This chart doesn't show the 5 year sabbatical that Microsoft decided to take between August 2001 and October 2006 (The amount of time between releases of IE6 and IE7).
I reckon they shipped IE7 at exactly the most damaging time for the web because If they waited another year or so then it might have been long enough to kill off IE altogether.
That sabbatical is precisely why I will never ever promote Internet Explorer. It was ridiculous. I don't even care if suddenly MS produces the best technical browser available (highly doubtful, but even so). I don't care if it's a new team because it's the same company, and yes much of the same leadership. They blew it and they don't get another chance.
They had the best browser back when IE4 launched. Given the amount of pain IE has caused over the years, it surprises me that any self respecting web developer could ever forgive them.
> That sabbatical is precisely why I will never ever promote Internet Explorer. It was ridiculous.
Some (including standardistas and other web luminaries) argue it was a good thing overall (though it got long in the tooth around 2005-2006) because it allowed the web to settle and developers to better understand what they were working with (because the target got static, it became possible to explore in depth, not just in breadth).
> They had the best browser back when IE4 launched.
They also had the best browser back when IE5 launched and back when IE6 launched.
That's definitely an interesting point. Had Microsoft continued to add features to IE during that time they likely would have created a bunch of new "standards" purely because of their market share.
There would not have been an incubation period where new ideas and standards could be worked out. Had Microsoft just pushed forward I suspect we would have a lot of "web standards" that wouldn't have much purpose beyond furthering Microsoft's monopoly. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft took this time off purposely to incubate new ideas, but it could be looked at as a beneficial side effect.
In a bizarre way, MS is continuing to create standards: when you're a developer, you have to have all the IE bug fixes in your back pocket and know which bugs are IE's bugs and which ones are yours. How much time do you think is spent circumventing IE's shortcomings? It's strange to think that there's a whole slew of sites that get tons of traffic based on IE's flaws.
That's a valid argument, however I'm sure you could argue that there would have been other benefits had they continued to innovate and release which may or may not have had a more positive net impact. Who knows? It doesn't lessen the pain any.
Regardless, I'm definitely not going to thank MS for this since I'm pretty sure your argument was not their intended effect (What was their intended affect anyways? Did they just not care? Concern over the threat the web posed to their OS?) and I will continue to promote IE's competitors until someday IE dies a horrible death and sinks into oblivion.
I'm also guessing you're of a similar view (albeit not as hardcore) and playing devil's advocate anyways ;)
This is 2001, pre-firefox. If you want a frightening thought then try it's main competitor: Netscape Navigator 4!
I remember Opera was my browser of choice around that time, it was a seriously nippy browser back then, way ahead of it's time. Unfortunately the fact that there was no free version prevented them from getting a decent share of the browser market. Later on, they did eventually release a free version but with an ad banner in the navigation bar (of course Opera is now completely free and doesn't have any ad banner).
We're talking 2001 here, when Firefox was still mozilla/browser (and had no own name), an experimental branch of Mozilla, back when Venkman was the one and only debugger for Mozilla. KDE 2.0 (first release including KHTML), Opera 6 (new feature: unicode support), OSX 10.0 (and 10.1) bundling IE5/Mac.
The alternative to MSIE was Netscape Communicator 4 (which had been stagnating since 1998), Mozilla 1.0 itself was still more than a year away.
It was horrible. But let's keep some perspective on why that sabbatical existed. It wasn't merely because MS had decided they dominated the browser market and didn't need to innovate anymore.
More than anything it was because MS was afraid of continuing IE development. IE is what got MS into all the regulatory anti-trust trouble in the first place, MS was too afraid to make a new mis-step with IE which could land them in even more trouble.
They didn't get in trouble for making a browser. They got in trouble for making it impossible to completely switch to a different browser under Windows. There was absolutely no external influence stopping Microsoft from continuing to develop IE as a standalone product. So yes, it was for that first reason.
This same argument is why I still have it in for Apple, despite their current success in consumer electronics.
The Apple I know is the one from the 1990s who had things locked down so tightly, hardware and software, bit loyal developers who put their best efforts into the platform, as if to destroy any ecosystem that built up around their successful products.
And I still feel that things haven't changed - if you can make money from iOS apps today, that is wonderful - but be prepared to get bitten one day.
This same argument is why I still have it in for Apple, despite their current success in consumer electronics.
