Slashdot Mirror
IE Standardization Fading Fast
alphadogg writes "Just as Internet users in general have defected in huge numbers from Microsoft Internet Explorer over the past several years, the business world, as well, is becoming less dependent on the venerable browser. Companies that used to mandate the use of IE for access to web resources are beginning to embrace a far more heterodox attitude toward web browsers. While it hasn't gone away, the experience of having to use IE 6 to access some legacy in-house web app is becoming less common. 'A lot of it has to do with the emergence of the modern web and the popularity of mobile. They have made it very different for companies to truly standardize on a browser,' says Gartner Research analyst David Mitchell Smith."
Try finding a merchant account with a bank (not a new fangled Web 3.0 deal like Square) that doesn't specifically write their "web" app to specifically *only* work with IE on Windows.
Done.
In fact, none of the (Australian) banks I've used in the past few years has had that requirement. Does the US work differently?
Um, they all use Webkit, and Opera is no longer entirely different. There are now three major rendering engines: Webkit, Gecko and Trident/IE.
Opera's entirely different.
Not for long: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
No, and I'm not sure where he's from - I live in the US and none of the banks I've used in the last maybe 5 years have mandated IE 6 - at least not to the public. I worked for Big Ol' Bank for a spat and, up until recently, IE6 was the "must be compatible with" browser of choice, although not the only that we could use. So, our internal sites worked great on modern browsers, and maintained functionality in IE6 thanks to some good JS libraries and sacrificing some data-intensive tasks for people who couldn't get clearance to download a new browser. They've since done a push to install Windows 7 across the enterprise, but who knows when that will be done.
Query post works in IE, it's just that IE was written by retards and will actually do something no browser written by intelligent humans would ever do: cache Ajax POST calls. Yes, they actually treat POSTs like they are fucking idempotent calls. I shit you not. I assume this was in some misguided attempt to make up for the shitty performance of their browser. This caused a problem in a web app we wrote and it took a while to figure out because it never occurred to us that any browser could be this fucking stupid, but IE managed to exceed our expectations. jQuery has built in cache busting for ajax calls but it only works for GET calls, so we had to add in our own to resolve it.
I have not checked to see if this is something that has been resolved in recent iterations of IE (9 or 10).
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
It should be noted that Google has recently overtaken Apple as the largest contributor to Webkit.
JavaScript is insecure and violates privacy
Javascript is a language; it cannot violate your privacy. Security and privacy issues related to Javascript can only be application-specific issues which are introduced by the developers of said application. Javascript as a language is in no more violation of your privacy than C.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
I do not know if the grandparent post was refering to insecurity from the clients point of view or the servers. However, if the website depends on js for input validation then the website is fundamentaly insecure. If we are looking at security from the users perspective then I am mindfull of cross site scripting, an attack method that is #2 on the OWASP top 10 list. JS can be done correctly but the user has to trust not only the site they are visiting, but also every advertizement or other object that the page has requested from some outside source. As a web developer I know, as I think you do, that js can be made safe. You are technicaly correct that js is just a language. But, I suspect that even you realize that simply trusting all js that is loaded into your browser is inherently insecure.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
Here's some info showing the share of contributions
http://blog.bitergia.com/2013/02/06/report-on-the-activity-of-companies-in-the-webkit-project/
Watch those corners