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IE 5.5 Beats IE6 and IE7 On Acid 3
Steven Noonan sends us to a page where he is collecting and updating results for various browsers on the newly released Acid 3 test. No browser yet scores 100 on this test. (We discussed Acid 3 when it came out.) He writes, "It's not surprising that Internet Explorer is losing to every other modern browser, but how did IE 5.5 beat IE 6.0 and 7.0?" All of the IE versions score below 20 on Acid 3.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
This really belongs on thedailywtf.com
If you can't own the internet, this is the next best thing.
This space available.
Why has there been no discussion on Slashdot of IE 8 beta 1?
Available here without any WGA crap.
(It gets 10/100, btw, and can't do Acid2 completely.)
I guess it just goes to show you that two wrongs do make a right. IE's abilities to render a web page reliably go so far into the realm of incompetence that they've gone straight through and come out the other side.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
That "C" should be the one with the little squiggly on the bottom. I'm sure I can find it in my character map, but don't want those without a Unicode compliant browser to see some Chinese character or something... since we are talking the various iterations of IE here.
IIRC, and someone with a better degree in Web History can probably elaborate, but wasn't IE 5.5 written with code which came over from IE5 for Mac, the first really well done major browser with nice CSS support? Tantek Celik was lead (or close to lead) on that, and set the pace for good CSS compliance... which MS dumped when building IE6 for Win, because they could have their flagship internet browser rendering better on those other guy's OS and not their own.
No one else finds it odd that only a few browsers scored over 60%... What good is a standard that no one adheres to?
Makes it seem more like a suggestion...
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
The acid test website notes that the test may change over time as until it is debugged. Surely the page of collected results needs to record which version of the ACID3 test was used for each test, or at least the date on which each result was obtained?
Somebody moves the ends. IE 5 might just be passing it on a fluke. It's not as if it renders the Acid 2 smiley face better than 6 or 7. That said, either I'm not getting it, or the people setting up the acid tests aren't getting it- If no one is passing the "test" then the whole point of the test is moot. You might as well ask a politician for their detailed exit strategy in the war on terror. It's like granting a patent on something that never existed. It's what happens when you have standardized achievement tests in schools and teachers only teach to the test, while churning out students who lack critical thinking skills.
It's looking less like the browsers aren't really failing so much as the goals keep shifting.
Blessed with all the brains that God gave a duck's ass, and twice the charisma.
Acid 3 fails the IE test getting a best score of 17%.
Get with the program guys.... M$ discovered the Internet. It's theirs to stick their flag on wherever they like!
(Bloody natives getting restless again)
They ALL score less than 20. That's essentially random response to the test - so it's just a matter of luck if one scores better than another.
Brett
To put it all into perspective how bad IE 8.0 is when it comes to web standards I tested a two year old install of Konqueror (KDE 3.4) and it gets a score of 51%. The best IE 8.0 can do is 17%.
Firefox 3 beta 3 is worse. The nightly build (the one that theoretically most resembles the finished product at this point) is third in the rankings. Right behind two other nightly builds.
a beta version having worse performance than a production version isn't exactly the same as an ancient, no longer supported version having better performance than the current production version.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
In the days of 5.5:
"Internet Explorer isn't crappy enough! We need to make it worse!"
Thus, IE 6 and IE 7 were born.
-Aegis Runestone-
Actually, according to multiple sources, Firefox 2.0.0.12 score 50%, lower than Firefox 3 builds. No, the quality of Firefox is not decreasing.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Dear Customer,
We regret to hear of the shortcoming you found in ACID 3 Test Home Basic. We have not forgotten our advertised promise to pass the test. On that note, we are proud to introduce the ACID 3 Test Pro! IE8 happily passes this version of ACID 3, which is comprised of VBScript, ActiveX, and Silverlight technologies.
Yours Truly,
Department of Extending Standards and Compatibilities
Microsoft
really seems to be kicking ass at 90%; granted it is from a nightly build and not an official release.
Still, Safari seems to have been ahead of the game on standards and features for a while. Weren't they the first ones to pass acid2? Also, they were the first to implement various extensions to HTML which have become prevalent, such as the CANVAS tag, which was later added to firefox and others.
