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WebKit As Broken As Older IE Versions?
An anonymous reader writes "It's not everyday that we get to hear about the potential downsides of using WebKit, but that's just what has happened as Dave Methvin, president of the jQuery foundation and a member of the core programming team that builds the widely used Web programming tool, lamented in a blog post yesterday. While most are happy to cheer for IE's demise, perhaps having three main browser engines is still a good thing. For those that work in the space, does the story ring true? Are we perhaps swearing at the wrong browser when implementing 'workarounds' for Firefox or IE?"
That my webkit browsers have been very poorly behaved; maybe it's just me... but images flicker, forms appear and disappear, sometimes pages just stop loading at random... each patch for mountain lion seems to repair it BRIEFLY... but it always comes back.
Hey, TFA is from TODAY, given the late /. trends, at least that's a good beginning!
"Are we perhaps swearing at the wrong browser when implementing 'workarounds' for Firefox or IE?"
No.
Isn't the answer to these always "No"?
If you read TFA (haha!) make sure to scroll down to the comment of Pater Kasting (Chrome dev).
It might be just you. I haven't noticed any of these problems, and each ML update makes Safari snappier (TM).
I hate to say it but web developers need to stop using "frameworks" and "libraries" to do simple things.
There's so many websites that load jQuery or TinyMCE for no good reason other than the developer was lazy.
I code everything by hand, if it doesn't work in some browser, then that browser's implementation is broken. There should be no need to write against jQuery and assume that the underlying browser isn't braindead or futureproof. If you're writing against the standards for HTML5, CSS3 and the DOM, then you're better off writing your own code. If you're just a code monkey who can be replaced at a moments notice, then by all means write against stupid frameworks so that you're easily replaced.
Must admit, although I primarily use Firefox or Chome; I have no problems at all with IE. I don't understand why people would "cheer for its demise". IE9 is a good browser, and I'm all for competition. Less competition in any space is generally bad for users, if things swing too far toward one engine we'll be in the same position we were when IE6 was the "standard" and people ended up only bothering to test on that browser. That causes stagnation.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I still want to see three viable rendering engines competing in the browser world - and that's what we currently have.
I know there are a few people who live and die with Opera, but it didn't have enough market share to make any meaningful difference - its switch to WebKit is irrelevant to most of us.
#DeleteChrome
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Maybe we need a less-exciting ACID test. A test of useful but inconsistent functionality.
Personally I wish canvas mouse location handling was done more consistently.
But watch out, the last ACID test focused on functionality that was controversial, or less than important. Mozilla was right not to prioritize their effect to solving the acid test. They had their own tests.
Furthermore webkit pisses me off because webdevs think they aim for 1 platform. You can't. Please recognize the web is defined by standards, please adhere to them, and please respect your users. They don't use chromium, they don't use opera, they don't use safari, they don't use firefox, they don't use IE.
I've never been a fan of MSIE, but to say "most" would cheer for its demise seems a little gratuitous. Competition is good.
That's nothing. Look[1] how long some Flash bugs have been around, or holes in MS Word, Active-X exploites, Windows exploits... it's all a matter of how much time you have to maintain the codebase, and what you prioritize.
Things with a 98% chance of never affecting anyone will go for a long time before getting the "half-line fix" just like any other software. Yes, including jQuery[2]
[1] - http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search
[2] - http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=jquery&search_type=all&cves=on
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Yes. Yes, we are.
I might hate IE to death, but I would defend its right to exist to the grave for monopoly-weakening reasons right now.
Webkit and the WhatWG expose the exact behavior that caused all those problems and a stalling of progress back then in the first place. Growing into a quasi-monopoly, having tons of non-standards-conforming "features" (remember the marquee tag?), being the preferred choice of the dumbest and most incompetent at making an educated choice, openly going against the W3C for iTard and PHB reasons (aka: "Ooooh, shiny bling!" and "People are too dumb anyway. Remove *all* buttons and options.") and also deliberately making standards for dumb and incompetent people (by re-introducing quirks mode aka glancing-over-utter-incompetence mode aka HTML5 instead of actually telling the author when the code has errors.).
We already know that can't end well. Let us not repeat that mistake.
P.S.: Seeing Opera first dump its amazing killer feature (Opera Unite), and then dumb their core engine, is a really sad sight. I declare Opera (the company) as dead as Nokia.
That my webkit browsers have been very poorly behaved; maybe it's just me... but images flicker, forms appear and disappear, sometimes pages just stop loading at random... each patch for mountain lion seems to repair it BRIEFLY... but it always comes back.
Desktop Chrome used to be a breath of fresh air a year or two ago, but now, my experience with every new release has been worse than with the previous version. I feel probably they are ignoring it for the Mobile Android and Chrome browsers because they feel it's more important to keep their lead there.
In my current position, I have definitely had to implement at the very least twice as many Chrome workarounds as IE in the last six months. I was very surprised to see Chrome behaving oddly and Firefox and IE rendering the pages identically, as prior to that time period, I had never seen Chrome and Firefox render a page in a substantially different way.
Most of the issues have revolved around Chrome "over-reacting" to what it perceived as an XSS attack.
For those that work in the space, does the story ring true?
No. Comparing webkit to IE6 is like comparing stubbing your toe to being shot in the head repeatedly.
Webkit is open source, with an active community that cares about standards, has an explicit policy of trying to behave like other browsers where possible, listens to feedback, and fixes bugs. They are the opposite of IE in those critical respects.
