First, "the world changed forever" -- really? If you're not at least saying that ironically, I'm going to find it hard to take anything you say seriously.
Now, certain iPhone apps do need native APIs. Certain will want OpenGL, and I'm not sure Mobile Safari supports WebGL. But you don't have to look very far to find an example of a developer who, disgruntled with the iPhone app store review process, has chosen instead to release it as a web app.
There's still the problem of having a good way to back up local storage....
I would suspect many apps using local storage would use it as a cache for server storage... but really, that's up to the browser. On my system, I can simply back up "~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Local Storage" and be done. Looking inside, it's a few easily-read sqlite databases, stored as protocol_domain_port, more or less.
On Linux, at least, backing this up is a trivial shell script.
the DOM is beyond half assed as a GUI environment. There's not even a drag and drop mechanism built in that works across all browsers.
There is, however, a standard for drag and drop, and several libraries which emulate it in all browsers.
There's no way to guarantee that your handlers won't get stripped out by some overzealous UI library that you load.
Sure there is, just don't use such an overzealous UI library! That's like complaining that X11 sucks because it's theoretically possible to make a widget toolkit that sucks.
Basic functionality like contentEditable (for WYSIWYG editing) is barely supported in any browser, replete with hundreds of serious bugs that make it very hard to deal with.
I haven't touched it, so maybe you're right. Then again, there are more than enough tools to build your own.
There's no way to set up an automatically recurring callback with a guaranteed period.
That's the nature of a single-threaded system. But setInterval works, and I really don't see why it's inadequate for a GUI system.
There's no way to spawn multiple threads of concurrent execution (except for a FireFox-specific mechanism).
Google "web workers" -- it's not Firefox-specific.
There's no standard way to talk to hardware.
That's by design. What hardware do you need to talk to?
Even simple things like specifying which UI elements should grow proportional to the window size is an utter pain.
Assign a fixed size to elements which shouldn't grow, assign a percentage to the ones which should. This has been known for years. I'm sure you've found something that's "an utter pain", but what is it?
Creating clickable buttons that don't get their text content selected can be rather entertaining.
Your ShellScriptGames link suggests you're not an utter moron, but you're losing credibility here...
<button>...duh?
Convincing the browser to not deselect the selected text in a contentEditable region when you do so is doubly so.
I'll again grant that I don't know how this actually works.
Then, you have that fun box model that only a committee could love (all of us are dumber than any of us).
What is it about the box model you don't like? This is actually not a rhetorical question -- I'm sure it has flaws, I just don't really know about them.
Don't get me started on trying to do column layouts with CSS. I could go into specifics, but if you've ever tried to build any significant web application, you're already nodding in agreement....
I'm shaking my head... CSS3 supports columns natively, to take one example.
Yeah, it's going in the right direction. It's got a long way to go, unfortunately.
I will agree with this, absolutely. However, most of your complaints are addressed with current or future standards, much of it supported now -- for example, I'm using a Chrome beta, and I was able to see multicolumn layouts. (If you have to support IE, how are you getting local storage and CSS animation to work?)
you're still stuck in the browser, so the user experience isn't quite as good as a native app.
People always say that, but whenever I ask, I can never get a straight answer.
What, exactly, isn't quite as good as a native app, at least in the realm of things you'd even consider making a web app for?
Also, you have all of the overhead of the browser, so even the leanest and meanest Javascript will have a hard time keeping up with the speed of a native app.
Depends what you mean by "native" -- in many tests, v8 (from Chrome) is comparable to any scripting language, even faster than most.
At least, that has been my experience with the iPhone and Mobile Safari.
I have absolutely no idea how Firefox compares to Mobile Safari -- however, the summary indicates Firefox Mobile claims to be faster.
Mostly because it's the difference between singular and plural. While I might shorten Pointy-Haired Boss to PHB, I would also shorten Pointy-Haired Bosses to PHBs, and there is a fundamental difference between one PHB and many PHBs -- just ask Peter Gibbons.
It means I can either spend that much less time working, or spend that much more time actually making progress rather than supporting Microsoft's mistake.
No, it means that your competitors will undercut you by 20% unless you also pass the savings off to the person with the purse strings.
I think that's implied by "more time making progress" -- which would allow me to undercut my competitors by 20%. That 20% would add up to another project eventually -- which would make me my job more productive and more fun, even if there's no measurable gain for me.
On the other hand, if my competitors are slow to figure it out, I could simply take one day a week off and remain competitive.
Quote me, then, explicitly. Everything I've said is still right here -- if I actually made this claim, it should be obvious.
The point you tried to refute, I will give you one more chance:
The fact that you won't even read my refutation doesn't invalidate it. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and paste it again, now from two posts ago:
Ah, I see -- you must be living in the dream world where the latest release of IE actually makes an effort to support web standards... So no, it's not just the specific version involved...