Now, there's a version of safari for windows that I've been meaning to try, but it seems to still be in public beta, and has been there for quite a while. My question for anyone in the know, is whether the safari windows build is still progressing.
I would have to say that it is that you don't get it. No one is so arrogant as to think that they can sit down and design the perfect web. As with virtually all of human achievement, we expect that there will be continual advancement, and hopefully we will never hit a wall. The Acid tests are road marks on the advancement of web browsers. The Acid tests are for the purpose of seeing just how compatible the browsers are. Scores of 0% and 100% are both useless. So, you make a test that is not so hard that no one can get even 1%, and that are not so easy that everyone gets 100%.
Well, the browsers are getting to that 100% point. Acid2 was not built to check 100% compliance, at that would have been useless. Not that the main browsers are reaching 100%, Acid2 is becoming useless, and Acid3 is necessary to see who has the best compliance. To use your school analogy, consider Acid2 to be the second grade. It is important to achieve that level, but when you do, you can expect the 3rd grade to follow it.
(And if your opinion of public schools is as low as mine, you are welcome to substitute "second grade" with level of knowledge that a 7 year old should have.
the answer is simple, the value given does not directly equate to a percentage of conformance, it just means it screwed up earlier or later...but does not indicate how much it screwed up by (or more importantly what ELSE would screw up). So i would imagine that IE 5.5 probably has does some things simply "differently" from the later versions that make it fail at a different time, but that doesn't mean it failed less badly.
proxy
If there doesn't exist a program that can render your test correctly, then how do you know for sure you wrote it correctly to begin with?
I wonder why they didn't test IE5mac :]
Windows 2003: 2.0.0.12 = 51%; 3.0 beta 3 (portable version) = 58% here.
Nah, I just to sound like one. :)
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
59% or lower = A
0% = B = PASS
I don't know how, but I messed up when making the table. I reconfirmed the results with the ones I had written down and realized the Firefox 2.0.0.12 Mac OS X entry was incorrect. I've corrected the error. The actual value is 52%. So 3.0b3 is actually doing better than the current release. Sorry about that error. - Steven
I think that more systems should be tested. Try IE 5.5 on a copy of WinME, if someone tries this, IE might crash, several times. Or perhaps IE 5.5 on MacOS 9 and MacOS X? The Newton MP 2000 has a web browser too. Then there are all those old versions of Netscape Navigator stretching back to 1994. What about lynx, how well does it render Acid3?
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Okay, ACID is designed to find browser bugs. But I think my point remains valid; if the web standards had been a bit better designed (or perhaps merely a bit simpler), then the bugs would be less numerous and it would be easier to write a compliant HTML document.
Sorry, but this is just plain nonsense. It is like saying that C and C++ standards made programming easy. However, the truth is that even if you teach the whole world all the intricacies of C or C++, it still won't turn everybody into programmers.
The world has gotten so used to expecting so little from the internet (and MS browsers in particular) that the standards are regressing to match. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate (that ie 5.5 was ahead of it's time).
I just can't be bothered.
re: your sig that would be "et al"
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
If you need to worry about "your 12 year-old self competing with" you, then I would say that you need to revisit your product rather than the *perceived* effort going into it.
So non-standards compliance browsers are now "high quality"? and we should all be creating more "high quality" crap and so the gravy train never ends? Competition will bite you in the ass sooner or later, just ask Detroit or RIAA.
In the meanwhile, why don't you enjoy some music and chill? What' that? Oh sorry, that non-standards compliant DRM'd CD doesn't play on your PC/Player/etc. I'll sell you one. It's a bit pricey at $200000, but it's "high quality" and my employees will that you for it.
Ultimately, it's the customer that pays the bills. You may be able to make a temporary living off of inefficiency by providing less at a higher cost, but I wouldn't make it my business model. The market adjustment is a bitch.
One of the primary components of the Acid test are to see if a browser will properly handle out of spec code.In this case "proper handling" means ignore it. IE is counter intuitive in this sense because it has facilities to "guess" what should happen.
