Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Slams Chrome Frame As "Browser Soup"
CWmike writes "Mozilla executives today took shots at Google for pitching its Chrome Frame plug-in as a solution to Internet Explorer's poor performance, with one arguing that Google's move will result in 'browser soup.' The Mozilla reaction puts the company that builds Firefox on the same side of the debate as rival Microsoft, which has also blasted Google over the plug-in. Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla and currently the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, said in a blog post, 'The overall effects of Chrome Frame are undesirable. I predict positive results will not be enduring and — and to the extent it is adopted — Chrome Frame will end in growing fragmentation and loss of control for most of us, including Web developers.' Baker says Chrome Frame's browser-in-a-browser will confuse users and render some of their familiar tools useless. 'Once your browser has fragmented into multiple rendering engines, it's very hard to manage information across Web sites. Some information will be manageable from the browser you use and some information from Chrome Frame. This defeats one of the most important ways in which a browser can help people manage their [Web] experience.'"
Translation: Those fucking bastards are probably going to do the same thing to Firefox!!!! Chair... Google... Must... throw...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sounds like sour grapes to me. Google has a technically superior engine, and Mozilla's whining about it. Well boo-hoo guys, how about cutting the crap and getting to work improving your product?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
IE8 doesn't support canvas, or svg, doesn't have a real javascript engine, and still mangles standard css.
It can get by on simple web pages, but it's simply not suitable for real web apps. Anyone developing one either writes off IE completely, or is using the tools that Google's been releasing to augment IE's deficiencies.
... because I love and use it daily. But isn't Firefox 'plug-in soup'? Updates frequently breaking plugins, plugins sometimes breaking the browser, etc.
Seems silly to me for them to make a comment like this.
More options are good. There are many users who are forced to keep IE6 for work access to intranet sites and yet may want Google wave for personal use. This way they can access all their sites without having to remember which browser is for which and deal with different sets of bookmarks and cookies. What alternatives do Microsoft and Mozilla foundation propose for this group of people?
Isn't that a good thing? I'm a web developer--and I'll say outright--I don't deserve control of your browser. The marketing tools that we had do our frontpage came up with a *beautiful* flash application--and the boss was absolutely heartbroken when he couldn't show our new page to somebody he met in the lobby of a motel. And most of what they did in flash would have rendered faster with a bit of CSS and tiny bit of javascript.
I warned him---but pretty shiny things overcame technical sense. More fragmentation of the browser market is a *good* thing, as it will make further development of new shiny toys impossible (and economically unrewarding) until people actually FIX THE FUCKING STANDARDS. That's right--I said it--HTML is broken. Embedded video in a page is more about fucking politics than good technical sense--fuck you too apple and google for everything you had to do with that.
Break the entire web, raze the platforms, make Microsoft impossible to develop for when their market share gets pushed down to 30%. Bring back the days of hacking different tables together, the CSS kluges in comment fields, javascript expressions detecting browsers, and the current abomination that is the ridiculous engine-creep in User-Agent strings.
Make web developers like myself weep with frustration and push for real standards.
But when it's all done, can we please get an open standard out of it (unlike Acid2), with a protected term (sort of like how CDROM is owned by sony) owned and registered by a governing body that certifies a browser engine as either implementing it or not?, and as part of the standard, have a "standards only" mode required--wherein no new tags may be rendered or acted upon?
So finally, IE can't be called a "web browser" by definition if it doesn't pass "ACID VERSION 5.897879 Test 1083b".
Then, and only then will the web actually be a reasonable platform to work on. Because as it is today--I look forward to fragmentation, since it would at least make all those lazy "web programmers" out there pay attention to the tags they're using.
Dudes... I work at a company whose standard is IE6. Not IE7, not IE8. IE6. And IE6 isn't even compatible with IE8 in some cases.
The reason Google is releasing Chrome Frame is very simple--so that they can get Google Wave in the door of enterprises who have standardized on IE (including IE6) without having to develop 4 different versions of it (Standards Compliant, IE6, IE7, and IE8). They decided that doing Chrome Frame was easier, cheaper, and better for the future of Google Apps (broadly construed to include Wave) than continuing to pander to IE.
