No, I have no connection to Microsoft. I'm familiar with technologies around .Net and have nothing against using them where a project calls for it, but as it happens none of my current commercial projects is built on it today. I certainly have no vested interest in promoting it over any other platform that might be more suitable for any given job. More generally, I have been rather critical of Microsoft/IE for a long time, for much the same reasons many here apparently still are.
However, I do try to look at situations objectively and consider the facts, both quantitative and qualitative, and that in an industry that moves this fast, those facts can lead to different conclusions rather quickly. I honestly see Microsoft's current direction for their browser as healthier and more sustainable than that of say Google or Mozilla.
I don't think more frequent releases of new toys or a factor of 5 difference in synthetic benchmarks can trump an emphasis on providing/speeding up core functionality that real users depend on today and tomorrow. Also, so far Microsoft are mostly rising above the silly political games that Apple/Adobe/Google have been playing lately in terms of knocking out functionality for non-technical reasons.
Meanwhile, I have been less impressed with each successive version of Firefox, as performance of the UI slowed, things got moved around or more cluttered, and they didn't keep up with what I regard as essential features in a web app world like running tabs independently.
I have nothing serious against Chrome, except that their release schedule and tendency to break stuff makes my life difficult as a developer. However, I also see little practical advantage in the areas they have been speeding up lately, since they were fast enough even for the web projects I work on that do fairly intensive DOM manipulation and such. As anyone reading my posts here can probably figure out, once functionality is fast enough to use in practice, I am more impressed with making it easy to use, robust, and/or easy to develop than I am with getting another notch up on some benchmark.
>Microsoft are mostly rising above the silly political games that Apple/Adobe/Google have been playing lately in terms of knocking out functionality for non-technical reasons.
You mean like satisfying current internet standards and meeting the draft standards head on to allow browsers to exploit the latest advances in web design and development off the bat rather than having to wait years-and-years and drag back the whole development of the www as a medium.
>Meanwhile, I have been less impressed with each successive version of Firefox, as performance of the UI slowed, things got moved around or more cluttered, and they didn't keep up with what I regard as essential features in a web app world like running tabs independently.
What do you mean by "performance of the UI slowed". You've stated quite clearly that performance is only a factor for you up to the point it is fast enough. So, it seems something in the UI is so slow as to be unusable for you - the UI is pretty much non existent though isn't it. There's an address bar, couple of buttons, search bar - what is significantly slowing you down there? The actual user interfaces save a few niceties (like Chrome's tab closing, optional tabs on top in Chrome/FF/Op, etc.) are pretty similar in their standard forms.
You mention running tabs independently (as independent processes presumably) I didn't know that IE8 did this?
> You mean like satisfying current internet standards and meeting the draft standards head on
Well, yes, actually. I just think Apple's failure to support Flash and Google's overtly political decision to drop H.264 support are far more relevant to real users today than the various emerging technologies that bring the browser one step closer to being an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an operating system. I just don't see that as the right path to take anyway, and I certainly don't see it as a higher priority than supporting the numerous existing web sites that use Flash or holding up what should be the killer feature of HTML5 for the immediate future.
Of course I would prefer that all browsers support all useful standards with complete compliance, but in the real world we have to prioritise to some extent, and I prefer Microsoft's choices at this particular moment in time.
> What do you mean by "performance of the UI slowed".
I haven't diagnosed the problems in detail. I'm just getting bored of waiting several seconds for my browser to start up, one slow-loading tab holding up all the others, horribly slow scrolling on pages with certain CSS styles applied (usually some sort of fixed background), and other obvious delays during routine use. Neither IE nor Chrome exhibits these problems, and Firefox never used to. I realise that it's possible that these delays are actually due to the extensions I use, but there are only a few and they are all very popular ones without which Firefox is seriously lacking in basic functionality, so I don't see much point in distinguishing the core browser from the software I actually use when it comes to the user experience.
> You mention running tabs independently (as independent processes presumably) I didn't know that IE8 did this?
Actually, IE8 did it first, Chrome did it next, and two years later IE still doesn't do it at all.
>I haven't diagnosed the problems in detail. I'm just getting bored of waiting several seconds for my browser to start up, one slow-loading tab holding up all the others, horribly slow scrolling on pages with certain CSS styles applied (usually some sort of fixed background), and other obvious delays during routine use. Neither IE nor Chrome exhibits these problems, and Firefox never used to.
Ah, I think the disconnect is that this isn't the UI that's at fault it's the application. For me all the browsers work equally crummily and that appears mainly to be Flash's fault.
I didn't realise IE8 had independent tabs because I've only ever had the whole app go down. Similarly Chrome locks up for me as much as FF. FF does seem to have gotten a little slower up to FF3 but I think that FF4 is an improvement.
You say Microsoft isn't involved in the politics. That isn't an accurate portrayal: It is more the case that Microsoft is following far enough behind that, by the time they get to the issues that the others are bickering about, the issue has long since been decided.
You obviously think Microsoft is doing great by the Internet with IE. Obviously most people hear disagree. Regardless, you cannot say they are in any way leading nor innovating anymore. For the company that made AJAX possible, it is a sad state.
Please notice that I have never actually said any of the things you just attributed to me.
In particular, I didn't say Microsoft weren't involved in politics, I just said they have so far remained above the recent trend of dropping major functionality for political reasons.
Also, please keep in mind that I have never said IE, even IE9, is a "good browser" or "as good as Firefox 4" or anything along similar lines. My position here is simply that I think Microsoft have started going in the right direction again with IE, specifically by focussing on improving performance and standards compliance in the areas that users need immediately within a sustainable rate of releases. Meanwhile, I think various other big names, including Google, Apple, and now Mozilla, are taking a dangerous and probably unsustainable approach in various ways that are, ultimately, not in either users' or web developers' interests.
If these trends continue -- and that is a big "if" in a world as fast-changing as software -- then I expect future versions of IE will start to reclaim market share. Meanwhile, Google, Mozilla, et al. will keep throwing resources into areas they haven't properly thought through, with negligible practical benefit to users any time soon and increasingly frustrating web developers as well.
You are being pedantic and defensive about the politics statement. I think it was obvious from the context that I was referring specifically to your comment about Apple/Google/Adobe politicking and not about their political tendencies in general.
And for never having said IE9 was a good browser, you sure have said IE is a good browser a lot. Sure, you not have said it in those words, but it is impossible to come away from these comments (a huge percentage of which are yours) without the belief that you think IE9 is better (and perhaps I'm wrong for conflating "better" with "good"). And that impression stems from seeing way more in comments than just "MS is getting configuration management in browsers right."
> You are being pedantic and defensive about the politics statement.
I prefer accurate, but OK. You seem to be making a "slippery slope" argument, and I don't agree with it.
> Sure, you not have said it in those words, but it is impossible to come away from these comments (a huge percentage of which are yours) without the belief that you think IE9 is better (and perhaps I'm wrong for conflating "better" with "good")
I have been fairly careful about what I have said in this discussion, and I have clarified in very simple terms and I think more than once now that I am talking about the direction Microsoft is heading vs. the direction Google, Mozilla and co. are heading. I can't help it if people who don't like Microsoft or do like $ALTERNATIVE_BROWSER choose to reply to what they would like me to have said instead of what I actually wrote. :-(