According to the author, Opera should spend their time and money to fix old edge-case bugs in WebKit, but he shouldn't have any obligation to contribute patches himself.
Sorry sir, but that's not how open-source development should work. If you're going to spend time rebuilding your own codebase, evaluating whether a ton of old workarounds are still necessary because of missing "half-line fix[es]", you should consider spending some of that time contributing such simple patches upstream to improve the situation. With IE, that was never an option, but it is with WebKit. In an open-source stack, the only workarounds that should be accepted as the regular course of business are ones that are prohibitively difficult to implement in the dependency, or where the patches have been submitted and rejected.
What's most entertaining is the reference to the "tragedy of the commons" in TFA's title. Tragedy of the commons is not something being so commonly used that it's improved in places you don't like. Rather, it's where everybody using the common property thinks that maintenance is someone else's problem. Mr. Methvin, WebKit's maintenance is as much your problem as it is Opera's.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This isnt a 'WebKit' problem, this is a Mountain Lion + Safari problem. Safari started implementing a lot more things to leverage the GPU in rendering and it did not turn out very graceful.
No, it is not just him. This corruption problem with Safari is a well known problem. It appears that this problem manifests strongly in the macbook retina. There are ongoing discussions about this in many forums, including apple's own:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4148522?start=0&tstart=0
As reported by many testers, these problems have NOT been fixed in the soon-to-be-released 10.8.3 update, and they are still present in the Webkit nightly. If you are not experiencing such problems, the most probable reason is that you're using a non-retina display.
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If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
This, like nearly every Slashdot headline, is sensationalistic. If you read what Dave said it is clear that he is referencing support for *older* versions of WebKit;
... 24 now? So, yeah ... if you take a normalization library like jQuery and look at the amount of code needed to support the various iterations of browsers, you don't need to be a rocket surgeon to realize that supporting the various bugs in 30 versions will take more code/effort than 3 versions. The latest versions of WebKit, as the title seems to suggest, is not "as broken" as older versions of IE.
"Even when they have been fixed in the latest Chrome or Safari, older WebKit implementations like PhantomJS and UIWebView still don't have the fix."
Think about it for a moment. IE has had 3 major releases in the past 10 years (I'm not counting IE10 just yet). Safari, on the other hand, has had 6. Chrome has had, what
"WebKit As Broken As Older IE Versions?"
Yes! Because any two things that are not perfect are equally bad. :-|
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Apple: where your product can be broken, but the hipsters just adore it even more because it's "quirky."
Seeing as you need to use a Microsoft system to run any form of IE, then you have no competition with any other browser on other systems.
I've never been a fan of MSIE, but to say "most" would cheer for its demise seems a little gratuitous. Competition is good.
Internet Explorer is not a cross platform browser. It does not *compete* it abusively bundles Internet Explorer.
I certainly spend more time dealing with webkit quirks than IE quirks these days, thanks to the demise of IE6 and IE7.
So far, few of the visual 'bugs' I've encountered in webkit have been strictly 'non-standard'.
They pretty much ll fall into two categories:
Happens to me as well when filling out forms on many sites.
I have this problem sometimes on FireFox, on Windows, with ATI GPU's. Their drivers are written by 12 year olds, i sware.
Happens to me as well when filling out forms on many sites.
Should have added in Safari on a macbook pro retina, running 10.8.2. Have not tried it on my 10.8.3 VM yet.
Probably unrelated to TFA, but I made an amazing discovery about the webkit-based browser Rekonq 0.8 in Kubuntu 11.10 - it doesn't show commercials in streaming video. Whatever mechanism is commonly used to insert commercials into a flash video stream - it doesn't work in this version of Rekonq. I'm talking youtube, ustream, livestream, social cam sites, porn sites, and television networks that stream their own shows - no commercials ever. It's glorious =)
I'm actually reluctant to upgrade in case this "bug" has been fixed.
I might hate IE to death, but I would defend its right to exist to the grave for monopoly-weakening reasons right now.
Except Microsoft does not compete is abusively bundles IE, The damaged caused by Microsoft set innovation in the web space back years, if IE was a cross platform browser, not welded to their [not your] Operating system, I would agree. Unfortunately it only pollutes standards, without any of the positives that competition brings. Firefox and Chrome [and Opera] have been ahead for so long now its not even funny any more.
IE explorer should be destroyed with fire. So competition can continue unabated.
When developing for different browser you have some "strange" issues which are not from the webkit engine, but from de javascript engine or from the underlining implementation. For exemple Chrome decide not to check outside of his local cache sometimes, it's not webkit problem, it's not javascript it's only chrome implementation which is different ( to be polite ) and sometimes a nightmare for web developers.
Even if we had IE, Opera, Firefox and Chrome using webkit there will be some big differences.
Internet Explorer is bundled [not replaceable] on one platform Microsoft's. To compete it needs to exist on other platforms and be replaceable on its [not your] OS. As it stands it continues to hold back the innovation on the Web...the polar opposite of what would have happened it real competition exists. All it is is another incompatible product. The fact that XP users are such on Internet explorer 8 says it all.
IE is not in the position to compete with anything from a feature and standards compliance p.o.v. The only competition it drives is by brute force, on the desktops, since most of them use Windows and IE is the default browser. Luckily, this "strong" position is slowly being eroded and will fade.
