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MS, Mozilla Clashing Over JavaScript Update
jfruhlinger writes "JavaScript has become a crucial part of Websites built on AJAX underpinnings, which makes the upcoming revision to the ECMAScript standard crucial for the future of the Web. But in today's browser environment, no one vendor can impose an update path — which may set things up for a nasty conflict. A fight is being fought on blogs between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, who wants to the new ECMAScript standard to be a radical upgrade, and Chris Wilson, architect of MS's IE team, who would rather keep JavaScript as is and put new functionality into a brand-new language."
ECMA International is a group that writes standards.
I know it's somewhat indicative of a tinfoil hat, but that's basically what I and many others do, using NoScript.
If I trust the website enough to run javascript, then I add it to my whitelist. I don't see the need for javascript on most of the pages I go to, and would rather not have my computer running unnecessary code. Seems to my totally uneducated POV that it'd slow my computer down if I have 20 tabs each running javascript stuff, when only 2 of them ACTUALLY need it. My RAM is precious to me. =(
The overview of the current ES4 proposal is here: http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf
Go check it out and decide for yourself.
And you are precisely echoing all of the lies that Brendan discredited in his post. There is absolutely nothing about ES4 that will break ES3. Nothing. Yet you (probably quite knowingly) propagate the falsehood that it will.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
[...]
Syntax
Some identifiers that were legal names in ES3 (let, yield, cast, is, and a few more) are keywords in ES4. Other keywords in ES4 were future reserved words in ES3, and correct ES3 programs do not use them (class, interface, public, private, and many others), though some implementations allow them to be used as names. Sometimes the new keywords are contextual and can continue to be used as names, but in general an ES4 implementation that must be able to process all ES3 programs must be told which dialect--ES3 or ES4--it is looking at, so that it knows whether to treat these identifiers as keywords or not.
The mechanism that supplies the dialect information will depend on the environment. In a web browser the information comes from the MIME type of the script or from a version parameter on the SCRIPT tag in the document. New web pages that choose to use ES4 will have to specify the dialect. So unless you specify that some script block is actually version 4 ES4 interpreters are supposed to treat it as version 3 code.
np: Savath & Savalas - Tormenta De La Flor (Golden Pollen)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
You seem to be under the impression that JavaScript has some relationship to Java. It doesn't.
From the Wikipedia Javascript page:
"Despite the name, JavaScript is essentially unrelated to the Java programming language; though both have a common debt to C syntax. The language was renamed from LiveScript in a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun's Java runtime with their browser, which was dominant at the time. The key design principles within JavaScript are inherited from the Self programming language."
Yes, I'm too lazy to find a better source.
Have you ever, honestly, been to a website that freezes Firefox?
Yes, I have. There's a dating/forums site called plentyoffish that regularly freezes Firefox for me (at least as of 2.0.0.8). Sometimes the browser recovers quickly, sometimes it recovers slowly, sometimes I give up waiting and kill it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
There are some issues I have with the fact that there's no simple way for users to set trusted zone and Firefox security tends to throw the baby out with the bath water as far as security goes(no modal windows, no clipboard modification etc, I know why this is the case, but sometimes folks like me have legitimate reasons for these sorts of things). I'm also a bit annoyed with the whole "we'll fix it in 3.0" thing that's going on right now, but that's another story.
This all sounds like a wonderful story for the Mozilla corp, but it's not. While the bundling didn't help, Netscape got beaten by IE because IE was better. It's not now, but that's mostly because Microsoft have been slack bastards and sat on it for years.
I remember the browser wars well. I wasn't on the web for mosaic, but I was on for the browser wars. I know that having bundled IE got a lot of people on the net who wouldn't have otherwise gotten there, and I know that Netscape got bundled by ISPs for a while too. Netscape 4 was a great browser, it was better than IE 4, when I had to choose between those two, I used Netscape. However, Netscape 4 wasn't better than IE 5, and by extension it wasn't better than IE 6.
After Netscape 4 there was pretty much nothing for a number of years. Netscape 6 was an abomination, an unfinished rendering agent(gecko is great now but it wasn't done then). Opera was and is a great browser, probably the greatest browser of that time(might still be haven't played with it in a while) most of the innovations of the new era of browsers came from Opera, but it never caught on. Partly that was because in order to be faster it gave up on all the terrible web kludges and large chucks of the web in those days was terrible kludges. It could also be its linux reliance on QT which was bad back then, or the cost, who knows. You want to find a case for why a good browser failed, look at Opera, but back then Netscape wasn't in it and Mozilla wasn't done.
As for the reason why there are standards out there that nobody complies with, it's because the standards suck.