You "addressed" this by claiming that the effort was there, but I couldn't see it because I am an "angry monkey banging on a keyboard". You never actually addressed the fact that no release of IE has come close to the other browsers.
As I explained to you, the fact of the matter is that a large portion of the world does not update their browsers to new versions. FireFox 3.x does not entirely support DOM2 yet
And as I explained to you:
IE can't compete on any measurable test of compliance, nor have I seen anyone actually claim it's more compliant. The strongest argument anyone seems to be able to make is that other browsers aren't perfectly compliant, as if that means they're all "just as bad" as IE.
Here, I am indeed referring to the latest version of IE -- yet this has been true pretty much since Firefox has existed, and arguably was true for much of the lifetime of Mozilla -- you have to reach back into the days of Netscape to find a time when the Mozilla codebase was less compliant than IE.
Now, do you claim IE is more compliant than the other browsers I mentioned? Do you actually claim the other browsers are just as bad?
If the answer to both of these is "no", I don't see what your point is, or where we disagree. Yes, as you say, there will be people who don't upgrade, and they will be a problem -- however, I suspect Firefox 2 is still much easier to support than IE6.
I am an Opera user, and have been for many many many years (long before FireFox.) I am not pro-internet explorer nor am I pro-microsoft.
I haven't accused you of being so in this discussion -- nor am I an anti-Micro$oft FOSS zealot. I have engaged you on specific points.
This problem would have existed even if Microsoft never created a browser.
To a much lesser degree, yes, and I've provided numbers of how much less effort I would have to put into supporting additional browsers if IE didn't exist.
You might have a point in that much of the rush to standardize is a reaction to just how bad IE is -- but if that's the case, I'm not sure we can really know how different things would be if IE didn't exist. For one thing, we'd likely still be using Netscape, meaning Mozilla would never have been created, meaning Firefox wouldn't exist.
This is also not the point you have been trying to make. In particular:
There is a market of IE6 users. Either support them, or don't. Stop being a fucking crybaby and blaming the effort involved to support them on others. You are paid for that effort, jackass.
This is one of several side points you made -- this point has nothing to do with whether the problem would exist without IE. This point is merely calling me a "crybaby" for suggesting the problem exists at all, and further implying that it's not a problem if I'm getting paid for it. The first I didn't address, as it's childish name-calling -- the second, I refuted pretty thoroughly.
So you've now clung to the one claim you feel I haven't refuted -- for what reason, I can only guess, since the only real disagreement there is that you seem to think my argument revolves around IE6 users not upgrading.
...when it works. It doesn't have hardware accelerated 3D, and I've had trouble getting certain things working under a VM. For example, I had a little USB device that only works under Windows 98 -- it would be great if a VM could access that, though it'd also be dangerous unless done right (I don't want my VM talking to every USB device, just that one).
I seem to remember that the Parallels implementation uses some code from Wine, or maybe it's licensed from Cedega -- but it has exactly the same performance and compatibility issues as Wine on Linux.
The only difference is that you've got an entire Windows installation, so it's a lot easier to deal with things like copy protection and weird DLL dependencies.
But I would guess performance would be just slightly faster than Wine, especially for any Direct3D-accelerated stuff. (OpenGL would approach native.)
..and wont (rightly) update 2.x to any version of 3
That is true, and I don't believe I claimed it did. It will, however, update 3 to 3.5, after asking permission.
Way to miss the point.
Spell it out for me. How, exactly, am I missing the point here?
The effort is there, its just not obvious to
anyone who's been watching.
It frequently comes across as too little, too late, especially when their competitors are all much farther along than they are.
You can talk about that Acid3 all you want.. (I am running a browser that scored 100/100 long before FireFox, so why arent you running Opera?)
Because my current browser is also open source, and provides several features Opera doesn't.
The point is not which browser is fastest to win a particular test, or which is most compliant.
The point is that most browsers are reasonably close, and getting closer. IE stands out as being by far the worst, and that gap isn't narrowing significantly. It's especially telling when there are several rendering engines available under licenses that would allow them to be included in IE, but Microsoft has chosen to instead try to bring theirs up to speed.
but its meaningless shit.
For an angry monkey, I sure took longer to resort to personal attacks, and now to profanity.
Nobody supports DOM2 completely,
What's your point?
This vaguely sounds like the Creationist who says, "Aha! The universe is expanding faster than they thought! See, science can be wrong! It's really no better than faith. Evolution is just a theory, just like the theory of Intelligent Design."
IE can't compete on any measurable test of compliance, nor have I seen anyone actually claim it's more compliant. The strongest argument anyone seems to be able to make is that other browsers aren't perfectly compliant, as if that means they're all "just as bad" as IE.
Yet the fact remains: I can develop a website that runs flawlessly (of course) in the browser I develop it with. I may find a glitch or two in other browsers, causing me to spend maybe an hour or so a month dealing with other browsers. If I were to try to support IE6, it could take (has taken) one day a week.