I voted you up, but I'll note that one of the secondary reasons I wanted a PowerBook in 2004 was because Windows seemed so dominant and I didn't like the idea of Microsoft being able to completely control the Internet. OS X was the only OS at the time capable of competing with Windows for average users. Now, because of Firefox, Apple, and Google, it looks highly unlikely that Microsoft could in effect control the Internet even if they wanted to.
This chart doesn't show the 5 year sabbatical that Microsoft decided to take between August 2001 and October 2006.
Major versions of IE tend to be (are always?) synced to OS releases. What effect did the Longhorn Reset have on the sabbatical Microsoft "decided to" take?
Does anyone know? I can't imagine I'm the only one to ask this in the intervening 4.5 years, but my Google searches aren't finding anything.
My understanding is that once MS won the '90s browser wars, they disbanded the IE team entirely. Only when new competition arrived did they restart development. I could be wrong, though...
During that same five year period MS screwed up virtually everything else they were working on. It's not surprising they also could't come to grips with getting IE out.
To put it another way, do you suspect malice with how long Vista took? Probably not. I suspect that with Vista struggling all resources were moved to getting Vista back on track -- as important as IE is, Windows moreso.
I don't think he attributed disbanding the IE6 team to malice, MS had no need for that team anymore since they controlled virtually all of the browser market, and their main platform focus was never the web so there was little incentive for them to keep innovating there "for innovation's sake".
> It's not surprising they also could't come to grips with getting IE out.
It's not that they couldn't get it out, there was no IE7 project until they reactivated MSIE in 2005.
This is what MS said on the issue (from Wikipedia):
"With the release of IE6 Service Pack 1 in 2003, Microsoft announced that future upgrades to Internet Explorer would come only through future upgrades to Windows, stating that "further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
I think Vista messed up their plan. It doesn't sound like they just thought they were done. At least that was what they said in 2003. Now maybe you're saying internally something else was happening, but I hadn't heard that before.
Apparently in 2005 they then announced that they needed to do an out of band release for security.
As far as I know this is correct: after IE6 took down Netscape as an actual competitor, Microsoft put MSIE in maintenance mode as a project and most of the team was sent elsewhere, until the IE7 reactivation as Firefox started gaining significant market share.
One of the things that killed Macromedia Director Schockwave (remember that?) which was in many respects superior to Flash (SWF stands for "shockwave flash" -- Flash originally rode on Director's coat-tails) was too-frequent releases. As a Director coder you never knew what platform you needed to target and the end-user experience usually comprised being pestered to update their plugin before seeing your content.
Flash forward to 2010-11 and Google is doing the same thing with Android and Chrome (and Firefox is following suit). This is actually a BAD thing, even though we all have broadband, etc. now.
There's some kind of happy medium between significant, reasonably well-paced releases and shoving stuff out the door constantly.
"Real artists ship," but they don't spam you with incremental releases.
I am not aware newer browsers break backwards compatibility. Newer browsers usually work better at the things they were already good at. If you want to target a larger audience, pull your analytics and draw your line at the set you want to serve. Usually any reasonable line will cover mostly everybody.
This is the kind of excuse Microsoft uses - when you can't improve your software, you call it "stable" and "mature".
It's really not that hard to find examples of this. Chrome recently broke rounded corners, and they're about to break h.264 video. But it's certainly more fun to attack Microsoft in every post.
Chrome did not "break" rounded corners, they are various cases in which they arent perfect, but every time someone makes this argument they just point to "search the chrome bug tracker" as opposed to giving a specific breakage
They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken.
> Chrome did not "break" rounded corners, they are various cases in which they arent perfect, but every time someone makes this argument they just point to "search the chrome bug tracker" as opposed to giving a specific breakage
Here's an example bug where the antialiasing was screwed up:
And here's one demonstrating the (much worse) problem that you could get completely different colours showing through, although the screenshot isn't great because it only shows a small issue, not the much more offensive result if you had a larger corner radius:
Spending literally one minute with Google would find you numerous related problems with screenshots attached.
Pretending this wasn't a problem with Chrome and related browsers is like an IE fan pretending that no-one ever really needed CSS hacks because (insert excuse here). There were numerous complaints about this for several months from practising web developers.
> They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken.
If we all have to implement fallbacks anyway, why bother supporting any modern browser features at all?
They had H.264 support. They took it away. That means stuff that used to work in Chrome won't any more. It doesn't matter what words you use to describe that situation, the result is still the same.
You just repeated what I said, yes there are edge cases that are broken, no they are not entirely broken.