I don't think they want to "enable" IE users... but they'd rather enable IE users to continue to be stupid than cripple their applications as they've been doing ever since gmail came out. From Google's point of view, this is ALL about the apps, not the browser wars.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Asides from the sites that only render properly in IE due to poor authoring, there are still sites out there that will actively forbid you from viewing them unless you are using IE. Unfortunately, once in a blue moon I have to visit them. That's why I have the Firefox add-on IE Tab, which pretty much does the same thing as this Chrome Frame thing. Or am I somehow mistaken?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Odd - I have for the past few years always used the "IE Tab" plugin for Firefox - that makes the pages render in IE (for IE specific sites, like windows update). Isn't that EXACTLY the same thing?
What he means is Frame doesn't activate unless the website asks for this (or, theoretically the user but I can't see that option being so popular if the site works anyway).
So there's no extra work. If you don't want to support chrome then don't.. nothing has changed.
I've been thinking about Google Frame. Honestly, I think it's too good a stopgap. Let me explain:
People have Internet Explorer. It sucks. Or people have Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Safari/... and they all work the same (almost).
People who have IE are mostly unable or unwilling to install, well, anything else.
Chrome is good in that installing a browser plugin is easier (and more familiar) for most people than installing a browser. They do it all the time - Flash, Java, SuperPornSearch - even if they shouldn't.
So Chrome Frame is nice, in that regard, in that I as a web developer can have IE say "install this to view this page", or otherwise throw up a "You must have at least Flash 7 to view this content"-type page. Those errors seem to be effective, for the most part.
But it's bad in the sense that if everybody requires Chrome Frame, and everybody has it, that's dandy. But it's still running IE.
In short, it's a stopgap. But it's a very good stopgap. Potentially so good that people won't switch to a real browser. And that's bad.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
And not a moment too soon, because Flash sucks ass.
The only thing I use it for is embedding video. Groovy menus? AJAX and CSS. Flash was a great idea when we all had dial up. We've moved on from there, and we all learned not to build flash based splash pages. This makes Flash a fairly useless application. I look forward to it dying, like its bloated predecessor, Director.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Anyone developing one either writes off IE completely, or is using the tools that Google's been releasing to augment IE's deficiencies.
Really, those are our 2 options? Either don't support IE, or use something from Google. Oddly enough, I've been getting by for years without doing either of those. Granted, my "real web apps" don't need canvas or SVG. The vast majority of mature Javascript libraries around have no problems supporting IE with the vast majority of their functionality, what's your excuse? I've been supporting tens of thousands of corporate (read IE) users who spend hours each day using large ajax applications that I've built. I've got an installation with over 70,000 users on it where about 1% of the front-end code is HTML, and the rest is Javascript and CSS. IE8 runs that application just fine.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
But as a web-dev, I can ignore Chrome-Frame [CF]... so right now I develop sites based on web-standards, and then I test and I typically add a bunch of IE conditional comments to deal with IE specific issues.
So no changes there.
The only reason I might want to add an meta X-UA-Compatible='chrome=1' (or whatever it is) is if I wanted to (a). allow IE users with CF installed a snappier browsing experience, or (b). I wanted to make use of features that only exist in modern browsers such as canvas or SVG or something.
It's clear that Googles intent here is (b) in the above list, since they're the ones really pushing the limits of what is possible using currently available web-standards.... and by that, I mean what is possible with IE since IE is still the browser with market share.
So.... from a web developers perspective, I can do nothing at all, and this doesn't affect me, or I can think about it a bit, continue building as I do, but add an X-UA-Compatible response-header/meta. I really really ain't that difficult IMHO!!
Just to recap on Google's motivation here; it *isn't* about killing off IE6/7 (like most people seemed to think), but is about *all* versions of IE since not even IE8 supports bleeding edge functionality. All versions of IE are hindering the Google vision of web apps (think Google Wave here in particular), although Google Docs is kind of key here too.
I think Google are preempting MS's response to Google web apps; in order for MS to transition MS Office to Office Web-apps (or whatever they're calling it), it seems entirely likely they'll push Silverlight. Sooooo, without Chrome-Frame, Google would have no answer to this, and darkness would once again descend upon the web!! [I _might_ be being overly dramatic!]
Since it's relevant, I imagine that Win7 will ship with Silverlight installed and I imagine it will run regardless of which browser the user chooses. So hopefully, you can see the problem!