Today I was borrowing someones computer and i went on a few websites with IE. When they came back they were disappointed because all of the sites i went to messed up there "recently visited" listing in IE. They were frustrated that that there would have to manually type the URLs of the pages to go to. Then I introduced them to the wonderful world of Favorites/Bookmarks, something I learned about back in 97. Now when I was in High School i tested out of all the intro to computer courses in order to take programming, so can anyone tell me what they teach in these classes. I mean seriously. Sometimes it surprises me how little people know about computers. Maybe its because I grew up in a city whose major employers included HP, Oracle, and BAE Systems( who bought Sanders, the inventors of the Magnavox Odyssey) . So maybe I just used to most people having a general understanding. It seems when I went to college the average computer skill per person I associate with dropped.If the ability to handle browser incompatibilities is the only thing that separates you from a twelve year-old, you probably don't deserve your job or its above-average pay scale. Competent developers don't fear competition from children.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Standards are definitely better for consumers. But many of you seem to forget that you aren't just consumers -- you're employees too.
Making technology more complicated and more expensive is not beneficial for consumers of what you sell. Businesses measure the ROI of projects. If you drive up the cost, you drive down the ROI. Eventually you will encounter a situation where no projects will be implemented. Yes, that may take a few years, but it will happen. Then, you will have killed your entire company, which I think is much worse than fighting to maintain your standard of living.
Today, third-world cheap labour for metal and plastic and paper trumps any local labour. Do you want tech jobs to go the same way?
And you believe that by fighting against standards you can stop it?
It also seems that you want to effectively form a cartel. I have news for you: The people in India don't want you to form a cartel. They want standards, because it allows the job transfer. It will raise their standard of living. Thus, they will create and follow standards even if you do not. If you believe that the large companies that are consumers and not developers of technology will stay with a more expensive solution because you hope beyond hope that they will pay you extra... then you're dreaming. The bad news for you in that picture is that the companies that purchase web development services will transfer and outsource that work. Again, by trying to stop progress, you doom your own company.
There are many other reasons your logic fails to be reasonable: Economic production location is based on relative efficiency rather than absolute efficiency, not all of the resources/services you provide need to be scarce to be valuable, complexity and frustration does not translate into value, supporting your clients doesn't mean giving them inferior products at higher cost, etc.
The answer to good wages is not to hope progress stops. The key is keeping a high skill set, being flexible, and ensuring that you are paying attention to what technologies and products are becoming commodities. As an employee (and not self-employed), means, of course, a touch of luck is involved as well. The answer is not to fight standards.
What an asinine POV. I run an internet application programming business. I don't want standards. Browser standards will make it really easy for anyone to create a web-page semi-well. Right now, my efforts are spent on the high-tech skills of managing a high-tech industry. If things become too easy, my skills will switch to competitive sales. That's good for the consumer who doesn't care about excess quality, sure. But it's just plain aweful for my employees. I'll pay them less, I'll outsource more. If I were your boss, I'd fire you. If I were your employee, I'd quit. Someone who is more interested in maintaining their corporate/company's status quo, regardless of the market, is useless. I'm sure the flailers would have loved to artificially inflate their value compared to the threshing machines, or the farriers to do the same with the automobile. In reality, someone will undercut you. There is more profit in undercutting you than in your protectionism. Your view has nothing to do with capitalism, but protectionism. You want your market to remain esoteric enough to avoid competition. As you said "it's not hard to program". You're doing yourself and your employees a disservice by relying on obfuscation/secrecy instead of quality to sell your product. You might get lucky for a while due to inertia of the system (perhaps even your whole life), but you can only be successful in a capitalistic environment two ways (AFAICT): Stack the deck(eg influence legislation), or build a good hand(eg build a better mousetrap). Since you've mentioned competing against 12 year olds, I'll assume that you aren't in a position to stack the deck, and you explicitly stated that quality wasn't your goal (see your comment about consumers), so I assume your entire strategy is making sure you hide your cards well enough that no one even knows if you're playing the game.
This is a nice touch: I'll produce high-quality products and services, I'll stand behind them, and I won't worry about competition. You've already said the exact opposite. In fact, the gist of your post was the exact opposite. You're supremely worried about competition, to the point where you don't want either market stability, market information, or standardization to wreck your money-grab.
The test should work from http://webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html and http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html, but IE8 fails the first one. The mirrors might exacerbate the problem, but they certainly did not introduce anything that wasn't in the original test.
However, it is true that this issue has nothing to do with hardcoding a certain URL and trying to cheat.