IE is also tied to one platform, and even worse, tied to a certain version of the OS it is running on. People can perfectly well run either Chrome, Opera, Firefox etc on their XP, Vista and later machines, but if you want to use IE 9, you gotta have Windows 7. IE 10 - gotta have Windows 8. In a way, IE competes with itself. Microsoft still thinks it's in the 90s and that people will upgrade their OS for the privilege of running a browser or having a better version of a task manager. Stupid, stupid Microsoft.
Their drivers are written by 12 year olds, i sware.
Something looks like something was written by a 12 year old.
It's not just him. I have some weird issues with Safari stalling but it seems to only affect Slashdot. Go figure...
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This is FUD. Apple software is head and shoulders above all other forms of software. Apple fucking INVENTED the web browser in its modern form and you people have done nothing but criticize and attack in your usual flagrant anti-Apple way. Pathetic.
I was just talking to someone about IE yesterday and I had to bring up how much I miss having just one long-lived version to code against.
It may have been broken but you knew how it was broken and that it would be broken forever.
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From what I have seen, most of that crap is very low-level stuff that basically nobody outside of HUGE-scale implementations cares about.
And some of it seems to be legacy for the sake of the fact that earlier versions of Webkit were still around very recently compared to say, Gecko or Trident. (both have been around for a long time)
Even with automatic updates, a decent number disable them, and more to the point, those who probably use sites with technical developers behind it in the first place, so those people are more the ones being exposed to it. (who wouldn't disable the automatic updates? What a stupid annoyance they can be. Auto update at bloody night or something, or throttle the damn installer priority! My computer isn't a supercomputer you know, I don't care if it takes half the day to install! Better yet, detect current activity and dynamic priority, idle is too strict)
Although I will say one thing, a stupid bug has been around in Chrome (and possible webkit) for a while.
Make a test page, put a little text. Add some random nonsense script (just a variable reference would be fine)
Now put this in the CSS style: *{display:block}
Enjoy seeing all that hidden stuff. (including the CSS styling you just entered!)
Just tested Canary as well to be sure, yep, happens there too. And on Android version.
As far as I am concerned, I am pretty sure * is supposed to only reference visible HTML elements, not the invisible structure elements and any text within them.
It doesn't help that extensions can embed stylesheets and scripts as well. (also, if you have a userstyle extension installed, add that styling to THIS page... dear god)
That bug was really annoying because I used that to make absolutely sure that no stupid browsers were setting terrible styles on elements, so I reset everything to Block and then manually made the Inline list.
Most likely video drivers. I've had screen flicker, things scrolling forward, jumping back, then forward again. Granted, I'm running on a heavily modified "unsupported" MacPro1,1, so not especially surprising in my case.
It's inertia. IE6 was a terrible browser. IE7 and 8 were better, but not markedly so. IE9 was a total turnaround for Microsoft, and IE10 is keeping with that trend.
However, the damage is already done. On top of it being a Microsoft product and thus being automatically terrible, dangerous and likely to cause the death of a few Linux whackjobs, its bad reputation in the past has stuck to it like a skunk's stink. Is it deserved? Not anymore, no. But you probably have noticed by now that for all our claims of technology being a fast moving sector, a lot of the people working in it are old men shouting at you to get off their lawn ;)
Opera's shift to WebKit should concern everyone. It's likely a good decision for them, but it consolidates WebKit's position as the dominant rendering engine, and having any dominant engine is bad, as you go from standards directing engines to the dominant engine imposing "standards".
Ironically, it's Firefox which is still doing its job: never the dominating browser, but always a significant enough force to stop any one browser from entirely dominating. Those who think Mozilla's outlasted their welcome should think again.
I have no problems at all with IE. I don't understand why people would "cheer for its demise".
If you don't hate IE, then you haven't been building websites. For years, the standard process for me was to write perfectly valid HTML and CSS that would render the same way in every other browser, and then spend time screwing around with it until it looked correct in IE. It added 10%, easily, to the cost of every project, and I've read of others claiming 30% or more.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Well, part of the issue with ie6 (and previous) was that a healthy web was contra to Microsoft's interests. If google or Mozilla are in the same situation, they want an easy to use, universally compatible web experience.
I think competition is good, but if everyone got behind a single vendor that wanted the web to succeed, it would be far better than when ms won the browser war (or, technically, when Netscape list it with the 4.x line that just plain sucked).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
No seriously; I use a retina Macbook, and haven't seen those problems either. Not saying others haven't, but it's not universal.
So that's why Opera is switching to Webkit. They can now have the same experiences with Webkit than with Opera's previous web engines. ;)
It's inertia. IE6 was a terrible browser.
I feel the need to point out, here, that when IE6 came out, it was a WONDERFUL browser, far ahead of everything but Opera.
IE6 was only terrible by the time it was replaced because Microsoft basically stopped all development on it after it was released.
That's a little dishonest. When IE6 was released in 2001 it was quite good. There was also virtually nothing else on the market as AOL let Netscape flounder for five years and the earliest viable releases of Mozilla were still two years away and Firefox another year after that. IE6 also did quite a bit to tighten up the standards compliance at that time, including fixing the box model. Everything leading up to that point was a huge mess of feature-ramming on the parts of both AOL/Netscape and Microsoft while the W3C slowly toddled along.
What Microsoft did that was blatantly stupid was to stagnate IE for five years between 6 and 7, effectively halting the development towards better standards compliance. And while Netscape at least had the excuses of recent acquisitions and bad project management Microsoft did this quite intentionally by all-but-disbanding the IE team entirely.