Stop being a fucking crybaby and blaming the effort involved to support them on others. You are paid for that effort, jackass.
"Angry monkey" -- projection, much?
What makes you think being paid for it is a justification? Did you even bother to think about possible rebuttals before bashing on your keyboard? Two obvious ones spring to mind:
I could be paid to wash dishes for a living. That doesn't mean I enjoy doing so. A dishwashing machine might put me out of work, but it's still a good idea, and I'd probably enjoy my new job better. (And in case it wasn't obvious: This was an analogy.)
When people pay me to work, if IE didn't exist (or when I don't have to support it), that immediately cuts 20% of my time on the project, thus 20% of the cost of implementing it. It means I can either spend that much less time working, or spend that much more time actually making progress rather than supporting Microsoft's mistake.
I mean, really, three words: Broken. Window. Fallacy.
If it magically became todays webkit build then 8 years from now you will be saying how shitty it is that the outdated rendering engine is included
You seem to be assuming that my complaint is that it's old.
No, my complaint is that it's IE. 32/100 on Acid3, and that's with an IE9 preview. Firefox gets 95/100 today, and Safari (released!) and Chrome Beta get 100/100, perfect test runs.
I don't know that I've ever heard a web developer complain about any browser other than IE, certainly not about them being "moving targets". It's not hard to make a standard page that's reasonably future-proof. It's just hard to do so, and also have it work with IE, without IE-specific patches -- thus, it's very easy to create something that renders correctly in IE, but will break in some other engine.
Again, I don't necessarily blame them for how they got into this -- one point that's often made is that certain standards we've come to rely on were not finalized when IE6 was released, though they were somewhat widely deployed.
should be engineered out of the OS.
That isn't what I meant to imply. I mean to imply that they should engineer themselves out of having to maintain the IE engine in particular. Second best case for Microsoft right now would be to build IE10 on Webkit, and only leave the current IE8 engine in there for compatibility's sake, hoping to slowly phase it to something optional (like XP mode on Windows 7), and eventually abandon it completely.
Best case would be to do that with the rendering component, but get out of the browser business entirely.
Yes, I think these would be good for Microsoft. Less software they have to maintain, when others seem perfectly willing to fill that niche. Happier users. Better all around.
Ditz for per-project tracking. It just sits there in your repository (which you should have). I used Git for a repository. This meant that the change that fixed a problem would also close the bug, making things much more closely tied than something like Trac could hope to be. (Ever wanted to know which branch still has a given bug open? Now you can.)
I've also used Ktimetracker, back when it was called Karm, to track billable hours. The advantage of a GUI/desktop time tracker, in addition to being KDE-based, is that it can do things like notice which desktop I'm on, notice when I become idle, and punchin/punchout with a global keystroke -- these kinds of things are more difficult (though not impossible) with a tool closer to Ditz.
I have not, however, used both of these at the same time.
Isn't this what the Open Source Initiative [opensource.org] does already?
My understanding is that the OSI tries to declare whether a particular license counts as "open source" or not. They do track redundant licenses.
Doesn't the EFF ask you to transfer ownership/copyrights to them so they can take care of copyright issues?
Indeed, and many projects ask you to transfer copyrights to them to allow them to change license at will. This is a reasonably fair deal -- it means your code gets accepted, and if the license allows it, you can always create your own fork just before they change licenses. But it also means that the community can decide if/when to go GPL3, for example. Setting "any future version" is putting too much faith in the FSF, I think, but if you don't do that and do allow people to contribute while retaining copyright, you end up with a situation like the Linux kernel, which will likely be forever GPLv2.
I shudder when Microsoft tries to: a) "standardize" something, and b) "popularize" it.
This appears to at least be trying to be an independent organization. And you also didn't address that #3 is an important point, though one that I don't think you really need an organization to make:
There should be a standard set of best practices for how corporations should participate in open source. We've seen it done wrong so many times before.
For example -- remember when IBM ported Linux to their mainframe platform? They did so behind closed doors, only releasing the code to the community when it was done. Aside from potentially being a bitch to merge, this was really cruel to the community which had been trying to do the same thing independently. On the other hand, "release early, release often" doesn't really need an organization to tell you to do that.
The one way I can see this really working is if the organization were to provide corporate-y things, like training and seminars, for executives and developers at companies who want to participate in open source, and don't want to look like assholes doing it.
Now, the unfortunate thing is that Steve Ballmer continues to make truly retarded statements about open source (GPL = virus! Linux violates our patents!) on a fairly regular basis. Fortunately, Microsoft doesn't seem to be following his example. For all the paranoia about things like mono -- the fact that it might have submarine patents from Microsoft -- has any ever been justified? Since SCO died, has Microsoft actually done anything directly to undermine open source -- and, in particular, have they ever done so while appearing to support it?