> If we all have to implement fallbacks anyway, why bother supporting any modern browser features at all?
because graceful degredation is how the web works, if we enforced every browser implemented every single thing exactly the same way then nothing would ever happen.
since firefox will never have implemented h264, chrome removing it is a step towards a consistent platform, not away from it.
Considering the repeatedly defensive position about ie and bringing up fairly minor points to criticize chrome, plus the fact you replied to this hours after it went of the first few pages, are you really not Elepsis and a microsoft employee?
I criticise Chrome because I don't think their approach is a sustainable one. As it happens, I have been on the wrong side of exactly that bug when it came to a client demo, and apparently what you regard as "not entirely broken" is different to what my paying clients regard as such.
As I told you in the other thread, I have nothing to do with Microsoft. Not everyone who disagrees with you, or indeed with the majority opinion in any given discussion, is a troll/sockpuppet/astroturfer. And this discussion is still on my HN home page right now, never mind when I posted my previous comment several hours ago.
h.264 was never a standard for browsers to implement. It is widely in use, yes, but not a standard. This is why there was such a huge issue over <video>, because Firefox, Opera, and Chrome didn't want h.264 in the standard.
Firefox and Opera have much larger marketshare, and they weren't implementing h.264. It was DOA as a "standard" long before Chrome dropped it.
No, it's not. There is a reason not to implement h.264 - it's patent encumbered and eventually there will be licensing costs that will make free implementations impossible.
There is a difference when company G takes a stand against a bad standard and company M that can't implement simple features correctly despite the fact that it can dedicate humongous resources to its development.
Yes, it is inconvenient, but I'd say it's more justified than the IE inconvenience. They didn't implement h264 because of concerns about how it would restrict distribution, worries about fees, and the fear of another patent encumbered (aka "free") format become standard. Microsoft didn't implement these features pretty much every other browser has because of...what, time constraints?
I think that might be true in cases where you're not building on such a widely distributed and incredibly backwards-compatible / gracefully-degrading platform such as the web.
That causes issues for being able to use the latest features, which is somewhat of a problem, but should not affect backwards compatibility. It means you have to possibly be aware of the OS features you use in your apps, but you don't have to worry about updating them due to some API being deprecated.
Shockwave / Flash / nearly every other application in the world tells you your software is old, and asks if you want to update it, and it will keep telling you this until you check the "don't tell me again" box. Which few people do. So instead they get irritated that it always pops up, and get used to clicking "no" because they didn't want to deal with it then, and don't want to deal with it now. A year passes, they get a virus through an old exploit, and they blame the software instead of their habits / their IT department's dogma (which is not always incorrect, but frequently problematic).
Chrome, on the other hand, keeps itself up-to-date in the background, at all times, and doesn't ask you to deal with it. It doesn't even inform you it's doing so, aside from a minuscule little up-arrow on the wrench that disappears on the next launch - no progress bars, no delay, no "restart now", no alerts, nothing. There's no question if someone's using version X or Y; they have the latest of their branch. Period. Or they'll get it in a day or two, and problem solved.
Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel". It's apples and granite, or oranges and wolverines - there's no comparison ("apples are sweeter than wolverines").
> Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel"
Transparent updates are great, until something goes wrong. What happens if someone manages to hijack the DNS entry to make 50 million Chrome installations download an update from a poisoned well? Or Google's quality control misses something and pushes out a buggy update that breaks Chrome's ability to reconnect and obtain a fix for that update? (This has already happened to companies the size of Skype and McAfee.) Or an update simply introduces a behavior that users don't want, like Microsoft using Windows Update to inflict WGA everywhere.
The net benefit of transparent updates is still probably greater than explicit updates, but both ways have costs and we shouldn't pretend that either is zero.
Don't those same problems also exist for explicit updates?
I suppose it's a mitigating factor on the part of requiring user opt-in, should a problem occur, but that's (IMO) only a fortunate side-effect. It's like saying that walking is better than driving, because if you run into something you'll only bruise your shins.
The problem with automatic and invisible update is this:
say you are using chrome in your company as the interface to an internal tool of some sort. Since the tool is used internally it's messy and one day chrome changes and now, automatically and invisibly, no-one can use it.
I'm not saying chrome's way doesn't have its upsides but there is also a good argument for mantaining older releases.
Point taken, but standard practice is to write correct code for a CSS bug, then write a 'hack' that works for that specific browser version.
On the other hand, if you're doing an intranet site with a company that only has one browser, you might have dispensed with writing correct code and only written the hack.