IE has come a long way since then. IE9 and especially IE10 are very usable browsers in terms of speed and compliance. They're not perfect, but nothing is. What we need above everything else is an accurate measure of compliance. The W3C HTML/CSS Test Suites are the perfect avenue for that, very narrow unit tests of specific rendering functionality. The problem is that it's not as pretty or fancy as some colorful ACID test.
The problem with IE is that it's hard to test, since both IE and Trident are not available for most platforms.
Out of all the PCs where I work and at home, none run windows, so it's not easy to test IE, while I can test Chrom{e,ium}, Firefox, Opera, etc on almost any desktop OS.
The article blames WebKit for issues with the JavaScript implementation and keeps using Chrome and Safari in the same breath. The problem is that WebKit is modular and, in fact, the JavaScript engine is a separate piece -- Chrome and Safari use completely different JavaScript engines.
The Safari JavaScript engine is based off KJS and has evolved over time from interpreter, to JIT compiler, to native compiler. Apple contributes quite a bit, but so do other WebKit developers.
The Chrome JavaScript engine is V8 and is a separate OSS project from Google.
WebKit is used as the rendering engine and it has hooks to plugin the JavaScript engine. If the issue is with JavaScript, it might be more helpful to bring the issues to the developers of those engines rather than the WebKit developers.
Very true - in fact IE4 was actually way more stable than NS4, and IE5 was a revelation when it came out. It wasn't that MS just used underhand practices (though they certainly did) but their browsers just had better engines. NS5 was terrible. they attempted to correct the biggest problem with NS4 which was that resizing it with JS and dynamic content would either crash the browser completely, or kill the JS engine and screw up the layout (unless you used the proprietary tag). IE4 at the time had no problem with reflow, although it was a bit slower. NS5 though was ridiculously slow, incompatible with NS4, and had so many bugs that it was ludicrous to recommend anyone use it. Netscape basically just let it stagnate.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
It has nothing to do with the retina display. I'm seeing it on the non-retina current-generation MacBook Pro. I think it is limited to a single model of Intel GPU, though, as I don't see this behavior on any other machines, and it goes away if I lock my machine to use only the NVIDIA GPU.
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As I mentioned above. MS make VM images available to test content in various versions of IE for free. These can be used on OSX or Linux (and probably any other platform that supports the VMI format they use). Safari isn't available for Linux either, in case you forgot.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Mozilla - the Official Opposition Party
Absolutely. If Opera were at an overwhelming 3% usage instead of just a stout 2%, this would already be done and dusted.
/s
Safari uses webkit, and testing in chromium will usually suffice (I haven't come across safari-specific issues that can't be reproduced in chromium either).
And, yeah, sure, one of my development laptops has 1GiB RAM, another is a PowerPC. I can't even run a windoze VM there. I wouldn't do it if I could either.
Opera's shift to WebKit should concern everyone. It's likely a good decision for them, but it consolidates WebKit's position as the dominant rendering engine, and having any dominant engine is bad, as you go from standards directing engines to the dominant engine imposing "standards".
Personally, I'm glad the opera devs will be working on the engine, as opera was usually the fastest to report and fix bugs out of all the browsers. Their work and experience will certainly improve the project as a whole.
197 replies on an Apple.com thread in 6+ months is indicative of an extremely small problem, I'd say, given the sample size of users running mountain lion. Personally, I've had my fair share of issues with my rMBP, but not this one, yet (knocking on wood...). Safari is my primary browser, too.
Also, users on the thread you link to clearly indicate the problem happens to them on prev-gen macbooks (i.e. non-retina) too.
I quite enjoy the bundled IE. It makes downloading the newest Firefox easy.
It is what it is.
You can easily run a windows VM on a machine with 1GB of Ram. I can run a windows VM on a Windows host with half that, and I suspect I could do it on a machine with 384MB or less, but I haven't tried.
You jest but the web browser (not to mention the web) was invented on a NeXT Step machine. Be glad CERN didn't use Windows 3.1 and VB! So, no, they didn't invent it but NeXT created the tools and frameworks that made the first web browser easier to develop and influenced the design.
Mozilla's staying power doesn't surprise me. Firefox is my browser of choice for one reason: add-ons.
Everyone has tried to make their browser support add-ons, and almost everyone has failed.
Firefox has a healthy and useful add-on library. It's very well supported, both by Mozilla and by the community.
IE has an add-on library. But most of the add-ons are for-pay, and I'm just not going to pay for a browser add-on. The free ones are crippleware, shoddy, or both.
Chrome and Safari have... unauthorized patches? At least that was the last time I checked either of them. There might be some "support", but make no mistake: Google doesn't want you to have AdBlock. And Apple doesn't want you to have anything that sets off their NIH alarm.
As for the rest, I haven't bothered with an alternative browser in years. Firefox is open enough, configurable enough, and extendable enough to meet all of my needs. When it becomes troublesome and has true alternatives that aren't, then I'll look for another browser.
Must admit, although I primarily use Firefox or Chome; I have no problems at all with IE. I don't understand why people would "cheer for its demise". IE9 is a good browser,
My issue with it is developer tools. Firefox has Firebug, Chrome has Firebug-clone built-in, and IE9 has some crappy popup window when you press F12 which confuses me. I generally develop with Firefox and Chrome and tinker with things to get it working in IE.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
You are aware the you can remove it in Win7(not sure of Vista, I never used it)?