The fact of the matter is that the same people running an old copy of IE would also be running an old copy of one of those other browsers.
Possible, though unlikely -- the default configuration of Firefox on Windows is to auto-update, and this has been the case for some time.
You are living in a dream world.
Yes, I must have imagined the years I spent as a professional web developer.
what woe-is-me excuses will you have when FireFox is up to version 7 but an uncomfortable portion of the market is still running 3.5?
Ah, I see -- you must be living in the dream world where the latest release of IE actually makes an effort to support web standards. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all have 100/100 renderings of Acid3, at least in a developer version. Even the developer versions of IE haven't managed to score even 30/100.
So no, it's not just the specific version involved -- we actually made a decision at one point to stop supporting IE6, and only support IE7 and later. It helped, but it still didn't let us get rid of our ie.css file -- and there was no corresponding browser-specific css for any other browser.
Specifically, they require you to go through technical support before they'll even talk to you about a refund. Tech support is free -- the idea is that if you're returning it because of some aspect of it being "broken", they should be given a chance to fix that.
Try downloading any HTML engine -- Gecko, Webkit, anything. I've done some playing around with Webkit. It comes with a demo "browser"-like application, but it is hilariously short of a browser -- no caching, no bookmarks, no add-ons or extensions...
Yes, the engine is still there. In a way, it has to stay -- there are tons of applications (non-Microsoft applications) which rely on a generic HTML engine being provided as part of Windows. Microsoft can't remove it, and if they replace it with something else, they'd break hundreds of apps, and have to admit IE sucks.
So I don't really blame them for leaving the engine, though I do think it's a shitty situation and one that they should be engineering themselves out of.
I'm still grateful that IE, the browser, can actually be removed.
First of all, I don't see the ballot requiring 12 different browsers. (Disclaimer: I didn't read TFA. Maybe it does.)
But the sad, simple truth is that IE has been dead last, by a huge margin, ever since Netscape 4 died. I can develop a web app and have it work on:
Firefox
Safari
Chrome
Opera
Epiphany
Konqueror
OmniWeb
SeaMonkey
iCab
Camino
To name just a few...
And it'll break on IE. In different ways on IE6, IE7, and IE8. And I'll have to spend easily 20% of the development time hacking around IE.
So no...
All this decision will do is increase the number of those retarded "This webpage does not support your browser. Go get a real browser to view this site!" messages.
Unless the browsers I've listed really drop the ball, that's unlikely. We might list browsers a page has been tested with, but at the end of the day,we'll slap a W3C logo on it and say it works. The most we'll do is go out of our way to tell IE users to download a real browser -- but that's because IE is about the only non-real-browser we're likely to run into.
I doubt it. Much more likely, it will result in hilarity, much like contextual ads. I don't know, I can see how that would inspire rage, but it just makes me laugh.
You seem to be implying that this is what the GPL is working towards. It's not.
BSD licenses are far closer, but no one forces you to release stuff BSD-licensed, either. In fact, I'd imagine many people who contribute to BSD projects are as appalled by Microsoft's behavior here as you are.
And I've never heard Microsoft described as the "king" of software development before.
If this was truly an "unlocked" phone, especially if it's meant to be a developer-friendly phone, I don't see how they could add on-device ads that I couldn't remove.
it's trivial to add smoothness and human-like errors to the movement.
At which point, it just becomes an arms race. Add a human-like delay, and a human can win. Add "human-like" misses, and chances are, they'll show a predictable pattern.
Client knows where enemy is (because it has to be drawn).
There are several ways to fool this kind of cheat, however. One possibility (making it up as I go) is to send false information about an enemy position, such that it likely won't be drawn (behind/in a wall, or with an invisible model) and watch for clients that immediately snap towards that target.
Another problem is ESP, warnings and other such cheats that do not directly interface gameplay, but give cheater a huge advantage because he gets a lot more info than other players.
To a certain extent, you can't really do anything about this. For example, if your game is something like Doom 3, so you've got a lot of darkness, or maybe you've got a nice sniper spot that's hidden by HDR bloom, you might have a player who is just very observant, or you might have a player with worse hardware so they have to turn effects off, or you might have a player who deliberately turns those effects off (and maybe loads bright orange models for the other players) in order to see.
On the other hand, aside from the misdirection I've mentioned, one thing that helps a lot is to not send information the player doesn't need. For example, Counter-Strike traditionally sends positional information to all players, all the time. One of the many admin mods only sends updates for players you'd be able to see/hear.
Slashdot Mirror
First, "the world changed forever" -- really? If you're not at least saying that ironically, I'm going to find it hard to take anything you say seriously.
Now, certain iPhone apps do need native APIs. Certain will want OpenGL, and I'm not sure Mobile Safari supports WebGL. But you don't have to look very far to find an example of a developer who, disgruntled with the iPhone app store review process, has chosen instead to release it as a web app.