That is the most selfish post I have seen for the entire year.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Typical Microsoft, they embraced when they should have extended.
Electronics? It once went from being a big mysterious thing that professionals were needed to maintain, to being a commodity item. Where once you needed a pro to trace a problem to a discrete component (IC, resistor, capacitor, etc), now any half-educated tech can trace it to a malfunctioning board, replace it, and all works well again. Consequently, electronics techs were replaced by generic maintenance techs.
If you think for one second that the world owes you a living because you know how to throw together HTML, CSS, and half a dozen other scripting languages into a website that looks pretty? Err, sorry, but no. It don't work that way.
I went from electronics to computers to systems administration, and am now flirting with programming and engineering as part of my duties.
If I sat there then (like you're doing now) and whined about the impending commoditization of a tech that I make money off of? I'd be living in a trailer park somewhere on Welfare, bitching about how life is soooooo unfair. Instead, I'm working for a Fortune 100 corp for a healthy salary and quite a decent life, with a hard-won lust for challenge and a constant eye on emerging technologies.
The secret is simple: instead of worrying so much about how your cash cow is swirling the drain, work on how to provide the best value now, and where to take you and your employees in the future.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
College Humor at it's best
You missed Daniel Glazman, who contributes code for Mozilla.
Apologies for my pedantry.
There was a time before computers that companies employed hundreds of women punching data into manual adding machines in warehouse-like accounting departments.
Then a host of clever people decided that technology should be explored and refined, and the result was a new type of electronic universal adding machine which eventually caused all of those jobs to dissolve. --It also eventually resulted in the internet and the creation of your current job.
So we could either live in a world afraid of change which has no computers at all and a lot of 'safe' wage-slaves doing millions of hours of monkey work, or we could live in a world where exploration and refinement drive the human experience. . .
-FL
I don't think Microsoft deliberately wanted to break the standards. What would they get? They aren't becoming the standard that you claim so, they are just allowing other browsers to take more bites out of their market share. Now I know /. hates MS and would like to think that they're evil, maybe so... but in the IE compatibility-development department I think they've just become incompetent and complacent due to their monopoly.
I think its really interesting that safari HEAD is at the top, while the most recent release (only a few months old) is towards the bottom. Safari was the first to meet acid2, and my guess is they are focusing on Acid3 now. Any browsers that came out before the Acid3 test was released are doing absolutely dismally.
I don't think these numbers mean much just yet... Lets check again in a year to see how they've progressed. Hopefully the IE8 team consider this a priority.
Jeremy
Any browsers that came out before the Acid3 test was released are doing absolutely dismally.
That's exactly the point of the Acid tests. They're designed to motivate browser developers by pointing out a lot of flaws in current implementations.
I don't know why people still use IE. There's Firefox, there's Opera, and on both Mac and Windows, there is Safari too. There are plenty of other browsers out there if these three aren't good enough for you. Why in the world would anyone use IE?!?!? This is a sincere question. Would someone please tell me?
Stick a fork in you, you're already done.
Your attitude is just like that of a guy we fired not too long ago. He went through with a little script and deleted all the comments out of his code that he never bothered to check in to source control. It was his thought that we would come crawling back to him because we couldn't maintain his crappy spaghetti code. It was okay though, we threw an intern at it and all was well in under a week.
If you are worried about monkeys (or kids for that matter) taking over, you've already lost. Now...where is my t-shirt about replacing you with a shell script?
IE 5 and IE 5.5 where developed during the period during which it appeared the government was going to atually do something about their monopoly -- during the period when DOJ was building their case and everyone was getting ready for what should have been a huge trial.
Everyone in their right mind (presumably including MS) was expecting something big like a breakup of the company was going to happen. So MS was having to play by the rules there briefly rather than the usually sabotaging anything they didn't already have monopoly control of. Once the trial was over, MS go back to trying to block out competitors by including IE as default browser on every PC sold and making it deliberately incompatible with standards so all sites would have to develop for compatibility with IE, thus being incompatible with anything else.
Very strange that if AdBlock is active Ff 3.0b5pre scores 68 not 69 as it does without it.