Yes, some of it is left behind for the Win OS to function, but the browsing capabilities/engine are taken out.
"That's right...I said it."
..you are the resident IE $hill here ? If everybody just used the M$ cruft we would have no problems ? Including Chinese intelligence having no problems ? Yeah, makes a ton of sense !
What world do you live in that non-OSS software is bug-free? Do you get a free pass if you don't comply to the specifications, but don't have bugs in how you do that?
What, besides your own prejudice, justifies supporting a browser that you admit has some serious bugs, and also does not properly implement the web standards?
I don't see any facts or evidence in your post -- that would presumably detract from your trolling. However, there's a simple fix for this and all other issues with browser compatibility: charge for it. Charge for compatibility beyond IE, and charge for any time spent submitting bug reports. No one is expecting you to work for free -- most of those OSS developers aren't working for free, either. Of course, if you need a reason to bitch about something more than you need money, you can keep doing what you're doing...
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Two years ago I was developing a webapp with very high usability requirements, one supported target being Safari 5.1. I hadn't used Safari much, and really didn't like the interface but had got very good references from diverse people, so I somehow had the notion it was a first class, slick, professional and quality browser. Some very lame inconsistencies came up related to Java support but well, that was supposedly not the browser's fault, but Apple's Java plugin/jvm, which they mantained it themselves at that time but was a messy thing on any browser anyway.
Then one day a particular very surprising bug showed up with randomly some images not showing. Just plain images, nothing special. After much digging I ended up in Apple's Safari support web with an official bug report (i.e., "known issue") about some images not displaying "sometimes". It seemed pretty much what was plaguing us. It was very embarrassing to see such a high standard developer not being able to consistently provide such a basic feature like showing fucking images, adn that's supposed to be it. But what was really mindblowing was the proposed workarounds: either a) use the services of a DNS provider (?????) or b) get a new router. I've never been so amazingly baffled by a bug report, in my life. A pity I don't have the link anymore. They not only weren't able to consistently display images in a browser, they had the goodamned guts to even laugh at their own customers in their face whith that bs. I felt kinda sorry for mac users, and lost all remaining respect for Apple that day, at least concerning software development.
We did work around the bug, eventually. It involved just some special preloading and a bit of luck.
Not being rude, but if you can't spend £150 or so on a PC with 4GB RAM for development, you're not charging your clients enough! Sounds like that laptop is so old it probably came with a version of Windows with IE5/6 on it anyway!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
A big problem with IE is simply it's versions which are slow to update. IE 10 is great at the moment, but it won't be in 10 years time.
Users of all other browsers will have upgraded by then but I'm betting there will still be some IE 10 users like there are IE 6 users now.
I think it's a bit unfair to bash it and call it crap because you haven't spent any time using it. It actually has a very good console, profiler and step-through debugger that's at least as good as Firebug, or the Web Developer plug-in for FF. Personally I develop with Firefox or Chrome when I'm on web projects, but I have taken the time to find my way around IE's debugging tools too.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Backwards bug compatibility: There’s a bug — background SVG images with a prime-numbered width disable transparency. A year later, 7328 web sites have popped up that inadvertently depend on the bug. Somebody fixes it. The websites break with dev builds. The fix is backed out, and a warning is logged instead. Nothing breaks, the world’s webkit, nobody cares. The bug is now part of the Web Platform.
Preventing innovation: a gang of hackers makes a new browser that utilizes the 100 cores in 2018-era laptops perfectly evenly, unlike existing browsers that mostly burn one CPU per tab. It’s a ground-up rewrite, and they do heroic work to support 99% of the websites out there. Make that 98%; webkit just shipped a new feature and everybody immediately started using it in production websites (why not?). Whoops, down to 90%; there was a webkit bug that was too gross to work around and would break the threading model. Wtf? 80%? What just happened? Ship it, quick, before it drops more!
The group of hackers gives up and starts a job board/social network site for pet birds, specializing in security exploit developers. They call it “Polly Want a Cracker?”
Inappropriate control: Someone comes up with a synchronization API that allows writing DJ apps that mix multiple remote streams. Apple’s music studio partners freak out, prevent it from landing, and send bogus threatening letters to anyone who adds it into their fork.
Complexity: the standards bodies wither and die from lack of purpose. New features are fine as long as they add a useful new capability. A thousand flowers bloom, some of them right on top of each other. Different web sites use different ones. Some of them are hard to maintain, so only survive if they are depended upon by a company with deep enough pockets. Web developers start playing a guessing game of which feature can be depended upon in the future based on the market cap of the current users.
Confusion: There’s a little quirk in how you have to write your CSS selectors. It’s documented in a ton of tutorials, though, and it’s in the regression test suite. Oh, and if you use it together with the ‘~’ operator, the first clause only applies to elements with classes assigned. You could look it up in the spec, but it hasn’t been updated for a few years because everybody just tries things out to see what works anyway, and the guys who update the spec are working on CSS5 right now. Anyway, documentation is for people who can’t watch tutorials on youtube.
