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."
Without Microsoft nobody will be left to defend us from the Ubuntu £inux monopoly.
Let's hope companies also stop mandating the use of Shockwave and JavaScript, or at least let me use the web site without having to completely disable NoScript.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Yes but the important distinction is that WebKit is open source. While Apple has a lot of influence on it, if Google doesn't like Apple's changes, they can fork it as can anyone else.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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."
For every business that Gartner "knows" is dropping IE standardization, there are 100 it doesn't know about who are continuing to mandate IE use because they bought some legacy Web-based app that is only used internally, and the people who wrote that app were too lazy or incompetent to write it in actual HTML (as opposed to "we played with it until it worked in this browser, so this is what your users must use").
My favorite example of a web-app developer who knew virtually nothing about HTML but shipped what "worked" had every single element on the page absolute-positioned with CSS. What looked like a simple table of 30 rows of data on the screen was actually hundreds of DIVs that had been rendered on the fly by the server with absolute position coordinates for each one. Even INPUT elements that were invisible had absolute positions calculated for them. Every time someone loaded a page, the server would calculate the offset for each "cell" in the table so it would look like a table, and for dozens of invisible form elements so they wouldn't collide with the table. The billion-dollar non-tech company that bought this couldn't figure out why the server frequently became unresponsive... They actually bought a second server from the developer and a load balancer to get around the fact that the developer didn't understand basic HTML, and have been using the app for 7 years. When I explained the problem to them, they reasoned that it would cost them more to ask the developer to do it properly that to just add additional servers as needed. They will probably be using it for the next 20 years. And the login page states that it requires IE.
Often this type of app lives on an internal server that will never be updated because the company doesn't want to pay for something that works well enough, but serves some essential purpose that hundreds or thousands of employees are required to use daily. IE standardization will die out in consumer applications long before it goes away in businesses. Microsoft knew this is how most businesses approach computers, and it's the reason the Windows/Office/IE monopoly was so successful. It's the reason Microsoft is still successful despite the Ballmer decade.
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?
Nice to see that typical snide attitude of "but our site is certified for IE 6, so use it" that was so common among web developers getting its comeuppance by the CEO's latest smartphone. I would have given a dollar to be there every time one of them was told to his face that his site needed to become cross-platform, and pronto. I can only imagine the weeping and gnashing of teeth as the web developer fearfully installed Firefox and Opera and began to learn that awful vocabulary "cross-platform".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sad, isn't it? People are *still* talking about standardizing on browsers instead of enforcing adherence to standardized markup languages.
C|N>K
"We need to spend money to get rid of IE" doesn't fly with management.
"You can't run that on your iPad because it needs IE" however, does.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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