Its' temporarily practical in a time crunch, but not a good practice since the next update may kill your hack.
Note that there are also other cases where incompatible changes are made (e.g. ES5 is not exactly compatible with ES3 in various edge cases, CSS2.1 today is not quite compatible with CSS2.1 a year ago in edge cases, etc). The various standards groups an implementors try to minimize the damage from such changes, but it still happens at times.
Heck, Chrome 9 or 10, made major changes to the HTML parser to follow the HTML5 draft. Sites that depended on the old behavior (which different between browsers, so they presumably browser-sniffed and then sent different content to different browsers) likely broke. They certainly did in Firefox when Firefox changed to the HTML5 parsing algorithm.
This happens in the wild with Java updates. We have been burned twice with minor point versions that broke our app, that were pushed out automatically.
My impression was always that Macromedia acquired FutureSplash (shortened to Flash) when it became clear it could kill Shockwave, which was much slower (14Kbps connections then). Flash also had a rapid release cycle, which did not have any negative impact in its adoption and success, releases were backwards compatible. Chrome's adoption is certainly more significant now, also not affected by many releases. For Android, I'll wait and see.
There's a certain arbitrariness to this analysis, since all that is being considered is an increment in the major version number. If the author were looking at operating systems this way, Apple hasn't released a new operating system in nearly 10 years! (OS 10.0 Cheetah was released on 3/24/01)
Not to offend anyone, but Chrome major version releases tend to feel relatively incremental compared to what I had come to expect from Firefox.
The developer tools have been steadily improving, apart from that I can't recall to much exactly.
Will be interesting to see if Firefox can keep to their new release schedule after 4. Otherwise it seems that Chrome just iterates to fast compared to Firefox. Chrome 9 is a long way ahead of Firefox 3.6, sure Firefox 4 might even it up but if every release has this kind of beta time Chrome will just keep skipping ahead.
Hey, there you go. I noticed some great additions to the Inspector.
I'm pretty sure that the reason I can't come up with the differences is that the change is so gradual. I know Chrome has been improving, it's just not a dramatic change like FF 1 to 2 or IE 6 to 7. But Chrome 4 to 9 doesn't even seem like a dramatic change. if they were using normal versioning, I don't even know if it would be time for Chrome 2.0 yet.
Why would that be offensive? Chrome major version number changes are a: typically invisible to the user, and b: chosen for merely engineering reasons. If tech blogs didn't exist to tell people about major version changes in chrome most user's wouldn't have the slightest clue what version they were running.
tl;dr Chrome's major version releases are supposed to be incremental.
These really do reflect the most significant releases of each browser, regardless of arbitrary major/minor/micro version number changes... Firefox 3.6 was as major a release in that universe as Chrome 8 was in theirs.
Check the Wikipedia pages for each major browser to see just how much changed in the versions represented. (Perhaps I should link them!)
This 'Modern Browser' stuff is getting kind of old. The question is relatively meaningless, but if it were meaningful, the answer would be more complex than something you can diagram in ~5 minutes.
"Modern browser", "open/not open", "killer", "dead", and recently, "Quora" articles can probably be ignored if they're the focus of the title. They're pretty much always petty arguments. I think I'd respect these sort of articles a lot better if they skipped the rhetoric and just focused on their point. "IE is not a modern browser" is a great soundbite, but it also means that's what rebuttal articles will focus on. "IE is holding back the web by not implementing features the majority of other browsers are" is less catchy, but it conveys the actual focus of the article. Sadly, I think most tech journalism would distill an article like that into another meaningless soundbite.
The "Grade A" browser ratings are only slightly more meaningful than the "Modern Browser" label. And IE fans (apologists?) can rationalize from now until Sunday, but web developers who project after project are forced to write CSS Hacks, conditional comments, etc. know that improvements to IE have been slow and minimal. The "modern", standards compliant browsers are the ones that continue to improve and push the envelope re: HTML5/CSS3 features. All this talk about IE doing well by not adding HTML5 features because the W3 spec may change is just an excuse for continued suckiness. You'd think the fact that so many people (me not included) use IE give MS a greater pressure to keep pace with the Chromes and Safaris of the world, but I guess they don't agree.
"web developers who project after project are forced to write CSS Hacks, conditional comments, etc. know that improvements to IE have been slow and minimal"
Not my experience. IE8 seems to have its act together, at least on CSS 2.1 compliance. Granted, conditional comments are still necessary for IE6 and IE7, but MS has made big improvements.