Amaya 10, W3C's own browser and authoring tool would score 100%, if it didn't, that would be one hell of an embarrassment; it displays most pages in a horrible manner, probably because it applies the web standards so strictly, like an old uptight teacher lecturing you. The problem is, it doesn't even support Javascript, which you need for running this test. I wonder if this some kind of safeguard against hypothetical failures.
Windows 3.11 For Workgroups beats Vista at many tasks, and will run reasonably well on a 486. Is this a trend for Microsoft, older software outperforming newer software?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
lols, how could i be redundant and overrated at the same time considering that I'm one of the early posters and there is no in soviet russia jokes yet.. ohh I get it.. in soviet russia... hmmmm
This test is for compliance with w3c. It has to do with accuracies, not speed or user experience.
The truth of the matter is, IE is its own standard because every developer must comply with it, as is Mozilla. And from the user's standpoint, this test again means nothing because it has nothing to do with experience.
Finally, to say IE5 beats IE7 is another distortion of substance, as they are actually 14%, 13% and 12% in their results, which, if isn't within the margin of error, is within any margin of approximation - they are all the same. The difference in the score between first and second place is 16.
These curve ball articles really do a disservice, as they are only interesting when distorted. If the boring truth were the headline it would read "IE continues to ignore W3C as everyone and their mother continue to follow its specs".
but it used to be that they implemented the stuff in their own browser: Amaya
I am running Sugar build update.1 691 The browser is based on Gecko
This is similar to saying that MS-DOS 5 has less bugs than Windows Vista hence MS-DOS 5 is far better than Windows Vista
Well yes, of course it has less bugs, because it's much smaller and supports far fewer features, but that doesn't make it better, it's nigh on useless for everything people want to do nowadays.
At the end of the day, IE5.5 supports less features and gracefully falls back where it fails on a feature as it should. IE6 and IE7 are much more ambitious and implement far more features, but when pushed to the limits on these features they fail more horribly than IE5 which doesn't even try. There is an argument that features shouldn't be implemented at all if they don't work perfectly but I disagree, the fact is the features in question almost certainly work in say 90% of cases it's just that Acid3 is specifically exploiting the cases where it doesn't work rather than where it does.
People are free to stick with IE5.5 if they like the fact it does better on the Acid3 test if they want, but don't come crying when you can't use half the features on sites that are designed for the new series of browsers.
Acid3 is doing it's job well, it's highlighting problems in implementations so that they can be fixed in future versions. I'm not sure why some people see Acid tests as a tool to attack browsers with, that's not the purpose. Whilst crappy journalism might like to use it for this purpose one would hope that Slashdot was above Daily Mail type shoddy stories.
Nope - IE does not need at crack to work. Not even a NOCD patch... ;-)
That's why I keep IE Tab installed on FF. So the standard is probably meaningless to the wider population of sites.
I suppose this raises the basic question of just how meaningful a public test like this is if everyone is actively working on their project for the specific purpose of passing the test. That's not a whole lot better than the allegations we saw earlier of browsers whose rendering engines tried to detect test pages and adjust their rendering in an attempt to pass it. I give kudos to the safari team for getting that far into the test, but I question just how meaningful that is when you consider it didn't pass that far because of how well it was designed - it got that far because it was specifically worked on to get that far on that specific test.
The true measure of a browser's test is of course how well it does on the day the test is released, which as a previous post points out, smoked most browsers pretty bad.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Subj. ;-)
Your logic proves the point of the need for standards which are not suggestions, as you construe them, but recommendations. The point of standards is not to document the state of the art but to provide a common reference point for everyone to use.
Following your logic, "standards" is synonymous with "observed behavior" which would mean that the behavior of the most-used rendering protocol would be the "standard." Can you see the problem? That would mean some flavor of IE would be the standard by the fact of being the most prevalent.
Standards don't describe the vernacular. Standards establish guidelines.
blog
By "features" you mean the ability to render sites that are specifically built to not work with anything but the latest version of msie? Such as msft's own site?
> > Microsoft doesn't WANT IE to be compatible.
> This might fit in well with Slashdot groupthink, but it doesn't fit in well with reality.
WTF? Are you aware of msft's history? Controlling the standard is central to msft's business model. Msft's philosophy is: "control the standard and the money will follow." Msft's EEE strategy has been well established - and not just on slashdot. Once msft get's of control of the standard - which msft did by msie 5.5 - msft then goes to work on extending the standard.
