I tried to tell people this was coming. It was clear to me listening to Dean talk about IE9. He was, for the first time, strongly hinting at the fact that users would want to use IE not because of features, but because it ran the web the best.
I think MS made a smart call. They saw that the standards web was taking over. They couldn't stop it. So how do you sell Windows licenses in this new world? Be the best platform for the standards web. So now they're throwing all their eggs in this basket. It's the right move and I look forward to a new world when people actually say, "Use IE... no, seriously, use IE".
While I applaud IE team for doing an amazing job in recent time, I can't help but point out the fact that their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product. And they did it only after they realized that they are loosing browser market share by large number in a very short period of time.
I am not suggesting that mozilla/Opera/Chrome developers don't care about money; but making the best browser for them was not a reactionary motivation to their low browser market share. At least for Opera, they have been right up there, or as long as I can remember, as the most standard compatible browser. Yet their browser market share never went above 1% (statcounter). And they are still making it better, recently developed the fastest JS engine.
My point being. I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place. AFAI am concerned, as long as I have the choice, I will never use IE.
The motivation for all of these companies is money, except maybe Mozilla Foundation, being non-profit. It's just that many times your interests are aligned with different things.
For example, Opera makes its money from the browser. Plain and simple they need to sell their browser. And really they have no other product.
Google is a very different story. Let me give you an example, do you think Google would ever release a version of Chrome that allowed you to block all advertising? Even if that was the best user experience possible, they want to sell you ads. There plan to do it is to make the rest of the experience so good that you stay on the web and click ads. But they won't do anything, regardless of how beneficial to the user, where there's a reasonable possibility that they'd drastically reduce their profit.
I personally don't buy the whole "good company" "bad company" thing. But I do look for companies whose profit is aligned with my interest. That changes over time (both my interests and the company's), but I simple don't have this belief that some companies are "gooder". That died with my belief in Santa Claus.
> their motivation for making IE more compliant has to do with selling more of their products and perhaps had little to do with making the best product.
If you mean it, Firefox should have supported H.264.
Mozilla/Opera aren't so innovating in the old days. I remember there was a HUGE ad in the toolbar area of Opera when it's still a shareware. I have to use a no-ad patch/crack.
Tons of innovating features exists before Mozilla, there were lots of thirdparty IE shell browsers like MyIE.
> I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place.
They did a damn good job in the first place. IE 5.5 was such a tremendous step forward in reliability and consistency that web apps stampeded towards it and away from the alternative, the hideous Netscape 4.72. Before anybody could plan for it, tens of billions of dollars of activity had moved to IE, and Netscape's market capitalization was a smoking crater.
The catch was that the web apps of that time were brittle, something like Perl or PHP code with HTML snippets hard-coded into it. The brittleness of these apps prematurely standardized the quirks of IE 5.5/6. Microsoft had no choice but to put the product line on long-term support. Consequently, a lot of app authors sensibly decided to target IE 6's carved-in-stone quirks rather than emerging standards. At that point IE 6 was there to stay for the long haul; trying to migrate away would have been tilting at windmills.
What we are seeing today is that (1) the emerging standards of 1998 have finally been carved into stone, (2) the web app frameworks have finally gotten good enough at separating logic from presentation to make rewrites worthwhile, and (3) IE challengers finally accumulated enough development to compete. This is not because Microsoft was evil, but because you have to climb a tall hill to replace a pretty good solution with an ideal solution.
The rumor that I've heard is that Microsoft sold a bunch of support contracts for IE 6 with huge potential penalties if Microsoft failed on its end. This gave them huge financial incentives to support the quirks of that browser for as long as those contracts were still valid.
I believe I already felt that way... In olden days of IE5 when I'd tease Netscape users - Why would you want to drive a Ford, when you've already got a Porsche parked in the garage?
sigh - why oh why can't they support Windows XP? 80% of the customers using our web application are still on Windows XP (some even on NT4...) and seing how conservative these companies are, I have my doubts that they'll ever upgrade.
Now if we could have a working IE without hardware acceleration that runs under XP, that would be wonderful.
I do have some hopes for Google Chrome Frame's MSI installer though - to support a barcode scanner, we already have to force our users to install Java, so there's at least some hope with GCF.
As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6
Why should they? New features and updates only available to newer operating systems, drive upgrades! Makes perfect sense to me, especially considering XP support won't be around forever.
As it stands now, 20% of our development time is wasted on making stuff work on IE 5.5 (!) and 6
I'm not following... If it's a waste of time, why are you doing it? Drop support for those browsers in that case. Unless, of course, customers using those browsers make up a significant percentage of use, it doesn't sound like much of a waste to me.
Windows 7 SP1 is currently in beta. Once it ships, you will no longer be able to downgrade Win 7 to XP, which is going to make it extremely difficult to legally buy a new XP license.
He was talking about converting a 7 or Vista license into an XP one which is AFAIK the only way how you can still acquire an xp license if you are not a hardware manufacturer needing it for a netbook
It is a waste of time because we could do 20% more features in the time we waste to support a now 10 years old and soon unsupported software configuration.
