Tag Archive for: Internet Explorer

Microsoft IE9

Microsoft is working on a better browser?

This comment from the post highlights the feedback I have heard from many web developers and their love for the IE browser:

Instead of focusing on things like: Direct2D and DirectWrite, please focus on better STANDARDS SUPPORT!

Will IE9 support default ECMAScript events instead of stupid IE proprietary ones?

Will it support as much css3 as other browsers do?

Innovation is fine when you aren’t so freaking behind on features other browsers have had for 5 years.

Stop innovating until you get IE9 up to speed with CSS, Box model, canvas, SVG, base64, @font-face, etc. Stop trying to create your own APIs before you implement standard ones!

Web developers hate you and recommend other browsers because of this asinine behaviour.

Microsoft and the European Commission

Mitchell Baker is the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation is the not for profit organization that brought innovation to the web browser market. Get Firefox here.

She made some interesting points on her blog as she reflected on the proceedings of the European Commission against Microsoft.

The statement of objections states the issue very clearly:

… the Commission sets out evidence and outlines its preliminary conclusion that Microsoft”™s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.

Mitchell has some pretty strong thoughts about the Commission’s statement of objections:

In my mind, there is absolutely no doubt that the statement … is correct. Not the single smallest iota of doubt. I”™ve been involved in building and shipping web browsers continuously since before Microsoft started developing IE, and the damage Microsoft has done to competition, innovation, and the pace of the web development itself is both glaring and ongoing. There are separate questions of whether there is a good remedy, and what that remedy might be. But questions regarding an appropriate remedy do not change the essential fact. Microsoft”™s business practices have fundamentally diminished (in fact, came very close to eliminating) competition, choice and innovation in how people access the Internet.

She also expresses another interesting point of view:

In the mid-1990s Microsoft began developing Internet Explorer in response to the success of the product known as Netscape Navigator. In this period Microsoft developed a fine product (particularly the version known as IE 4). Kudos to Microsoft for this. Microsoft also promoted IE through activities that the US Department of Justice and the U.S. Courts determined to be illegal. As result, Internet Explorer ended up with well over 90% market share. Once this happened, Microsoft stopped browser development; even disbanding its browser team. The product stagnated and then became a prime vector for bad actors to inject spyware onto consumers”™ computers. There was no meaningful response or innovation from Microsoft.

And the role of open source software?

Equally important, the success of Mozilla and Firefox does not indicate a healthy marketplace for competitive products. Mozilla is a non-profit organization; a worldwide movement of people who strive to build the Internet we want to live in. I am convinced that we could not have been, and will not be, successful except as a public benefit organization living outside the commercial motivations. And I certainly hope that neither the EU nor any other government expects to maintain a healthy Internet ecosystem based on non-profits stepping in to correct market deficiencies.

Her post is worth reading.

flyingbow.com

Well, it is now official. The website I have been working on for a friend is up and running. You can take a look at Trevor’s site here.

Trevor’s site was an interesting project to work on from a couple of perspectives — artistic and technical. The artistic elements included colors, graphics, typography. The technical elements included CSS, PHP, XHTML.

I built up several mockups of the site in Photoshop. We then reviewed the mockups and ultimately decided on the final design. I then coded up the stylesheet from the Photoshop layout. I built the site on top of WordPress and integrated the design as part of a custom theme.

The project did take a fair amount of time to code and debug. The most time consuming part was getting things to render appropriately under the various Internet Explorer browsers. Perhaps IE8 will make things easier for web developers. The amount of time I spent trying to make sure that IE wouldn’t break the Web was silly.

Chris Wilson, an Internet Explorer platform architect, had this to say in a recent blog post:

I think we all want to converge to a world where a web developer doesn”™t have to spend much time at all testing and recoding their site for different browsers.

Amen to that. The rest of his post is also worth a read if you have an interest in web development.

You can download a beta of IE8 here.