> Out of curiosity: what's the "right direction" you think IE is taking? Stability over incremental updates? Or something else?
Well, yes, I am in favour of a certain level of stability over lightning-fast development. No-one who is actually developing web sites can use all the bleeding edge stuff the day it's released anyway, and releasing functionality changes every few weeks just means yet another round of reading release notes and blog posts to make sure nothing is about to break. I would far rather have a new version released, say, every 1-2 years, with a clearly defined set of new major features, and with every major browser implementing those new features at roughly the same time and in the same way. This is, after all, the point of standards. (Security patches can be released ASAP of course, but shouldn't change any functionality anyway.)
More than that stability, though, I feel that the IE team is focussing on better support for important technologies that are out there right now and experienced by real people and not just geeks and web designers who like the shiny new toys. For example, while Google, Adobe, Apple, and Mozilla are having a big pissing match and actively dropping support for various things, IE will be happily running Flash, H.264 in an HTML5 video tag, etc.
Along similar lines, recent versions of IE have dramatically improved both JS performance and standards compliance, so most arguments about IE being slow or needing things like CSS hacks are out of date anyway. Moreover, Microsoft have much improved their handling of security issues in recent years, and as I mentioned before, IE has long since moved to running tabs independently. I've been shopping on-line for a lot of networking components recently, and while Firefox has been my default browser for a while, I've been getting awfully tired of waiting around because one of the 20+ tabs I opened to compare products/prices was loading slowly and locking up the whole browser.
Apparently I've gone into super-verbose mode today so I'll stop there. Basically, I do think IE's approach to releases is more practically useful and sustainable, but I also think the IE team is focussing their efforts on technologies that are in widespread use today, while some of the other browser teams seem more preoccupied with bragging rights about trendy-but-currently-worthless new ideas and politics, neither of which ever did much to help real users trying to get real stuff done.
Really? Which version of it do you think they would use? In most of these bleeding edge cases, there is no standard way of implementing the functionality yet, and even in quite common cases (e.g., CSS3 gradients), the syntax is completely different in Firefox vs. Chrome, say. Do you really want a web development world where you have to reimplement every little detail for several different platforms and nothing is standard? If everyone shifts the goalposts every few weeks, any more uniform alternative is going to be difficult to achieve.
While I think "the next day" is obviously a bit of hyperbole, how do you think that the IE team is going to cope with HTML after the HTML5 spec is actually released? It's just going to be a living document going forward, totally unversioned.
Firefox, the WebKit team, and Opera are basically already operating on this model. Team IE isn't.
> Firefox, the WebKit team, and Opera are basically already operating on this model. Team IE isn't.
And for the reasons I have explained elsewhere in this discussion, I think team IE are the only ones who have an approach that can actually work in the long term. A standard isn't a standard if it's constantly changing, and progress at a rate the world can keep up with is more useful than browsers progressing at a much faster rate but actual web pages not progressing at all.
But the subset of HTML that is used on most real sites won't change much at all. It will be too much hassle for casual web sites to keep up, even if they could benefit from any of the new features, which most couldn't because it's still as crazy as it ever was to view the web as a good alternative platform to native apps. The cost/benefit will be dubious for most businesses for similar reasons.
The entire rapid-release-cycle idea is one big overreaction by people who are fed up with the glacial pace of standards development at organisations like the W3C. In a few years, I expect we are all going to be looking back in bemusement, wondering what possessed us to try to advance such a complicated industry without meaningful standards, and wishing we'd just stuck with stable standards all along.
Another possibility is that we will have simply lost interest in the whole affair, because the advancing technologies that help to build more practically useful tools around remote protocols won't be HTML and CSS anyway. For example, a simple delivery mechanism for native apps, along the lines of mobile app stores today, could have ended the current fool's quest to rewrite every serious desktop application on top of poorly suited web technologies, because, leaving the web to do what it does best, present and collect information.
>No-one who is actually developing web sites can use all the bleeding edge stuff the day it's released anyway
Progressive enhancement disagrees. OK well maybe not quite but all the new features ...
I've used a few sites in the last couple of days using the new HTML5-ish drag+drop file uploads in the wild (not yet officially released browsers working to not yet officially completed specs).
> Progressive enhancement disagrees. OK well maybe not quite but all the new features ...
Really? How do you progressively enhance a video site to use HTML5 video, or a site-wide menu system to use CSS3 transitions? The alternatives are things like Flash and JavaScript, which we have been using for a while anyway. However, if you have to write the Flash/JavaScript version anyway, where is the benefit in also supporting HTML5 and CSS3?
Progessive enhancement is a great idea for minor details, like having a site use a subtle rounding on corners when a browser supports it but just square cutting them otherwise if that's the visual effect you're looking for. However, in a world with desktop vs. mobile sites, persistent local storage, multimedia content, etc., it's becoming ever clearer that the idea of a single page with progressive enhancement doesn't scale to support fundamental functionality in a complex web app or interactive site, and multiple versions of the presentation/functionality are needed to cope with the ever increasing and diversifying range of visitors we need to support.
Well, yes, I am in favour of a certain level of stability over lightning-fast development. No-one who is actually developing web sites can use all the bleeding edge stuff the day it's released anyway, and releasing functionality changes every few weeks just means yet another round of reading release notes and blog posts to make sure nothing is about to break. I would far rather have a new version released, say, every 1-2 years, with a clearly defined set of new major features, and with every major browser implementing those new features at roughly the same time and in the same way. This is, after all, the point of standards. (Security patches can be released ASAP of course, but shouldn't change any functionality anyway.)
More than that stability, though, I feel that the IE team is focussing on better support for important technologies that are out there right now and experienced by real people and not just geeks and web designers who like the shiny new toys. For example, while Google, Adobe, Apple, and Mozilla are having a big pissing match and actively dropping support for various things, IE will be happily running Flash, H.264 in an HTML5 video tag, etc.
Along similar lines, recent versions of IE have dramatically improved both JS performance and standards compliance, so most arguments about IE being slow or needing things like CSS hacks are out of date anyway. Moreover, Microsoft have much improved their handling of security issues in recent years, and as I mentioned before, IE has long since moved to running tabs independently. I've been shopping on-line for a lot of networking components recently, and while Firefox has been my default browser for a while, I've been getting awfully tired of waiting around because one of the 20+ tabs I opened to compare products/prices was loading slowly and locking up the whole browser.
Apparently I've gone into super-verbose mode today so I'll stop there. Basically, I do think IE's approach to releases is more practically useful and sustainable, but I also think the IE team is focussing their efforts on technologies that are in widespread use today, while some of the other browser teams seem more preoccupied with bragging rights about trendy-but-currently-worthless new ideas and politics, neither of which ever did much to help real users trying to get real stuff done.