End game: the web is now far more capable than it was way back in 2013. It perfectly supports the features of the Apple hardware released just yesterday! (Better upgrade those ancient ‘pads from last year, though.) There are a dozen ways to do anything you can think of. Some of them even work. On some webkit-based browsers. For now. It’s a little hard to tell what, because even if something doesn’t behave like you expect, the spec doesn’t really go into that much detail and the implementation isn’t guaranteed to match it anyway. You know, the native APIs are fairly well documented and forward-compatible, and it’s not really that hard to rewrite your app a few times, once for each native platform
Does this have to happen just because everybody standardizes on WebKit? No, no more than it has to happen because we all use silicon or TCP. If something is stable, a monoculture is fine. Well, for the most part — even TCP is showing some cracks. The above concerns only apply to a layer that has multiple viable alternatives, is rapidly advancing, needs to cover unexpected new ground and get used for unpredicted applications, requires multiple disconnected agents to coordinate, and things like that.
Can you write up a bug at bugreport.apple.com with specifics of your hardware config, sites you see it on, etc.?
Opera's shift to WebKit should concern everyone. It's likely a good decision for them, but it consolidates WebKit's position as the dominant rendering engine
What on earth are you talking about, IE still has 55% of the marketshare how on earth is webkit the dominant rendering engine at 17%-25% ? and how would a 2-3% market share that opera has make any difference?
having any dominant engine is bad, as you go from standards directing engines to the dominant engine imposing "standards".
There will always be one engine that has the biggest market share, what, you want them to be split evenly? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. And it is very nice if the dominant engine was open source and anybody could use it for their own browser, because that will significantly lower the barrier to entry for making new browsers.
The reason webkit is gaining market share is because it is an excellent piece of software. It is gaining marketshare because it is benefiting people (otherwise people would simply choose something else). What is wrong with this? What would you have them do different? would you like for them to intentionally cripple their engine so that other engines can catch up?
Webkit is only dominant in mobile. Desktop is still heavily dominated by IE. The reason it dominates in mobile is because at the moment it is the best html engine browser makers can get for mobile, and the price is right. You want more competition, sure, all you have to do is come up with a better html engine.
Nice to see I'm not the only one saying diversity is a GOOD thing. I hated when we had "Works best in IE 6" and I'll rail against "Works best in Webkit" because its bad for everybody...well except the malware writers, the day Webkit is the only one standing they'll probably be popping champagne corks because it will give them a big juicy target that runs everywhere.
While I haven't used IE since the days of the Mozilla Suite beta (I hated the UI of IE and having a giant target painted on it didn't make it any more appealing) I haven't used Opera and I'm not glad to see either of them go, the more diverse the system is the better and the closer we get to "one browser to rule them all" the closer we get towards another Code Red or NetSky only this will be worse as they'll be able to pwn the mobile AND the desktop.
Did this guy find significant problems in webkit? Probably, i have found EVERY browser has serious quirks and none of them seem to even be consistent on what those quirks are. But to me the more disturbing thing is how people just don't seem to care we appear to be just trading one master for another and for the health of the web that's just a bad idea.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not sure you can blame WebKit for JS issues unless it's tied directly to the Dom. But either way I left chrome because it is a bit shit actually. The two biggest things are how often tabs go sad faced and won't fix themselves on refresh and if something isn't perfect in the HTML it can render an obscene amount of elements trying to resolve it and performance is out the window. This has gone on for years and probably still does. So with that and being spied on it seemed going back to Firefox was the same choice. Firefox has been improving and chrome isn't really. It also still has some really dumb UI issues too.
Opera's shift to WebKit should concern everyone. It's likely a good decision for them, but it consolidates WebKit's position as the dominant rendering engine
What on earth are you talking about, IE still has 55% of the marketshare
Unless you consult any other statistic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Netmarketshare (aka NetApplications) is the only one putting IE at above 50%. All others show Chrome as the dominant browser.
And that's overall, including desktops. For mobile, Webkit has an even bigger share and now with Opera (which has a significant mobile presence) it will have a de facto monopoly there.
Chrome and Safari have... unauthorized patches? At least that was the last time I checked either of them. There might be some "support", but make no mistake: Google doesn't want you to have AdBlock. And Apple doesn't want you to have anything that sets off their NIH alarm.
As for the rest, I haven't bothered with an alternative browser in years. Firefox is open enough, configurable enough, and extendable enough to meet all of my needs. When it becomes troublesome and has true alternatives that aren't, then I'll look for another browser.
Chrome has had extensions (including AdBlock) for quite some time now.
Nice to see somebody remembers. As one of the poor bastards that was trying to use NetScape during that period i can tell you it was deep fried ass, AOHell let it fall apart so we basically only had TWO, count 'em two choices at the time, either use Opera which hit you with a big bandwidth sucking ad banner if you didn't cut them a check or IE which was banner free, not hard to see why IE won as they honestly didn't have anybody else on the field.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm running on a MacPro 3,1, showing 12 cores and 24GB and SL. The biggest issue with Safari is the JS engine and too many tabs open. That causes hangs and sometimes has interesting side effects, like having to Cmd-Tab to another window and back to "unlock" the JS engine. IIRC, even switching tabs or windows of the browser itself will fix it. This, IMHO, has nothing to do with our hardware, but is a bug in the JS engine. Safari's JS engine doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation. I think Chrome has a better JS engine implementation, personally.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Already did.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What world do you live in that non-OSS software is bug-free?
Sorry, you don't seem to have actually read what I wrote before posting your reply. Here is the relevant part again:
"Just as important, the relatively few serious bugs in the more recent versions of IE tend to be well-known, and the necessary workarounds are well-established and stable because the goalposts don't move every six weeks."
I don't see how that equates to anything like what you wrote.
