Microsoft considers adopting WebKit for Internet Explorer

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Comments

  • Reply 41 of 59
    haggarhaggar Posts: 1,568member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by shawnathan View Post


    About time, I'm sick of always having to include ridiculous amounts of extra code in a website to cater to IE's ass backwards web standards.



    How do we know that Microsoft won't corrupt WebKit, so that web sites created by Microsoft or ignorant designers only function properly in Windows IE? Hence the term "Embrace, extend, extinguish".
  • Reply 42 of 59
    Ballmer has, yet again, proven to completely incompetent. As someone else already stated on this board, IE8 only scores a 20/100 on the ACID3 test. That is BY FAR the worst score of any available browser on the market. He talks about Apple adopting WebKit, but how that isn't the direction MS sees themselves going. Just for comparison's sake, The Safari 4 beta has become the first browser to score a 100/100 on the ACID3 test... EVER. To say that WebKit is "interesting" but not something they will probably pursue is hysterical, considering their beta product is currently getting beaten by 80 points on a very telling test by their direct competitor's beta. Also by comparison, Opera Mini and Safari Mobile score a 79 and 74, respectfully. These are phones browsers, and they are kicking MS's tail!



    MS needs to get their heads out of the a**es before it's too late, and it's starting to look more and more like they don't know how to.



    Reference:

    http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39495/140/
  • Reply 43 of 59
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tomahawk View Post


    Don't get too excited about this. While it is probably a great idea for Microsoft, and if done properly it could make life easier for everyone remember Microsoft's history. When they decide to "incorporate" something, they start with a shared platform, then hack the crap out of it until they are no longer compatible and keep pushing it until the original is dead.



    This would simply be standard operating procedure for Microsoft.



    Lets all take a very short trip down memory lane & recall the great blunder that is Outlook 2007. Microsoft made promises & dropped hints that it would be running some new HTML engine that would be far more compatible & secure than what they offered in 2003. Then we find it took a step back to the Word HTML engine used in Office XP?!!



    Don't count on them doing anything intelligent. Can't wait for Snow Leopard cause Entourage is a huge bloated piece of flying poo!
  • Reply 44 of 59
    ronboronbo Posts: 669member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by knightlie View Post


    I don't doubt it, his answer was very clear - but adopting WebKit would still be their best bet, because they obviously can't do the job themselves and are incapable of keeping up with emerging standards.



    What you say is true. The question is whether they care. By and large, they don't. As the market share of IE erodes, it will start to matter. But up to recently, the hideous reality was that IE defined the de facto web standards, simply because it's what so many people were using. And in that regard, I salute Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Mozilla, and everybody else out there who worked hard to craft an alternate browser.
  • Reply 45 of 59
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by talksense101 View Post


    Just for the record, I f!!@ing hate f!@#!@ who stick to IE6 as on date. I recently did work for a website which had 27% of IE6 traffic....



    My dad uses IE6 on his XP laptop, because I couldn't be stuffed trying to figure out how I was meant to access our wireless router's security with IE7, which made it ridiculously longwinded and difficult. I suppose I could figure out if I tried, but I'm sure many other people are in the same boat - tried it, was too hard/didn't work, went back to IE6.
  • Reply 46 of 59
    jfanningjfanning Posts: 3,398member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sgntscrawn View Post


    My dad uses IE6 on his XP laptop, because I couldn't be stuffed trying to figure out how I was meant to access our wireless router's security with IE7, which made it ridiculously longwinded and difficult. I suppose I could figure out if I tried, but I'm sure many other people are in the same boat - tried it, was too hard/didn't work, went back to IE6.



    You must have some wierd router there, it should be no different than accessing it via IE6
  • Reply 47 of 59
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member
    One thing you may have noticed about Safari is how infrequent the releases are. I blame this on the WebKit part of the equation. Open source introduces a layer of bureaucracy that slows things down over purely internal efforts.
  • Reply 48 of 59
    To be perfectly honest I don't think it matters if they do adopt web kit or not. Since IE7 its been very easy to make website look the same in all browsers (provided you ignore IE6) all you have to do is write good code and make sure you include the correct doctype.



    The way some people go on about different browsers you would think getting sites to work right was a real pain, but really it just comes down to how good the person developing is.
  • Reply 49 of 59
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by timgriff84 View Post


    The way some people go on about different browsers you would think getting sites to work right was a real pain, but really it just comes down to how good the person developing is.



    It IS a real pain. I can't tell you how many website designs I've made that complied to all the existing standards, displaying properly in every browser I tested, EXCEPT for IE. And you'd be surprised how many "hacks for IE" actually break things for everything else.



    The W3C would probably have solidified tomorrow's standards by now if IE didn't happen to be #1 due to the users just not knowing better.
  • Reply 50 of 59
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Synthetic Frost View Post


    It IS a real pain. I can't tell you how many website designs I've made that complied to all the existing standards, displaying properly in every browser I tested, EXCEPT for IE. And you'd be surprised how many "hacks for IE" actually break things for everything else.



    The W3C would probably have solidified tomorrow's standards by now if IE didn't happen to be #1 due to the users just not knowing better.