> Back when Internet Explorer 6 was being developed, they were in direct competition with Netscape.
I think you may need to review your timeline. By the time msie came out, msft owned over 80% of the browser market:
"5.x versions attained over 80% market share by the release of IE6 in August 2001."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5
> And when Internet Explorer development was restarted, they were responding to a call for improved standards support,which they have delivered on.
Ah yes, the incompatibilty "features" were put in because of user demand, just like DRM, and WGA. Isn't that standard msft PR?
> I'm sorry, but deliberate sabotage is a ridiculous way of explaining this.
Just like it's ridiculous to think that silverfish, or OOXML, are supposed to lock people in to msft's proprietary standards, right? Why will msft's own website not work with msie 5.5? And as I understand it, msft is going to incorporate silverfish into their own site.
"There are quite a few good things about the Microsoft release, such as showing that HTML5 is looked at, Acid2 is (almost) being passed, and CSS support is improving, but there are quite a few evil things as well"
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/ie8-bad
Webkit nightly (r30881) with Safari 3 on Windows XP = 90%, same as OS X. Too bad the text rendering is kinda broken, the anti-aliasing looks horrible, or it could become one of the major players on this platform.
True, except it's a quote. I'd put a [sic] in there but you know, why change now?
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
No way to verify it passes Acid2?
It was accurate as far as the table was concerned whet I posted.
Not really...
Adblock intentionally ignores elements of a page, by running adblock you are not seeing the site as it's coded. Acid3 is all about your browser displaying what the code tells it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Who cares? Web developers are the first ones who come to mind. The second is myself and anyone else who uses IE at work (which is most of us, last time Slashdot checked MOST visiters were still using IE!)
Jeremy
Yeah, I know. Out of curiosity, why did you get +5 insightful just for just hammering home my point?
Jeremy
The era of real competition in mainframe hardware did not begin until the U. S. Government started requiring a COBOL compiler, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government purchase of computers.
On a much smaller scale, the era of real competition in the MUMPS language did not begin until the VA started requiring a MUMPS system, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government of computers.
The U. S. Government should require, as a condition for purchasing computers, that the default browser on the supplied OS be standards-compliant... e.g. should achieve a specified score, such as, say, 100%, on the ACID3 test.
When it procures things, the government is part of the free market. And it is one of the few entities powerful enough to engage with Microsoft in a real negotiation between equals. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has the technical expertise to know what standards are, and what compliance is, and how to test it.
Just as with tanker aircraft, the government should buy what best serves the government's needs, without regard to what best serves the needs of The Boeing Company, or Microsoft Corporation.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
See, you've missed my point when you've said "ultimately, it's the customer that pays the bills".
My point was that it's not the customer that pays the bills, it's the customer's employer that pays the bills. That is my point.
Because that $200'000 cd player was made here in Canada/U.S.. But your $25 player that you have now, came from Taiwan. So you've given $25 of your economy's worth away to another country, another culture, and to other people. You've exported cash. You've eliminated jobs.
Now I'm not asking for our countries to become self-sufficient. Certainly we should import the things that we don't have, but we have humans, and we shouldn't be exporting work when we have unemployed and debts or deficits.
The reason we don't fear competition from children is because we have two things that those children don't have. We have experience, and we have existing resources.
Existing resources amount to servers and people and such already in place. That's money. Any child/start-up with money can get that stuff fairly quickly - i.e. a few months.
Now our experience is the only thing to practically distinguish us. If you make that experience common-knowledge, and you remove the necessity for half of it, then that child/start-up has no trouble competing with us because they can do so on price.
You're forgetting, I used to be that child/start-up and yes, I took customers away from larger companies like I am now. Yes I lose current projects to smaller shops willing to do little with less. And now I'm starting to compete with ibm's business solutions in much the same way.
If you make it easy to do, there will be more people doing it. That's just plain logical. Browser incompatibilities are simply one of many such things. But it's still a significant factor -- and it's the one that's most easily explained to potential clients: if you go with that smaller guy, or your nephew, it'll be fine but it won't work on every browser. That's an easy explanation. It's easier than cross-integrated functionality, and it's easier than explaining the concept of down-the-road and scalability. On the other hand, the little guy has the easiest of all explanations -- it's cheaper.