On with your next point:
What, besides your own prejudice, justifies supporting a browser that you admit has some serious bugs, and also does not properly implement the web standards?
And again with the twisting of words. Here to remind you is what I actually wrote:
"While [recent versions of IE] don't have all the bleeding edge shiny, the basic functionality does generally work very reliably, and actually IE9+ have a lot of the more useful recent developments anyway. Just as important, the relatively few serious bugs in the more recent versions of IE tend to be well-known...
I put the parts you twisted in bold for you so you can see where you went wrong.
In any case, I fail to see how making decisions based on extensive practical evidence constitutes prejudice. Prejudice would be, for example, saying I was going to advocate a browser that consistently shows up more bugs in basic functionality than all the other major ones instead of IE, just because the more buggy browser is not written by Microsoft.
And there is a difference between having a feature and supporting standards. I think if you're going to claim to support a standard, the feature should actually work. Chrome has had, and in many cases continues to have, obvious and fully reported bugs in CSS rendering. These include popular CSS3 effects like gradients and rounded corners not drawing properly under various conditions. They also include basic CSS 2.1 text styling problems like the infamous letter-spacing limitations, because Chrome still relies on its own very poor text rendering rather than using the far superior tools built into various host operating systems. It's not as if these kinds of issues are big secrets; some have been in the bug tracker for years with numerous people echoing the problem.
I don't see any facts or evidence in your post -- that would presumably detract from your trolling.
I was posting in support of TFA, not trying to make an independent case of my own.
However, I have made my own case based on my own evidence on several previous occasions on this forum and elsewhere. Unfortunately, even if you cite a bunch of specific issues, the response is rarely any better than your own: someone in denial of the situation who thinks anyone criticising their beloved browser must be trolling and can't possibly have actually experienced numerous documented and repeatable bugs, even though the bug tracker is a matter of public record and mere seconds searching it would confirm the kinds of bugs people are citing.
Charge for compatibility beyond IE, and charge for any time spent submitting bug reports.
Sorry, but I'm a professional, and as such I do the job my clients hired me for. If Google would like to hire me to help test their code, I'll be happy to quote them a suitable fee like anyone else. But right now, my real, paying clients typically hire me to produce web apps that work for contractually specified targets, not to provide subsidised debugging for someone else's product.
Today, those specified targets are usually something like IE8, IE9 and IE10, because with the deliberate policy by both Google and Mozilla to avoid stable versions and push updates every few weeks, it's difficult to specify support for Chrome or Firefox in any useful way in a contract even if you do want to. Without a stable platform to test against, there is no way to write acceptance criteria that are going to be relevant for more than one release cycle of those browsers, which for many projects isn't even time to run through the QA/release process fully.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You are aware the you can remove it in Win7(not sure of Vista, I never used it)?
Yes, some of it is left behind for the Win OS to function, but the browsing capabilities/engine are taken out.
No, no you can't. You have never and will never be able to remove IE because the Trident engine (90% of the browser) is a system component in System32. IE's HTTP component is also a system component+protocol kernel driver combination.
All that happens when you "uninstall" IE is the same thing that happened when you did that in Windows XP. It deletes the 50MiB of executables from Program Files leaving all the real parts behind.
Many developers keep discussing Firebug without realizing that the Web Deverloper tool has been built in since Firefox 10 came out a year ago --MUCH longer for bleeding edge Nightly users.
It is better for design than debugging because it lacks Firebug's waterfall, but the style editor is pretty good.
IE, on the other hand, has annoying-ly poor dev tools. F12 doesn't let you ADD attributes on the fly --you might change a width attribute if it's already styled in the page source, but you can't just add "width=500" to existing elements or "text-align: justify" when you want to play around with IE-specific quirks.
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79680#c3
http://kalev.fedorapeople.org/midori_about_widgets.png
http://www.mail-archive.com/webkit-gtk@lists.webkit.org/msg01200.html
And webkitgtk is at 1.10.2 now, but this particular bug is still not fixed.
Yes - you can "fix" this by compiling webkitgtk against gtk3, but then the audio and video tags are messed up. They are transparent and have no slider.
You blame Firefox and Chrome for being buggy. You admit that IE has bugs and target it exclusively. This is somehow not hypocritical. What does it matter that the bugs are "well known" ? Isn't that the same thing as FF and Chrome not fixing bugs for years?
Beyond that you're bitching that "I shouldn't have to support Chrome for free!" So don't, and quit bitching about it. If one of the people employing you wants Firefox support they can pay for it. Or if they feel that's unreasonable they can find someone else. Since when does being a professional not mean charging for your time?
I don't know how long you've been in the business, but if your big beef is font rendering, you don't remember very far back. IE6 had a broken box model, and you had to choose between using IE-only DX-provided effects or CSS.
Your bitching is hyperbolic, hypocritical, and counterproductive. Quit while you're ahead.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The loss of one of the largest competitors in the mobile market risks entrenching a monoculture in web browsing.
Now, many people have attempted to argue against this risk by one of three arguments: that Webkit already is a monoculture on mobile browsing; that Webkit is open-source, so it can't be a "bad" monoculture; or that Webkit won't stagnant, so it can't be a "bad" monoculture. The first argument is rather specious, since it presumes that once a monoculture exists it is pointless to try to end it—walk through history, it's easier to cite examples that were broken than ones that weren't. The other two arguments are more dangerous, though, because they presume that a monoculture is bad only because of who is in charge of it, not because it is a monoculture.
