Chrome doesn't update without restarting. (Unless you mean restarting the machine, in which case, of course not! What kind of browser would require a machine reboot to... oh.)
> Apple didn't license WebKit. Apple created WebKit, by forking Konqueror's engine
Of course, you're right. I was typing this faster than I was thinking..
Anyway, MS shouldn't even think of pulling something like this, on second thought---because rather than a render-engine replacement, it would end up as yet another "mode" in IE..
> Chrome doesn't update without restarting
Of course the binary cannot replace itself while running -- ((although with each tab being its own process and their highly persistent statefulness they might consider silently "rebooting" background tabs)) -- but, well at my end / from my experience, Chrome doesn't restart itself and doesn't prompt about restarting, in most cases -- rather seems to wait until the next time it is restarted by the user. Maybe I get that wrong, but if my memory recalls this as Chrome's auto-update user-experience, that's a feat one way or the other..
Well, remember that the IE components are global system files that require at least restarting Windows Explorer and often a reboot to update and all versions of IE follows the lifecycle of the underlying version of Windows. I have proposed rapid release IE in the past but it'd have to be separate from the current IE installation.
How does taking advantage of standards-compliant layouts requiring breaking the past?
I mean, if they're truly standards-compliant layouts, then they shouldn't be doing anything that requires that old stuff, and therefore they shouldn't be affected whether that stuff stays in or not. Or maybe I'm missing something.
Don't get me wrong, it sounds like it's headed in the right direction, but to me, at least, it's more about forcing crappy older sites to update their stuff than anything else.
You're missing the point. If they're truly standards-compliant and they "look like" IE6, then they'll get the IE6 layout the site author added and miss out on the new features. So IE11 will look bad and crufty no matter how good it's engine is. The point here is to make it "Look like WebKit" or "Look like Gecko", so that site designers don't try to support old IE versions.
This is explicitly about getting more sites to work /without/ forcing older sites to update their stuff. Older sites have ifIE() checks that return true and serve IE old legacy IE-specific code. IE11 is more compatible with standards-compliant code than legacy IE-specific code so forcing existing sites to serve IE the same code as FF/Chrome results in more sites working in IE.
The point is to avoid being detected as IE by _existing_ websites, which typically do extra work to display nicely for IE, and that won't necessary anymore, hopefully.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.