There's still the problem of having a good way to back up local storage....
I would suspect many apps using local storage would use it as a cache for server storage... but really, that's up to the browser. On my system, I can simply back up "~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Local Storage" and be done. Looking inside, it's a few easily-read sqlite databases, stored as protocol_domain_port, more or less.
On Linux, at least, backing this up is a trivial shell script.
the DOM is beyond half assed as a GUI environment. There's not even a drag and drop mechanism built in that works across all browsers.
There is, however, a standard for drag and drop, and several libraries which emulate it in all browsers.
There's no way to guarantee that your handlers won't get stripped out by some overzealous UI library that you load.
Sure there is, just don't use such an overzealous UI library! That's like complaining that X11 sucks because it's theoretically possible to make a widget toolkit that sucks.
Basic functionality like contentEditable (for WYSIWYG editing) is barely supported in any browser, replete with hundreds of serious bugs that make it very hard to deal with.
I haven't touched it, so maybe you're right. Then again, there are more than enough tools to build your own.
There's no way to set up an automatically recurring callback with a guaranteed period.
That's the nature of a single-threaded system. But setInterval works, and I really don't see why it's inadequate for a GUI system.
There's no way to spawn multiple threads of concurrent execution (except for a FireFox-specific mechanism).
Google "web workers" -- it's not Firefox-specific.
There's no standard way to talk to hardware.
That's by design. What hardware do you need to talk to?
Even simple things like specifying which UI elements should grow proportional to the window size is an utter pain.
Assign a fixed size to elements which shouldn't grow, assign a percentage to the ones which should. This has been known for years. I'm sure you've found something that's "an utter pain", but what is it?
Creating clickable buttons that don't get their text content selected can be rather entertaining.
Your ShellScriptGames link suggests you're not an utter moron, but you're losing credibility here...
<button> ...duh?
Convincing the browser to not deselect the selected text in a contentEditable region when you do so is doubly so.
I'll again grant that I don't know how this actually works.
Then, you have that fun box model that only a committee could love (all of us are dumber than any of us).
What is it about the box model you don't like? This is actually not a rhetorical question -- I'm sure it has flaws, I just don't really know about them.
Don't get me started on trying to do column layouts with CSS. I could go into specifics, but if you've ever tried to build any significant web application, you're already nodding in agreement....
I'm shaking my head... CSS3 supports columns natively, to take one example.
Yeah, it's going in the right direction. It's got a long way to go, unfortunately.
I will agree with this, absolutely. However, most of your complaints are addressed with current or future standards, much of it supported now -- for example, I'm using a Chrome beta, and I was able to see multicolumn layouts. (If you have to support IE, how are you getting local storage and CSS animation to work?)
you're still stuck in the browser, so the user experience isn't quite as good as a native app.
People always say that, but whenever I ask, I can never get a straight answer.
What, exactly, isn't quite as good as a native app, at least in the realm of things you'd even consider making a web app for?
Also, you have all of the overhead of the browser, so even the leanest and meanest Javascript will have a hard time keeping up with the speed of a native app.
Depends what you mean by "native" -- in many tests, v8 (from Chrome) is comparable to any scripting language, even faster than most.
At least, that has been my experience with the iPhone and Mobile Safari.
I have absolutely no idea how Firefox compares to Mobile Safari -- however, the summary indicates Firefox Mobile claims to be faster.
Mostly because it's the difference between singular and plural. While I might shorten Pointy-Haired Boss to PHB, I would also shorten Pointy-Haired Bosses to PHBs, and there is a fundamental difference between one PHB and many PHBs -- just ask Peter Gibbons.
Misquoted from here.
It means I can either spend that much less time working, or spend that much more time actually making progress rather than supporting Microsoft's mistake.
No, it means that your competitors will undercut you by 20% unless you also pass the savings off to the person with the purse strings.
I think that's implied by "more time making progress" -- which would allow me to undercut my competitors by 20%. That 20% would add up to another project eventually -- which would make me my job more productive and more fun, even if there's no measurable gain for me.
On the other hand, if my competitors are slow to figure it out, I could simply take one day a week off and remain competitive.
Yes, you did.
Quote me, then, explicitly. Everything I've said is still right here -- if I actually made this claim, it should be obvious.
The point you tried to refute, I will give you one more chance:
The fact that you won't even read my refutation doesn't invalidate it. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and paste it again, now from two posts ago:
Ah, I see -- you must be living in the dream world where the latest release of IE actually makes an effort to support web standards... So no, it's not just the specific version involved...
You "addressed" this by claiming that the effort was there, but I couldn't see it because I am an "angry monkey banging on a keyboard". You never actually addressed the fact that no release of IE has come close to the other browsers.