    I get how hacks for IE break other things, but there's generally no need to use them. As long as you make a site right and check it multiple browsers along the way there won't be a problem. I know this because I'm a web developer and since IE7 haven't had any probs with browser compatibility. I have had to fix other peoples work where it isn't browser compatible, but this has always been where people do things wrong. Mostly it just tends to be people using incorrect doctypes or no doctype and then just focusing building in one browser, thats going to be a bit random if your not properly telling it what rendering it should be using.
  • Reply 51 of 59
    Whaat? oh well that's microsoft.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Synthetic Frost View Post


    It IS a real pain. I can't tell you how many website designs I've made that complied to all the existing standards, displaying properly in every browser I tested, EXCEPT for IE. And you'd be surprised how many "hacks for IE" actually break things for everything else.



    The W3C would probably have solidified tomorrow's standards by now if IE didn't happen to be #1 due to the users just not knowing better.



    this is so true. i have made various pages where the source code was validated by W3C and it was fine on all the big browsers except for IE. I think W3C should just go on even if Microsoft hasn't caught up.
  • Reply 52 of 59
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by shawnathan View Post


    About time, I'm sick of always having to include ridiculous amounts of extra code in a website to cater to IE's ass backwards web standards.



    For one of my sites I'm tempted to be ultra "evil" and make the whole website Flash because I am sick of IE's bullsh1t.
  • Reply 53 of 59
    nvidia2008nvidia2008 Posts: 9,262member
    I'm glad this monkey is still so important in Microsoft. It's good for Apple.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by hittrj01 View Post


    Ballmer has, yet again, proven to completely incompetent. As someone else already stated on this board, IE8 only scores a 20/100 on the ACID3 test. That is BY FAR the worst score of any available browser on the market. He talks about Apple adopting WebKit, but how that isn't the direction MS sees themselves going. Just for comparison's sake, The Safari 4 beta has become the first browser to score a 100/100 on the ACID3 test... EVER. To say that WebKit is "interesting" but not something they will probably pursue is hysterical, considering their beta product is currently getting beaten by 80 points on a very telling test by their direct competitor's beta. Also by comparison, Opera Mini and Safari Mobile score a 79 and 74, respectfully. These are phones browsers, and they are kicking MS's tail!



    MS needs to get their heads out of the a**es before it's too late, and it's starting to look more and more like they don't know how to.



    Reference:

    http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39495/140/



  • Reply 54 of 59
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Just do a search for "gates open source" and you'll find a multitude of examples showing how Microsoft is vehemently against open source. Regardless of technical superiority, WebKit is covered under both the LGPL and BSD licenses -- hence Microsoft's distaste for it.



    I can't find a link to it right now, but I remember hearing how a pre-Microsoft Bill Gates stood up in front of a group of UNIX users and essentially called them a bunch of communists. Regardless of whether Gates is involved with Microsoft anymore or not, I'm sure that his sentiments are still exuded from upper management.



    Microsoft hasn't been forced to swallow it's pride when it comes to software licensing ideologies quite yet...
  • Reply 55 of 59
    Anyone remember the olden days where large scale corporate funding and big development teams actually meant a less buggy, higher quality product than the "open source" projects made by three 20 year old college freshmen in their free time? *cough*almostanyapp*cough*



    If that's not a sign that M$ lacks direction, I don't know what is.
  • Reply 56 of 59
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Synthetic Frost View Post


    Anyone remember the olden days where large scale corporate funding and big development teams actually meant a less buggy, higher quality product than the "open source" projects made by three 20 year old college freshmen in their free time? *cough*almostanyapp*cough*



    The thing most people don't understand about open-source software is that a lot of big companies use them in their products. So the work these companies do polishing up those projects started by college students tends to make them more stable and robust than solutions started from scratch within a commercial environment. I myself have done work in a commercial working environment on open-source projects that we were using as part of our commercial product.



    The days of open-source meaning "maintained by some undergrad in his/her parents' basement" are long gone. Projects like WebKit, Apache and Samba are worked on by experienced developers in a number of large companies.



    That's the one thing Microsoft just doesn't get -- that by actually working together with industry professionals on the smaller pieces that go into your proprietary solution, you can get a much more stable and feature rich product than you could by hiring a lead developer and a dozen interns internally. Keep the end product proprietary, but make it with the best pieces of software you can (open source or otherwise). Apple figured this out long ago and is reaping the benefits.



    Sure the GPL isn't always compatible with proprietary solutions since it forces you to release all your code, but the LGPL and BSD licenses have no such limitations. Ballmer and Co. are either too clueless, or too arrogant to see this.
  • Reply 57 of 59
    Actually I was thinking of projects like Adium, and games like Supertux. The likes of which "are" still done by college students.
  • Reply 58 of 59
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    Ahem...do we really want MSFT to "embrace and extend" Webkit like they tried to do with Java? Just think of what these Neanderthals might do to Webkit to make it "better".



    Yes, the world needs to standardize on some standards compliant rendering engine, but which one and who controls it? I don't think it will happen soon.
  • Reply 59 of 59
    progers001progers001 Posts: 1unconfirmed, member
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