In the end other end users with better browsers suffer in that they cannot get the full amount of theoretically possible features (we are a small company with limited resources) and our customers suffer because the have to pay more and wait longer because their customers (our end users) in turn are stuck in the past.
Then draw a line in the sand. Decide whether it's better to alienate your IE5 and IE6 users so you can get the newer features into your customers' hands faster.
Maybe not in an economic sense, but many people consider it frustrating to spend hours and hours on something that wouldn't need to be done if just someone else would act.
I still don't understand why MS didn't build a full IE6 rendering engine into IE8 that could be turned on site-by-site. Maybe too hard with all the ActiveX dependencies?
If your customers are sticking with IE5.5 and IE6 they won’t upgrade to IE9 regardless of XP compatibility or not. Require Chrome Frame or a different XP-compatible modern browser as part of your system requirements and that should sort the majority of your clients.
Well. We do have quite many users that upgraded to ie7 lately. And a small minority that went to 8, but both browsers are still far away from what you can do with all other browsers currently out there.
But yeah. Google Chrome frame is really interesting once the MSI installation becomes possible or they find a way around requiring admin rights for the installation (unlikely)
Why do people think it is unreasonable to not support a nearly 10 year old Operating System? Safari 5 is not going to run on OS X 10.1 and in all honesty why would anyone expect it to?
Because 62% [1] of Windows users are still on Windows XP. And these people bought computers; they didn't rent them. It at least feels like Microsoft's duty to herd as many of these people to the modern web stack as possible.
OS X, on the other hand -- virtually everyone is on Snow Leopard or Leopard by now, with a few stragglers on 10.4 Tiger. No one is on 10.1, or even 10.3, anymore. [1]
Part of the difference in the upgrade curves can be attributed to the legendary way Windows bloats and requires beefier hardware with each release (possibly excepting Vista → 7), the fact that Apple only needs to release OSes for its own hardware, the much cheaper and simpler (one version) OS upgrades on the Mac side of the fence, and frankly the anti-consumer DRM/validation tactics of Microsoft that make people fear updates. Apple makes no attempt to stop end users "sharing" or outright pirating OS updates — in part because everyone already bought hardware, but mostly, I suspect, because it's extremely beneficial to the (developer) ecosystem.
Actually, Safari 5 doesn't even run on 10.4, which was the newest operating system until Leopard came out 2.5 years ago. By that measure, Apple's doing worse than Microsoft. (Although, Apple still supports XP in Safari 5.)
MS needs all the moral support and encouragement it can get. Really, we should treat MS like a recovering addict who declines a free hit and goes to bed early. They're doing their best and they're improving.
Except that in this instance the "substance" craved is money. Microsoft actively neglected to support standards until it started to affect the bottom line. Pretending that they were clueless to how difficult they've made web design and development is foolish. If there were any epiphanies they were had while staring at a balance sheet.
Working as a web developer in the education sector, this gives me a great deal cautious hope for the future. About 90% of our visitors use IE because they are students in the classroom.
First Canvas and now CSS3. In the world created by my dreams, all of this is done to standards, with good performance.
In reality, experience has taught me that they could easily destroy these standards by doing it their own way. Only if there is finally a reconciliation to full standards (or little deviance like other browsers), would these press releases even be worth it.
If they "implement" canvas and CSS3, and basically the new web, and we still have to go "that's a great idea, but does it work in IE?" they have still failed.
In some cases (e.g. elements that trigger JS events but aren't real links or buttons) an I-beam may appear. In these cases cursor: pointer; is quite beneficial, though cursor: default; (not the same as "auto") may be appropriate.
But the web != your OS. Many things that work and are expected on the desktop, such as double-clicking, right-clicking, and dragging, are considerably more rare online, where there are a different set of expectations and, as you mention, affordances.
Yes, but buttons are buttons wherever they are, and browsers even style them according to the OS theme. That's why I think they should be treated as buttons and not hyperlinks.
And the sad thing is that desktop applications are starting to do this too. The new Symantec Antivirus interface is all webby and slow (something else I don't like), and uses the hand for buttons. This makes me a sad panda.
The difference is that "cursor: pointer" means (by default) that the target will initiate navigation away from the current page. All other elements follow OS conventions as a matter of presenting a common UI grammar to the user.
In my (unresearched) opinion, cursor:pointer was created to indicate that a hyperlink can be clicked on. Buttons were obvious, but underlined words in the middle of a paragraph, not so much.
It irritates me when people learn a concept and then illogically apply it to other domains. That's why I'm making a fuss, it seems like everybody is not using their brains and saying "EVERYTHING you click must use the hand because links do!".
So then would you say it is fair to use "cursor: pointer" on buttons that initiate navigation away from the current page? For instance: form submit buttons?
You don't 'click on' a button, you 'click' or 'push' it. It's a button. There's no need to change the cursor to let you know that you can actually click on it. That's the reason hyperlinks use the hand.
I think MS made a smart call. They saw that the standards web was taking over. They couldn't stop it. So how do you sell Windows licenses in this new world? Be the best platform for the standards web. So now they're throwing all their eggs in this basket. It's the right move and I look forward to a new world when people actually say, "Use IE... no, seriously, use IE".