Slash-dot-a-licious...

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Tino Zijdel — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 03:03:13 GMT

Chris: cool down please; I know you are doing a great but difficult job...

I also disagree that MS has made web developers' lives 2% better; if IE7 would ship today as a final MS would make web developers' lives at least 10% worse since we would have to hack for IE5, IE6 *and* IE7

Now I know that that's again a harsh comment, but it is not meant personal (you may take it so, but really it is not). Like I said before I would like to urge your company to not ship IE7 untill it is at least standards compliant to the same level as competitive browsers when it comes to CSS...

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Rowan — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 04:24:29 GMT

"I disagreed with the assessment that we have only made web developers' lives 2% better."

Whatever the improvement is, it won't kick into effect untill IE6 is officially (and actually) extinct, until that day comes IE7 will provide no solution to the problems we face today.

Even then, IE7 will be a thorn in the side because it will still (probably) have more bugs than any other competitive browser. Then IE8 will be released and we'll be writing for two or three wildly different versions of IE, but this is a problem of being too popular and virtually nothing can be done about it.

When do we get to see a chart of all the changes that have been made to CSS support? I don't care about specific bugs, but rather how certain behaviour has changed for certain elements.

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Richard MacManus — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 07:10:47 GMT

Sorry Chris, the Slashdot headline was my fault - not Taco's. In my defence it was very late my time :-)

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Nick Fitzsimons — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:43:35 GMT

Once again, the /. editors betray a certain lack of understanding of the duties of an editor.

FWIW, I had mod points and dished out a couple of "Informative"s for the (very few) comments correcting the article summary, together with "Troll"ing a couple of the more egregious comments. I'll suffer in metamoderation, no doubt.

Internet Explorer Not A Monster Anymore

Read/WriteWeb — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:56:31 GMT

This week I interviewed Microsoft's Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE, to address the issue of Web standards compliance and IE7. There has been controversy about this lately, sparked by a Slashdot thread last week that claimed IE7...

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Jeremy — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 09:27:56 GMT

This is a serious question for you, which I don't really expect to get answered but anyway here goes: Why doesn't Microsoft drop their html rendering engine and use mozilla or webkit instead? No seriously, it could work. We know from the IE6/7 transition that maintaining an html renderer is difficult. Microsoft would benefit from a more standard compliant browser that is maintained by someone else. Security fixes would get released faster. Microsoft would probably get a lot of respect from the developer community. Yes there are hurdles to this strategy, but none which are insurmountable. Microsoft may need the browser to do proprietory things, but mozilla supports binary plugins for the things you can't show, and you can donate back the code for the things you feel you can. IE is embedded in a lot of Microsoft windows applications, but the work to move them all to a new engine only has to be done once. Or you could write a compatibility layer. There's already a binary compatible mozilla activex control that can replace the IE one. A bit of support mozillas way and Microsoft no longer needs to maintain the engine (or even the whole browser), doesn't need to worry about new features, or implementing new standards, and may even get to worry a bit less about security. Apple did it with Safari and webkit, Microsoft could do it too, and better.

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Joe User — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 01:37:43 GMT

Jeremy, if only life were that simple. There are hundreds of thousands (if not, more) apps that rely on IE's broken rendering engine. Thousands.

On top of that, IE would never go and use someone else's rendering engine. They want you stuck in proprietary land, where they can dictate standards on the web and continue to push the so-called 'best' internet experience by using IE - by driving compatibility with IE (and by extension, Windows) and at the expense of others.

A case in point:

http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5218163.html

In short, Microsoft want to own the web and control its future. Having their own rendering engine, their own news site (MSNBC), their own search engine, their own standards... is all part of that plan.

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

markovich — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 20:07:41 GMT

This is a serious question for you, which I don't really expect to get answered but anyway here goes: Why doesn't Microsoft drop their html rendering engine and use mozilla or webkit instead?

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Threau — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 16:09:02 GMT

"I disagreed with the assessment that we have only made web developers' lives 2% better."

Whatever the improvement is, it won't kick into effect untill IE6 is officially (and actually) extinct, until that day comes IE7 will provide no solution to the problems we face today.

Even then, IE7 will be a thorn in the side because it will still (probably) have more bugs than any other competitive browser. Then IE8 will be released and we'll be writing for two or three wildly different versions of IE, but this is a problem of being too popular and virtually nothing can be done about it.

When do we get to see a chart of all the changes that have been made to CSS support? I don't care about specific bugs, but rather how certain behaviour has changed for certain elements.

re: Slash-dot-a-licious...

Webdesign — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:59:36 GMT