If that's the case then why do they keep buying windows instead of a mac?
One word. Applications.
Or even better. Familiarity.
Even if they've never used a computer before, chances are there's someone they know pretty well that can help them. 95 out of 100 times, that person will know a PC rather than a Mac.
Come back and tell me all about what Microsoft can and can't do after you've been through 10 product development cycles.
Yes, it's Microsoft, but as Scotty would say "They canna change the laws of physics", or in this case, project management. Projects have a point of diminishing returns when you throw bodies at them. On top of that, we're talking about a highly skilled set of developers needed to do this work (if it were that easy, every browser would have been 100% standards compliant years ago). They can't just throw 100 green recruits fresh out of college on the project, and skilled developers with the knowledge of the standards are hard to come by.
Microsoft also has hundreds of other projects they're working on, including getting Vista out the door. Resources, even for Microsoft, are finite. And that finite set of resources can only do so much work in a given timeframe.
Bah, I don't even know why I bother. You have an overly simplistic idea of what it takes to develop software, much less secure, stable, and standards compliant software.
Please, stop with the Acid test crap. It's meaningless. Acid2 doesn't mean anything. If Microsoft wanted to, they could pass the acid2 test in a few weeks, ignoring everything else. The fact that they didn't do this should clue you in to something. Much of what ACID2 tests is not common CSS, it's just an arbitrarily chosen subset of features, some of which aren't even part of the CSS2 standard, and some of which is illegal code.
By the way, even Firefox 2 still doesn't pass the acid2 test. Something to think about.
I already corrected myself further down. If you'd have read all the comments, you'd have seen that.
Office for the Mac exists largely because Apple paid Microsoft to do it. iTunes for Windows is necessary to support the iPod on Windows. Java is a bizarre circumstance. Even Sun hasn't ever been able to quantify the value they got from it over the years, and is now set to open source it. It's more of an OS itself than an application.
Why doesn't Apple port Safari to Windows? Pages? Keynote? Garage Band? Final Cut? Etc..?
The reason is that it give a value add. People will buy Mac's for those programs. Porting them to Windows would erode the reason for them to make Mac's.
Apple has a huge incentive to support iTunes on Windows, namely the Millions of dollars they're making selling music to Windows users. Maybe I should have said, "Barring an overpowering financial reason, there is no incentive..."
You seriously aren't a software developer, are you? Mozilla has been trying to make a standards compliant broser for nearly 10 YEARS and has yet to succeed, and they have a lot of people that feel that standards compliance is a priority.
It's simply not as simple as you want to believe. Standards are often written without regard for their implementability. Some standards are just to expensive to implement for the vast majority of users (example: export keyword in C++).
You are so wrong on this, it's unbelievable... "a couple of months" my ass.
They don't anymore. They did, at one time, because of a deal with with Apple to do so. And they produced IE for Solaris, but that was really a half-hearted attempt using Wind/U emulation layers. Neither are supported any longer.
Ummm.. i'm not sure what your point is. The person I was responding to said "Is he saying that they didn't have time to ship it, or is he just avoiding the question?"
This is kind of a stupid question to ask, since the original question was "if you'd had time...?", obviously they didn't have time, that was the point of the question.
I, however, took the posters question to mean something else, perhaps wrongly.
How could a short answer be acceptable when a full explanation isn't? You confuse explanations with excuses. They're not the same thing. Writing a standards compliant browser isn't something they can just throw bodies at. It requires skill, experience, knowledge of the standards, and a desire by the developers to do that kind of work (aptitude, you might say).
Do you really think 9 women can make a baby in 1 month?
THe statement was not "What users expect from IE", it was "What users expect from a web browser". While users may indeed expect a 1973 pinto to explode if you crash into the back of it, they don't expect that behavior from cars in general.
I think he did ramble a little on some of those questions and lost sight of the question being asked, however I think some of those questions were likely unanswerable for him, since they would have implied support of certain features in the next version (something Microsoft got burned bad on in Vista and I think they're a little gun shy). I also think he did a good job of answering the question about new features of IE that aren't (or weren't when they were developing it) in FF. Quicktabs, Deep RSS integration, Simple List Extensions, Anti-Phishing, etc.. were all very concrete answers.
As for the rendering question, he basically said... "No, we don't yet fully support every CSS feature, we did the best we could in the timeframe we had and prioritized the worst problems to fix first". Simply put, if MS waited to ship IE7 until it was 100% compliant, we'd probably be waiting until the next decade.
Umm.. no. Browsers have not been running in protected mode on Linux for years. In fact, they still aren't. Protected mode doesn't mean "run as a normal user", it means "runs with the minimum privileges needed to do it's job, even if the user has more privileges". For example, Ie running in protected does not have access to the majority of documents in the users home folder. What Linux browser can claim that?