As I explained to you, the fact of the matter is that a large portion of the world does not update their browsers to new versions. FireFox 3.x does not entirely support DOM2 yet
And as I explained to you:
IE can't compete on any measurable test of compliance, nor have I seen anyone actually claim it's more compliant. The strongest argument anyone seems to be able to make is that other browsers aren't perfectly compliant, as if that means they're all "just as bad" as IE.
Here, I am indeed referring to the latest version of IE -- yet this has been true pretty much since Firefox has existed, and arguably was true for much of the lifetime of Mozilla -- you have to reach back into the days of Netscape to find a time when the Mozilla codebase was less compliant than IE.
Now, do you claim IE is more compliant than the other browsers I mentioned? Do you actually claim the other browsers are just as bad?
If the answer to both of these is "no", I don't see what your point is, or where we disagree. Yes, as you say, there will be people who don't upgrade, and they will be a problem -- however, I suspect Firefox 2 is still much easier to support than IE6.
I am an Opera user, and have been for many many many years (long before FireFox.) I am not pro-internet explorer nor am I pro-microsoft.
I haven't accused you of being so in this discussion -- nor am I an anti-Micro$oft FOSS zealot. I have engaged you on specific points.
This problem would have existed even if Microsoft never created a browser.
To a much lesser degree, yes, and I've provided numbers of how much less effort I would have to put into supporting additional browsers if IE didn't exist.
You might have a point in that much of the rush to standardize is a reaction to just how bad IE is -- but if that's the case, I'm not sure we can really know how different things would be if IE didn't exist. For one thing, we'd likely still be using Netscape, meaning Mozilla would never have been created, meaning Firefox wouldn't exist.
This is also not the point you have been trying to make. In particular:
There is a market of IE6 users. Either support them, or don't. Stop being a fucking crybaby and blaming the effort involved to support them on others. You are paid for that effort, jackass.
This is one of several side points you made -- this point has nothing to do with whether the problem would exist without IE. This point is merely calling me a "crybaby" for suggesting the problem exists at all, and further implying that it's not a problem if I'm getting paid for it. The first I didn't address, as it's childish name-calling -- the second, I refuted pretty thoroughly.
So you've now clung to the one claim you feel I haven't refuted -- for what reason, I can only guess, since the only real disagreement there is that you seem to think my argument revolves around IE6 users not upgrading.
...when it works. It doesn't have hardware accelerated 3D, and I've had trouble getting certain things working under a VM. For example, I had a little USB device that only works under Windows 98 -- it would be great if a VM could access that, though it'd also be dangerous unless done right (I don't want my VM talking to every USB device, just that one).
I seem to remember that the Parallels implementation uses some code from Wine, or maybe it's licensed from Cedega -- but it has exactly the same performance and compatibility issues as Wine on Linux.
The only difference is that you've got an entire Windows installation, so it's a lot easier to deal with things like copy protection and weird DLL dependencies.
But I would guess performance would be just slightly faster than Wine, especially for any Direct3D-accelerated stuff. (OpenGL would approach native.)
the Microsoft licenses,
A few are OSI-approved.
the elusive OOXML (look, it's open)
Oh, right. You win.
..and wont (rightly) update 2.x to any version of 3
That is true, and I don't believe I claimed it did. It will, however, update 3 to 3.5, after asking permission.
Way to miss the point.
Spell it out for me. How, exactly, am I missing the point here?
The effort is there, its just not obvious to
anyone who's been watching.
It frequently comes across as too little, too late, especially when their competitors are all much farther along than they are.
You can talk about that Acid3 all you want.. (I am running a browser that scored 100/100 long before FireFox, so why arent you running Opera?)
Because my current browser is also open source, and provides several features Opera doesn't.
The point is not which browser is fastest to win a particular test, or which is most compliant.
The point is that most browsers are reasonably close, and getting closer. IE stands out as being by far the worst, and that gap isn't narrowing significantly. It's especially telling when there are several rendering engines available under licenses that would allow them to be included in IE, but Microsoft has chosen to instead try to bring theirs up to speed.
but its meaningless shit.
For an angry monkey, I sure took longer to resort to personal attacks, and now to profanity.
Nobody supports DOM2 completely,
What's your point?
This vaguely sounds like the Creationist who says, "Aha! The universe is expanding faster than they thought! See, science can be wrong! It's really no better than faith. Evolution is just a theory, just like the theory of Intelligent Design."
IE can't compete on any measurable test of compliance, nor have I seen anyone actually claim it's more compliant. The strongest argument anyone seems to be able to make is that other browsers aren't perfectly compliant, as if that means they're all "just as bad" as IE.
Yet the fact remains: I can develop a website that runs flawlessly (of course) in the browser I develop it with. I may find a glitch or two in other browsers, causing me to spend maybe an hour or so a month dealing with other browsers. If I were to try to support IE6, it could take (has taken) one day a week.
