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Google Brings SVG Support To IE
stelt writes "Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is in most graphical tools. It is used heavily in many big projects, such as KDE and Wikipedia. But Internet Explorer's lack of built-in support for SVG was keeping it away from mainstream use on the web. Google is fixing that now with a JavaScript drop-in named SVGWeb. They've posted a quick, one-minute overview, a longer and more detailed presentation, and you can read about it on the project page."
How long before a new version of IE develops incompatibility problems with this extension?
From the project page: "No downloads or plugins are necessary other than Flash ..."
IE used to have SVG support via an Adobe plugin. Then they bought the Flash crap and suddenly the SVG plugin went away. Can't have competition I guess.
But Internet Explorer's lack of built-in support for SVG was keeping it away from mainstream use on the web.
Yes! Internet Explorer may finally be ready for mainstream use.
It's not bad performance, and useful for applets, but you don't want to use it for layout unless having dozens of little flash applets all over the page turns you on.
Now Microsoft doesn't need to do it anymore. Is this a good thing then? Nice move on Google's part though.
It's a bad thing that Google needs to fix basic functionality in a competitor's product. But it shows one more time why Google is good and why Microsoft is mediocre.
... the long-awaited dawn of SVG animation challenging Flash, (and Silverlight)?
Despite the video being very very dry, there was an interesting link in the middle of the presentation: http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/
That site features real time download statistics for FF3.5. The interesting part is, that the map at the top is rendered in real SVG combined with canvas (for the dots).
About this flash based library: it's strange. At the demo page the native rendering of SVG failed and only the flash version worked on my FF 3.0.x.. Not a problem with my browser though, as the site I mentioned at the top as well as Wikipedia SVG's work fine. Something is not right with this library, but interesting non the less.
Microsoft is becoming AOL. A crappy, proprietary, expensive, unreliable impediment to getting onto the internet. Their applications have plateaued, and open-source desktop and web-based competitors are improving rapidly. They'll hang on longer, but they've begun their long decline.
As a website builder, svg is more then just pictures, if i had it available to me i would create entire websites using it. ( xhtml+svg )
why?
because then i can finally present people with websites that look exactly the same everywhere and fill your entire browser screen.
dynamic design, dynamic fonts, dynamic everything. no more fixed layout design.
While i don't thing this new plugin is going to be the holy grail, it love to see them push in the right direction :)
When discussions of supporting various versions of browsers come up, it is important to know what browsers are actually visiting your site. Earlier this year IE6 users to one of my sites dipped below 10%. Since then, it has now been ~3% for the past month.
Now I no longer stress about IE6. I'll check it to make sure the site is at least functional and usable in IE6. But I no longer strive for pixel-perfect compatibility. It's simply not worth it.
You can spend the extra hours getting it to work for all browsers and end up using hacks and mangling your HTML/CSS to do so, but if all of that work is only for a small percentage of your user base, it is not worth it.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
If having a plugin means Microsoft doesn't need to implement it, then the existence of the several-year-old plugin from Adobe has been doing that already. Looking at the project page, it seems like using this in IE means that the entire SVG part of the site ends up being rendered in an SVG-supporting browser implemented in Flash. Umm, yay?
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If you look at Silverlight (or XAML or XPS) you'll see a lot of things that resemble SVG. It would be trivial for MS to support SVG, but they choose not too. The probably don't want anything to compete with Silverlight adoption.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Microsoft is becoming AOL. A crappy, proprietary, expensive, unreliable impediment to getting onto the internet. Their applications have plateaued, and open-source desktop and web-based competitors are improving rapidly. They'll hang on longer, but they've begun their long decline.
The true Slashdot geek can't post about Microsoft without his brain dissolving into mush. Fantasy rules and reality is an intrusion.
Listen to one of your own:
And then there's Microsoft. The company prints billions of dollars worth of profits each quarter from its Windows franchise, yet for years it has been quietly developing its next big operating system. And no, I'm not referring to Windows 7.
Microsoft has created a bridge "between personal productivity and line-of-business applications," one that stitches together Microsoft's "desktop" dominance with its cloud ambitions.
It's called SharePoint, and with over 100 million seats and $1 billion in revenue, the odds are that your company already has it installed.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer long ago declared that "SharePoint is the definitive operating system or platform for the middle tier," and I don't think he's using the term "operating system" lightly.
Increasingly, SharePoint is the center of the Microsoft universe, at least, for enterprise computing. SharePoint serves as the hub for Microsoft's suite of operating systems, applications, and third-party software. It is a content application server, of sorts, one that provides the platform upon which so much of Microsoft's value is now being built.
I've disparaged SharePoint in the past for its tendency to lock customers into its proprietary repository. But let's be clear: a large number of companies seem perfectly happy to make that trade-off and are actively using SharePoint at the heart of their intranets, extranets, and Web sites.
Microsoft, Google, and VMware redefine the OS
Matt Assay is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management.
He was even blunter when speaking to The New York Times:
SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in. It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."
Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
"Flash sucks bleep on Linux, because Adobe apparently hates Linux or something. "
No, your assumption is mistaken... in fact, Linux is becoming more important to Flash over the next year, as smartphones and televisions introduce new configurations.
For performance which is slower than other machines, first try checking for background processes or browser chokepoints... that's easier than checking for hardware which creates the difference.
Then look into the Player betas, feedback process. If we can make your slowdown happen in the shop too, then we'd want to try to ameliorate that situation within the common Player, thanks.
jd/adobe
Sorry, I once worked on a site, where we got 16 million visits *a day*! And that's only for the top country.
Yeah, we've all "worked on" big sites. It's quite another thing to be financially accountable for a big site. You'll find it's a little less easy to cast away 10% of your users overnight when your profit margin is only 1% to 3%.
The proper way to build a big site is to build to standards and then add exception handling for any significant user bases. Over time some of these will shrink below the "who cares" limit and you can get rid of that exception. Obviously those limits will vary per site and audience.
Your rant about leadership is fine, but you do not lead your customers, you serve them. You lead your employees, and then, yes, you sometimes make decisions that are necessary but not popular.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I liked SVG, back in 2004/05 I wrote an interactive map application using SVG and what's now known as AJAX in IE5.
I read that Adobe was on the standards commitee for SVG, and piled tons of unneeded crap into the spec to try and make it a 'Flash Killer', but once they aquired Macromedia they stopped caring... and they were the only one that did.
There may never be a full implementation of the SVG spec, it's just too cumbersome, and outdated at this point.
Even supporting IE at all means withholding features. That can make sense for supporting IE 7/8, which hold about 40% of the browser market.
IE6 only holds about 15% of the browser market, and requires extreme measures to support. If Google, a 150 billion dollar corporation, can't be bothered to support it in something as simple as a webmail client or video portal, why should the little guy struggle to support it in a complex web app?