He's not justifying the lack of support by the edge cases, he's justifying the prioritization of features. A lot of people seem to think that Microsoft should just put every developer in the company on pushing a rewritten IE out the door, ignoring that this takes time. It took Mozilla 5 *YEARS* to rewrite Netscape, and then several more years to get to the current level of support after that. The IE team has only been working on IE7 for 2 years.
You can complain all you want that they had all the time in the world to do this, but that doesn't change the fact that they didn't do it (until 2 years ago) and are now doing a lot of work given the short time frame.
I think you're reading a lot more into what he's saying than he meant.
Here's what he was saying:
1) They don't have the resources to completely rewrite the browser for full standards compliance within the time frame they had to ship the next version 2) Given 1) above, that meant they had to choose a subset of functionality to support. 3) Given 2) above, they focused on the biggest problems developers were complaining about first, prioritizing them by what developers were telling them were the most important (ignoring that many developers say full standards compliance is the most important, since that's not feasible based on 1) above).
Seriously, if you were in his shoes. If you had X number of developers, and Y timeframe until the next release, where X * Y = Z total man hours available, and Z T Total man hours required to rewrite the browser to be fully standards compliant, what would YOU do?
While I don't necessarily agree, Microsoft's position seems to be that IE is only licensed for use on Windows, and if they were going to allow Wine to work, then Microsoft would effectively have to give you a free license for Windows to use it. By that logic, you need to own a copy of Windows to use IE, and Wine allows you to use IE without owning a copy.
He's saying that they had a schedule to meet, and the features that made the cut were all they could get done reliably by the ship date given their (the ie team's, not Microsoft's) resources. Certainly, Microsoft could have put every developer in the company working on IE, and given herculean management attempts, maybe even shipped a perfect browser. But that's not particularly feasible.
Honestly, you don't see Apple making Safari for Linux and Windows (and though Safari is based on KHTML, it's a lot more too).
Operating System vendors have no incentive, no matter who they are, to make their products available on other platforms. Open Source apps have the advantage that those with a little more objectivity can take the code and release it for a competitor, but that's not exactly the same thing.
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If that's the case then why do they keep buying windows instead of a mac?
One word. Applications.
Or even better. Familiarity.
Even if they've never used a computer before, chances are there's someone they know pretty well that can help them. 95 out of 100 times, that person will know a PC rather than a Mac.
Come back and tell me all about what Microsoft can and can't do after you've been through 10 product development cycles.
Yes, it's Microsoft, but as Scotty would say "They canna change the laws of physics", or in this case, project management. Projects have a point of diminishing returns when you throw bodies at them. On top of that, we're talking about a highly skilled set of developers needed to do this work (if it were that easy, every browser would have been 100% standards compliant years ago). They can't just throw 100 green recruits fresh out of college on the project, and skilled developers with the knowledge of the standards are hard to come by.
Microsoft also has hundreds of other projects they're working on, including getting Vista out the door. Resources, even for Microsoft, are finite. And that finite set of resources can only do so much work in a given timeframe.
Bah, I don't even know why I bother. You have an overly simplistic idea of what it takes to develop software, much less secure, stable, and standards compliant software.
Please, stop with the Acid test crap. It's meaningless. Acid2 doesn't mean anything. If Microsoft wanted to, they could pass the acid2 test in a few weeks, ignoring everything else. The fact that they didn't do this should clue you in to something. Much of what ACID2 tests is not common CSS, it's just an arbitrarily chosen subset of features, some of which aren't even part of the CSS2 standard, and some of which is illegal code.
By the way, even Firefox 2 still doesn't pass the acid2 test. Something to think about.
I already corrected myself further down. If you'd have read all the comments, you'd have seen that.
Office for the Mac exists largely because Apple paid Microsoft to do it. iTunes for Windows is necessary to support the iPod on Windows. Java is a bizarre circumstance. Even Sun hasn't ever been able to quantify the value they got from it over the years, and is now set to open source it. It's more of an OS itself than an application.
Why doesn't Apple port Safari to Windows? Pages? Keynote? Garage Band? Final Cut? Etc..?
The reason is that it give a value add. People will buy Mac's for those programs. Porting them to Windows would erode the reason for them to make Mac's.
Apple has a huge incentive to support iTunes on Windows, namely the Millions of dollars they're making selling music to Windows users. Maybe I should have said, "Barring an overpowering financial reason, there is no incentive..."
You seriously aren't a software developer, are you? Mozilla has been trying to make a standards compliant broser for nearly 10 YEARS and has yet to succeed, and they have a lot of people that feel that standards compliance is a priority.
It's simply not as simple as you want to believe. Standards are often written without regard for their implementability. Some standards are just to expensive to implement for the vast majority of users (example: export keyword in C++).
You are so wrong on this, it's unbelievable... "a couple of months" my ass.
Er.. sorry, I misread. Thought you said IE, rather than Office.
They don't anymore. They did, at one time, because of a deal with with Apple to do so. And they produced IE for Solaris, but that was really a half-hearted attempt using Wind/U emulation layers. Neither are supported any longer.