Ah, but if you mold C into perl, php, java, and ruby, then it does make programming easy. Then you can have tonnes of programmers cranking out software that works, and is perfectly decent, and gets programmed faster. Now as a C programmer, you'll have to explain why a project should be done in C and not in, say, VB. I'll bet that every advantage of C over VB is incredibly difficult to sell to just about any non-technical small business.
Thank you for submitting your resume. Unfortunately there are no positions currently available.
When C code is written poorly, it either won't compile or it crashes obviously; whereas when PHP (for example) is written poorly, errors are not immediately obvious (they only come to light through testing, as there's no compilation stage), and bugs are more likely to take the form of abysmal performance, incorrect behaviour, or massive security problems, than anything obvious like actual crashing.
Neither. They're both alphas. =D
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Ah, but I'm not an employee, I'm the owner. Not only have my clients never seen the t-shirt, but they wouldn't understand it if they did. My clients are non-technical, it doesn't matter how "properly" the code is written, or even if it's written at all. The product either works or it doesn't, and as long as I'm accountable for it, that's all that matters. They aren't purchasing the code -- half the time they don't even get access to it. They're purchasing the accountability that I provide with the product/service.
Ah, welcome to democracy. That's how it works.
And really, it's not selfish. It's self-serving, of course, but it's not selfish. I'm supporting family, friends, contractors, clients, employees, all of their families, and my dog. If you're saying that I'm not considering _your_ interests, well, that makes you selfish.
That was a very responsible thing for you to do.
Or, you could have actively kept the electronics industry from moving forward, and maintained your existing way of life. Sure it would have been worse for society, but it may have been better for you.
Now, you may not have had the strength to do that. But I'm not alone in my views, and I've got some of the largest companies on my side of this particular fence. I'd prefer that things not progress forward.
That's my vote. You are welcome to yours.
Umm, I don't know what you think my 12 year-old self is worth, but my 12 year-old self did well enough to bulid a business out of nothing. I competed with people bigger than me then (which pretty much meant everyone), and I continue to do so now.
A current 12 year-old who mirrors my 12 year-old's character would have no trouble competing with me today. That is the very nature of my 12 year-old's character. There are always cracks and fissures in anyone's client base, and there are always ways to sell to that market and to exploit that industy. I now gloss over the type of client that used to be my bread and butter. In order to get here, I had to pull my current client type away from other vendors. Welcome to competition.
I fear today's 12 year-old entrepeneur the same way other vendors have feared me for the last 20 years -- or should have.
I would argue that technology is the largest part of the economy when you include everything that was "technology" when it started. That would include what is now $6/hour metal working.
What you are asking me to do is to shift my focus from product quality to product sales in an effort to compete in a larger industry for more programmers and such. That's simply not of interest to me. I'd much prefer to focus on product quality in a smaller industry -- the one that currently exists.
And yes, I do see browser standards as one of the many things that would change this industry. So yeah, not only will I not support it, but I'll support it's opponents. And just like you support those standards, I believe that my support has some meaning and value.
But also, I don't have win out-right, I simply have to win in the relative sense that you describe. Delaying it for even a few years goes a long way in my business.
My clients tend to use my products to grow their business in ways that are not ROI related. And they can either afford to make it happen or they can't. It's not a matter of pennies one way or the other, it's a matter of a few thousand in any direction. I get to flex that in order to trump larger corporations on the same bid. I currently benefit from being near the bottom of that particular pack because my clients aren't really willing to go with anyone smaller, and very few of those smaller are able to achieve the project goals in the first place. I operate at the top of my company's abilities, not in the middle. I don't want little guys to be able to creep in.
You've mixed up my points -- or I've mis-used some punctuation. I don't choose to maintain my company's status quo, I choose to hold back the industry as much as possible -- there's a difference.
Also, I do choose to develop high-quality products. I can do so now because it's my product quality that competes in my industry. But if this industry grows, then the quality doesn't matter as much. Then I'll have to start competing on price alone. Which means that my focus turns to sales, and away from quality. That's when my quality changes.