Stop being a fucking crybaby and blaming the effort involved to support them on others. You are paid for that effort, jackass.
"Angry monkey" -- projection, much?
What makes you think being paid for it is a justification? Did you even bother to think about possible rebuttals before bashing on your keyboard? Two obvious ones spring to mind:
I could be paid to wash dishes for a living. That doesn't mean I enjoy doing so. A dishwashing machine might put me out of work, but it's still a good idea, and I'd probably enjoy my new job better. (And in case it wasn't obvious: This was an analogy.)
When people pay me to work, if IE didn't exist (or when I don't have to support it), that immediately cuts 20% of my time on the project, thus 20% of the cost of implementing it. It means I can either spend that much less time working, or spend that much more time actually making progress rather than supporting Microsoft's mistake.
I mean, really, three words: Broken. Window. Fallacy.
If it magically became todays webkit build then 8 years from now you will be saying how shitty it is that the outdated rendering engine is included
You seem to be assuming that my complaint is that it's old.
No, my complaint is that it's IE. 32/100 on Acid3, and that's with an IE9 preview. Firefox gets 95/100 today, and Safari (released!) and Chrome Beta get 100/100, perfect test runs.
I don't know that I've ever heard a web developer complain about any browser other than IE, certainly not about them being "moving targets". It's not hard to make a standard page that's reasonably future-proof. It's just hard to do so, and also have it work with IE, without IE-specific patches -- thus, it's very easy to create something that renders correctly in IE, but will break in some other engine.
Again, I don't necessarily blame them for how they got into this -- one point that's often made is that certain standards we've come to rely on were not finalized when IE6 was released, though they were somewhat widely deployed.
should be engineered out of the OS.
That isn't what I meant to imply. I mean to imply that they should engineer themselves out of having to maintain the IE engine in particular. Second best case for Microsoft right now would be to build IE10 on Webkit, and only leave the current IE8 engine in there for compatibility's sake, hoping to slowly phase it to something optional (like XP mode on Windows 7), and eventually abandon it completely.
Best case would be to do that with the rendering component, but get out of the browser business entirely.
Yes, I think these would be good for Microsoft. Less software they have to maintain, when others seem perfectly willing to fill that niche. Happier users. Better all around.
Ditz for per-project tracking. It just sits there in your repository (which you should have). I used Git for a repository. This meant that the change that fixed a problem would also close the bug, making things much more closely tied than something like Trac could hope to be. (Ever wanted to know which branch still has a given bug open? Now you can.)
I've also used Ktimetracker, back when it was called Karm, to track billable hours. The advantage of a GUI/desktop time tracker, in addition to being KDE-based, is that it can do things like notice which desktop I'm on, notice when I become idle, and punchin/punchout with a global keystroke -- these kinds of things are more difficult (though not impossible) with a tool closer to Ditz.
I have not, however, used both of these at the same time.
Isn't this what the Open Source Initiative [opensource.org] does already?
My understanding is that the OSI tries to declare whether a particular license counts as "open source" or not. They do track redundant licenses.
Doesn't the EFF ask you to transfer ownership/copyrights to them so they can take care of copyright issues?
Indeed, and many projects ask you to transfer copyrights to them to allow them to change license at will. This is a reasonably fair deal -- it means your code gets accepted, and if the license allows it, you can always create your own fork just before they change licenses. But it also means that the community can decide if/when to go GPL3, for example. Setting "any future version" is putting too much faith in the FSF, I think, but if you don't do that and do allow people to contribute while retaining copyright, you end up with a situation like the Linux kernel, which will likely be forever GPLv2.
I shudder when Microsoft tries to: a) "standardize" something, and b) "popularize" it.
This appears to at least be trying to be an independent organization. And you also didn't address that #3 is an important point, though one that I don't think you really need an organization to make:
There should be a standard set of best practices for how corporations should participate in open source. We've seen it done wrong so many times before.
For example -- remember when IBM ported Linux to their mainframe platform? They did so behind closed doors, only releasing the code to the community when it was done. Aside from potentially being a bitch to merge, this was really cruel to the community which had been trying to do the same thing independently. On the other hand, "release early, release often" doesn't really need an organization to tell you to do that.
The one way I can see this really working is if the organization were to provide corporate-y things, like training and seminars, for executives and developers at companies who want to participate in open source, and don't want to look like assholes doing it.
Now, the unfortunate thing is that Steve Ballmer continues to make truly retarded statements about open source (GPL = virus! Linux violates our patents!) on a fairly regular basis. Fortunately, Microsoft doesn't seem to be following his example. For all the paranoia about things like mono -- the fact that it might have submarine patents from Microsoft -- has any ever been justified? Since SCO died, has Microsoft actually done anything directly to undermine open source -- and, in particular, have they ever done so while appearing to support it?
I spoke too soon...