The real reason why monocultures are bad are not because the people in control do bad things with it. It's because their implementations—particularly including their bugs—becomes the standards instead of the specifications themselves. And to be able to try to crack into that market, you have to be able to reverse engineer bugs. Reverse engineering bugs, even in open-source code, is far from trivial. Perhaps it's clearer to look at the problems of monoculture by case study.
In the web world, the most well-known monoculture is that of IE 6, which persisted as the sole major browser for about 4 years. One long-lasting ramification of IE is the necessity of all layout engines to support a document.all construct while pretending that they do not actually support it. This is a clear negative feature of monocultures: new things that get implemented become mandatory specifications, independent of the actual quality of their implementation. Now, some fanboys might proclaim that everything Microsoft does is inherently evil and that this is a bad example, but I will point out later known bad-behaviors of Webkit later.
What about open source monocultures? Perhaps the best example here is GCC, which was effectively the only important C compiler for Linux until about two years ago, when clang become self-hosting. This is probably the closest example I have to a mooted Webkit monoculture: a program that no one wants to write from scratch and that is maintained by necessity by a diverse group of contributors. So surely there are no aftereffects from compatibility problems for Clang, right? Well, to be able to compile code on Linux, Clang has to pretty much mimic GCC, down to command-line compatibility and implementing (almost) all of GCC's extensions to C. This also implies that you have to match various compiler intrinsics (such as those for atomic operations) exactly as GCC does: when GCC first implemented proper atomic operations for C++11, Clang was forced to change its syntax for intrinsic atomic operations to match as well.
The problem of implementations becoming the de facto standard becomes brutally clear when a radically different implementation is necessary and backwards compatibility cannot be sacrificed. IE 6's hasLayout bug is a good example here: Microsoft thought it easier to bundle an old version of the layout engine in their newest web browser to support old-compatibility webpages than to try to adaptively support it. It is much easier to justify sacking backwards compatibility in a vibrant polyculture: if a website works in only one layout engine when there are four major ones, then it is a good sign that the website is broken and needs to be fixed.
All of these may seem academic, theoretical objections, but I will point out that Webkit has already shown troubling signs that do not portend to it being a "good" monoculture. The decision to never retire old Webkit prefixes is nothing short of an arrogant practice, and clearly shows that backwards compatibility (even for nominally non-production features) will be difficult to sacrifice. The feature that became CSS gradients underwent cosmetic changes that made things easier for authors that wouldn't have happened in a monoculture layout engine world. Chrome e
Because every bloody time there's a browser-specific error on a site.
It's still IE.
In my current position, I have definitely had to implement at the very least twice as many Chrome workarounds as IE in the last six months. I was very surprised to see Chrome behaving oddly and Firefox and IE rendering the pages identically, as prior to that time period, I had never seen Chrome and Firefox render a page in a substantially different way.
How does Opera render it?
This is why losing another rendering engine is bad... With 2:1 you have no idea who renders incorrectly. 2:2 says you'd better check the spec* , and 3:1 basically isolates the offender.
* Although, in my experience, I find that Webkit and Presto align more often than Webkit and Gecko, or Gecko and Presto, through which follows that Gecko often does the same thing as Trident, and Trident is usually not to be trusted.
This just shows that the whole concept of using browsers and JavaScript as a development platform is flawed. Use proper native SDKs.
Having all web browsers use WebKit is more risky than have say 5 popular rendering engines because and attack will be more dispersed. It is like only one company making cars and it goes bankrupt or very concentrated top->down government.
55%? Really? statcounter has it currently at 31% http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201301. One of the sites I manage has IE down around 12-15%.
When it comes to web statistics be careful when quoting - there isn't one single statistics service that has an absolutely accurate picture. It depends a lot upon how the stats are gathered and the demographics of the people visiting the site. It also is affected by where the stats agency bends.
~ALSO~
A few years back I was working on a website and something seemed kind of funky, so I did a jscript and ran it on a php webpage that would compare user agents as I tested on Mac and Windows running various browsers. It came up with some interesting information - most of the browsers on windows included IE/Internet Explorer in the user agent information, which really skewed the results in favor. It seems (at least at that time - using XP) that MS was hijacking information.
The problem with IE the way I see it is that it doesn't auto update itself like the rest of the browsers do, so we're still having to deal with older IE installations, that's my major gripe with it at the moment.
Somewhere mid-'01 I started using Deepnet Explorer as my main broswer; it used IE's rendering engine and a few of its libraries. It had tabs, multi-thread downloads, and some other neat stuff I've forgotten; it was fast and generally rendered most pages well.
I also used IE (for Windows update, at least), Opera, and Netscape.
SVG support in webkit is to be honest, crap.
I use chrome all the time, but it renders SVG's horribly, with caching issues, and poor rending compared with IE9/10 and opera 9/10/12.
Chrome and Safari come out worst where SVG rendering is concerned,
with no current support for mesh, blur, some text functions and a few other functions, i find SVG images in chrome look jagged and pixely. Even if a user applied nice filters to these to hide this effect, they simply wouldn't load.
As a web developer, IE is still a piece of shit. The development tools for that browser are a fucking joke. They have received almost zero improvement in five years. It's simply inexcusable.
If it weren't for the fact that IE is still pretty popular, we would drop support for it for just being too much of a pain in the ass to support.
I'm still smelling skunk.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?