Same here. I agree that IE6&7 were bad, but I didn't have to "hack around" for IE8 and IE9. Of course, if you do need to hack around, then you are probably not doing what is considered as "standard". A lot of things that we, early adapters, talk about (e.g. HTML5) aren't standard, yet.
This modern browser crap is getting old. I have no problem browsing internet with both IE9, Chrome, and Firefox.
Is the height supposed to mean anything? Why did they start with Safari? It's the first modern web browser? It points to a page that says IE9 is not a modern browser yet shows IE7 and IE8.
No, the icons just indicate releases. They're at different vertical levels so they don't obscure each other. :-)
I decided to start in 2006 to catch Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, otherwise you don't fully see the gaping hole which represents the Dark Ages of the modern web. (Safari was added later, and 2.0 happened to slot in at the start of 2006.)
It would be pretty cool if you extended it back to 2001, when IE6 was released - then you could also show the rise and fall of Mozilla and the birth of Firefox.
Even better, roll it back to 1991!
Edit: and another pony request - how about putting the release date in the tooltips (yyyy-mm-dd) to clarify any confusion about when exactly it was?
IE7/8 are there to show scale. The premise is that modern browsers release frequently. You can see that in the time it took IE to release 2 versions, the other browsers released at least double that same amount. Thus IE is not a modern browser.
I don't think the height means anything. As far as starting with Safari, they probably just picked 2006 as the start point and it was the first one with a release that year.
The reason it shows IE7 and IE8 is to illustrate that all of the modern browsers are shipping pretty regularly, while IE only has two releases on there.
It's a bit strange comparing Chrome's releases with the others. Firefox had many more pestering minor updates in that time, which are comparable to Chrome's, only Firefox labeled them differently. Safari also had major changes between version numbers.
To get an accurate picture the diffs between updates should be compared, Chrome made version numbers meaningless.
Firefox's minor updates were not really feature updates.
On the chart Chrome whole number releases are new feature releases. Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 are seperate because they are similar feature releases. 3.6.0 to 3.6.1 are not.
It's in there now, although it only shows major version numbers (generally not unfair, although a major version of Chrome doesn't necessarily mean the same as a major version of, for example, Firefox).
Edit: Actually, I just noticed that Opera 9.1 and 9.5 are there, along with Firefox 3.5, so scratch that!
These really do reflect the most significant releases of each browser, regardless of arbitrary major/minor/micro version number changes... Firefox 3.6 was as major a release in that universe as Chrome 8 was in theirs.
The point, which you seem determined to not get, is that the "major release" designation is an arbitrary one, and some major releases have more scope than others.
Which is what Tyrannosaurs said. Then you objected to something he didn't actually say....
Absolutely - Chrome 7 wasn't far off a bug fix release (also contained some improvements to HTML5 support but little in the way of new end user features) but it's clearly not the same order as the IE releases which aren't far off ground up rewrites with new UIs and so on.
See, that's where I disagree: a ground up rewrite with a new user interface gets the web precisely nowhere, particularly after years without a release.
Chrome 7 was a significant release. Hundreds of bug fixes truly means something (imagine if there were an IE6.5 with hundreds of bug fixes). The HTML5 parser is a huge deal, plus File API, late-binding SSL... all of these are about delivering actual benefits to web developers and users.
And that's why my retort to a mostly silly discussion was that Modern Browsers Ship. Because delivering a better web to developers and users is the whole damned point. Anything else is masturbatory.
So go ahead, be as picky as you want about what's major and what's minor. You'll just be missing the entire point. :-)
All the nitpicking people are doing on this and ignoring the point behind that graphic...
The Point: "Modern Browsers" are the browsers that actually get around to actually @#$@ing SHIPPING new features and NOT TAKING FOREVER TO DO IT. Iterate faster and get new crap to users NOW.
thing is, 'new crap' is also unfamiliar crap. Unfamiliar to developers. 5 browsers, 5 teams of developers, results is 5 different ways of doing things. -moz-border-radius and the like are BAD for the web, because everyone shipped new crap without any kind of agreement on how it was supposed to work. And now we've got vendor specific code in our websites. That's not how the web is supposed to work.
Impatient browser vendors shipping unfinished specs like css3 are as bad as proprietary spec extensions like 'filter' etc.
I reckon they shipped IE7 at exactly the most damaging time for the web because If they waited another year or so then it might have been long enough to kill off IE altogether.