Ummm.. i'm not sure what your point is. The person I was responding to said "Is he saying that they didn't have time to ship it, or is he just avoiding the question?"
This is kind of a stupid question to ask, since the original question was "if you'd had time...?", obviously they didn't have time, that was the point of the question.
I, however, took the posters question to mean something else, perhaps wrongly.
How could a short answer be acceptable when a full explanation isn't? You confuse explanations with excuses. They're not the same thing. Writing a standards compliant browser isn't something they can just throw bodies at. It requires skill, experience, knowledge of the standards, and a desire by the developers to do that kind of work (aptitude, you might say).
Do you really think 9 women can make a baby in 1 month?
THe statement was not "What users expect from IE", it was "What users expect from a web browser". While users may indeed expect a 1973 pinto to explode if you crash into the back of it, they don't expect that behavior from cars in general.
What does IE6 have to do with this?
I think he did ramble a little on some of those questions and lost sight of the question being asked, however I think some of those questions were likely unanswerable for him, since they would have implied support of certain features in the next version (something Microsoft got burned bad on in Vista and I think they're a little gun shy). I also think he did a good job of answering the question about new features of IE that aren't (or weren't when they were developing it) in FF. Quicktabs, Deep RSS integration, Simple List Extensions, Anti-Phishing, etc.. were all very concrete answers.
As for the rendering question, he basically said... "No, we don't yet fully support every CSS feature, we did the best we could in the timeframe we had and prioritized the worst problems to fix first". Simply put, if MS waited to ship IE7 until it was 100% compliant, we'd probably be waiting until the next decade.
So, out of curiosity, what kind of answers would you have found acceptable?
"Yes, we suck. Don't use any of our products. Oh, and sell all your stock too. We're just going to close up shop and die"?
I don't quite understand your logic. How does IE's past performance change what users expect from a web browser?
Umm.. no. Browsers have not been running in protected mode on Linux for years. In fact, they still aren't. Protected mode doesn't mean "run as a normal user", it means "runs with the minimum privileges needed to do it's job, even if the user has more privileges". For example, Ie running in protected does not have access to the majority of documents in the users home folder. What Linux browser can claim that?
He's not justifying the lack of support by the edge cases, he's justifying the prioritization of features. A lot of people seem to think that Microsoft should just put every developer in the company on pushing a rewritten IE out the door, ignoring that this takes time. It took Mozilla 5 *YEARS* to rewrite Netscape, and then several more years to get to the current level of support after that. The IE team has only been working on IE7 for 2 years.
You can complain all you want that they had all the time in the world to do this, but that doesn't change the fact that they didn't do it (until 2 years ago) and are now doing a lot of work given the short time frame.
Sorry, that should be "and Z < T Total man hours", bracket eaten by html
I think you're reading a lot more into what he's saying than he meant.
Here's what he was saying:
1) They don't have the resources to completely rewrite the browser for full standards compliance within the time frame they had to ship the next version
2) Given 1) above, that meant they had to choose a subset of functionality to support.
3) Given 2) above, they focused on the biggest problems developers were complaining about first, prioritizing them by what developers were telling them were the most important (ignoring that many developers say full standards compliance is the most important, since that's not feasible based on 1) above).
Seriously, if you were in his shoes. If you had X number of developers, and Y timeframe until the next release, where X * Y = Z total man hours available, and Z T Total man hours required to rewrite the browser to be fully standards compliant, what would YOU do?
While I don't necessarily agree, Microsoft's position seems to be that IE is only licensed for use on Windows, and if they were going to allow Wine to work, then Microsoft would effectively have to give you a free license for Windows to use it. By that logic, you need to own a copy of Windows to use IE, and Wine allows you to use IE without owning a copy.
He's talking about IE7 development, and you're talking about IE6. How can you possibly think your comments even mean anything in that context?
By the way, PNG support isn't tested by any validator, so i'm not sure how claiming it passed validation makes your comments about PNG relevant.
That's an odd comment.
By your logic, Mozilla shuns standards as well, since they haven't made shipping a 100% standards compliant browser a priority. Oh, and Opera too.
He's saying that they had a schedule to meet, and the features that made the cut were all they could get done reliably by the ship date given their (the ie team's, not Microsoft's) resources. Certainly, Microsoft could have put every developer in the company working on IE, and given herculean management attempts, maybe even shipped a perfect browser. But that's not particularly feasible.
Honestly, you don't see Apple making Safari for Linux and Windows (and though Safari is based on KHTML, it's a lot more too).
Operating System vendors have no incentive, no matter who they are, to make their products available on other platforms. Open Source apps have the advantage that those with a little more objectivity can take the code and release it for a competitor, but that's not exactly the same thing.
Thing is, Intel is already shipping 45nm chips, though 45nm CPU's won't be shipping for a while yet. It's already working on sub-45nm technology.