And I don't have to be "supremely worried about competition" to recognize that competition is a bad thing for vendors in my current industry at this time. I'm not about to support something that hinders me just because it only hinders me slightly.
Incidentally, I certainly understand that the views I've expressed are contrary to the norm, especially around here, and that's all fine and good. But without having done anything more than expressed my business objectives and decisions, I don't think a negative moderation is appropriate. This isn't even my opinion, it's my actions in the industry. By moderating down to the point where many won't see it, well, that's just obscuring information which may or may not be relevant to a reader. I note this as a point of interest, as it works to quickly render the moderation points into "agreement points" instead of "value points". Maybe meta-moderation will fix that in the next few days.
Yup, and that lets more "programmers" vie for your clients, than if everyone had to be fluent in C. But hey, I have one example for you. I started in C/C++. I quickly left and went to Perl because I got sick of absolutely everything being memory-related.
And yes, you are 100% correct when you say that all of my Perl bugs wind up being performance issues and security issues. And I actually get to sell that as a benefit to my clients saying things like tehy can pay less and get it sooner if tehy don't care about security and performance. And a good half of my clients are working on projects where they really don't care. So I get t oweasel a real C/C++ programmer out of the job because I'm using an inferior language.
That was especially the case back when I was 12. Now, I've built up my techniques, convensions, and platforms to have the security and get most of performance back, still have the benefits of Perl plus the benefits of my own platform. But I've balanced a little the other way and so it takes me a little bit longer than it used to. That leaves room for my former self to grab jobs away from me. Right now, I can debate that by saying that I'm building much larger and more cross-integrated features than my former self could. But browser standards would assist my former self more than it would assist me.
Actually, that's what ActiveX did for me. I used to be unable to make use of peripherals like barcode scanners, card readers, printers, turnstiles, and the like using Perl. I'd have had to use C++ in order to make use of the drivers and libraries to interface with those items. Then, a few years back, I started finding drivers with ActiveX OCX controls. So now, without any C effort at all, I can control business peripherals with ease. That's one more thing that a C++ programmer can't use to explain why his business is a better choice than mine.
Probably because your post gave the impression that you were surprised that the current versions scored terribly.
Frankly, in the global economy with the complexities of international ownership and investment, if the "employer" and "employee/customer" in your argument is limited to a strict national basis, particularly for a major industry (we are not talking about Mom & Pop outfits here) they are both screwed and if they are inefficient, they are doubly screwed.
The economy and the job market are not zero sum (I refuse to call it a game). Yes, there are real people affected with one whole segment of the economy goes and is replaced by something/someone/somewhere more efficient. However, that is hardly a reason to specifically build in inefficiencies (or non standards compliance) into the goods/services we produce in the hope that no one else will offer anything better and/or cheaper. There are a few lucky exceptions (usually due to regulations(safety, secrecy, make work, trade barriers, etc), but in general the market (or human nature if you prefer) will route around you and leave you high and dry quite quickly.
I suppose it's possible to "raise awareness" as in the various "Made In *" programs, but frankly that's not business, it's charity.
I agree with :"that is hardly a reason to specifically build in inefficiencies", but that doesn't mean it isn't worth supporting those inefficiencies when they are already there.
You guy's call yourselves geeks, and all I see in the comments section is ramblings about differences in IE versions and no one mentioned the one obvious anomoly in Windows OS's compared to the respective IE versions??
In TFA: Internet Explorer 5.50.4807.2300 (SP2) Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Multiple IE) 14%
Internet Explorer 5.50.4134.0600 Windows ME 14%
Internet Explorer 5.50.4807.2300 (SP2) Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 13%
Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 Windows XP Service Pack 2 12%
Internet Explorer 7.0.6000.16609 Windows Vista (32-bit) 12%
Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows XP Service Pack 2 12%
Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 11%
Why does an older OS (Win ME), with an older version of IE5.5, perform better than W2K SP4 with the newest version of IE5.5, compared to Windows XP with the newest version of IE5.5??
That doesn't quite make sense. We all know that IE is integrated into windows OSs but if an older version of windows on the 9x version of architecture performs better than, arguably, *one* of the more better built operating systems, what does this say about both IE AND Windows OS's in general??
Secondly, why hasn't the author of TFA included which service pack of IE 6 they are using like they did with IE5.5?