According to Wikipedia, an internal build of IE9 gets 32/100 on Acid3. Great, and Chrome Beta gets 100/100, as does Safari 4.
Firefox doesn't have higher than 97/100 -- but the version actually released has 95/100.
That does pretty much line up with my experience, as far as how obscenely far behind IE is.
The fact of the matter is that the same people running an old copy of IE would also be running an old copy of one of those other browsers.
Possible, though unlikely -- the default configuration of Firefox on Windows is to auto-update, and this has been the case for some time.
You are living in a dream world.
Yes, I must have imagined the years I spent as a professional web developer.
what woe-is-me excuses will you have when FireFox is up to version 7 but an uncomfortable portion of the market is still running 3.5?
Ah, I see -- you must be living in the dream world where the latest release of IE actually makes an effort to support web standards. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all have 100/100 renderings of Acid3, at least in a developer version. Even the developer versions of IE haven't managed to score even 30/100.
So no, it's not just the specific version involved -- we actually made a decision at one point to stop supporting IE6, and only support IE7 and later. It helped, but it still didn't let us get rid of our ie.css file -- and there was no corresponding browser-specific css for any other browser.
Specifically, they require you to go through technical support before they'll even talk to you about a refund. Tech support is free -- the idea is that if you're returning it because of some aspect of it being "broken", they should be given a chance to fix that.
Google "Sherman Anti-Trust".
An engine does not a browser make.
Try downloading any HTML engine -- Gecko, Webkit, anything. I've done some playing around with Webkit. It comes with a demo "browser"-like application, but it is hilariously short of a browser -- no caching, no bookmarks, no add-ons or extensions...
Yes, the engine is still there. In a way, it has to stay -- there are tons of applications (non-Microsoft applications) which rely on a generic HTML engine being provided as part of Windows. Microsoft can't remove it, and if they replace it with something else, they'd break hundreds of apps, and have to admit IE sucks.
So I don't really blame them for leaving the engine, though I do think it's a shitty situation and one that they should be engineering themselves out of.
I'm still grateful that IE, the browser, can actually be removed.
First of all, I don't see the ballot requiring 12 different browsers. (Disclaimer: I didn't read TFA. Maybe it does.)
But the sad, simple truth is that IE has been dead last, by a huge margin, ever since Netscape 4 died. I can develop a web app and have it work on:
To name just a few...
And it'll break on IE. In different ways on IE6, IE7, and IE8. And I'll have to spend easily 20% of the development time hacking around IE.
So no...
All this decision will do is increase the number of those retarded "This webpage does not support your browser. Go get a real browser to view this site!" messages.
Unless the browsers I've listed really drop the ball, that's unlikely. We might list browsers a page has been tested with, but at the end of the day,we'll slap a W3C logo on it and say it works. The most we'll do is go out of our way to tell IE users to download a real browser -- but that's because IE is about the only non-real-browser we're likely to run into.
Why not make Apple do that on their machines?
Because Apple isn't a monopoly. It can't be an abuse of monopoly power if you aren't a monopoly in the first place.
if done wrong will result in Hulk-like rage.
I doubt it. Much more likely, it will result in hilarity, much like contextual ads. I don't know, I can see how that would inspire rage, but it just makes me laugh.
You seem to be implying that this is what the GPL is working towards. It's not.
BSD licenses are far closer, but no one forces you to release stuff BSD-licensed, either. In fact, I'd imagine many people who contribute to BSD projects are as appalled by Microsoft's behavior here as you are.
And I've never heard Microsoft described as the "king" of software development before.
If this was truly an "unlocked" phone, especially if it's meant to be a developer-friendly phone, I don't see how they could add on-device ads that I couldn't remove.
it's trivial to add smoothness and human-like errors to the movement.
At which point, it just becomes an arms race. Add a human-like delay, and a human can win. Add "human-like" misses, and chances are, they'll show a predictable pattern.
Client knows where enemy is (because it has to be drawn).
There are several ways to fool this kind of cheat, however. One possibility (making it up as I go) is to send false information about an enemy position, such that it likely won't be drawn (behind/in a wall, or with an invisible model) and watch for clients that immediately snap towards that target.
Another problem is ESP, warnings and other such cheats that do not directly interface gameplay, but give cheater a huge advantage because he gets a lot more info than other players.
To a certain extent, you can't really do anything about this. For example, if your game is something like Doom 3, so you've got a lot of darkness, or maybe you've got a nice sniper spot that's hidden by HDR bloom, you might have a player who is just very observant, or you might have a player with worse hardware so they have to turn effects off, or you might have a player who deliberately turns those effects off (and maybe loads bright orange models for the other players) in order to see.
On the other hand, aside from the misdirection I've mentioned, one thing that helps a lot is to not send information the player doesn't need. For example, Counter-Strike traditionally sends positional information to all players, all the time. One of the many admin mods only sends updates for players you'd be able to see/hear.