

Genuinely surprised that IE still sucks - gaelian
http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2012/07/13/genuinely-surprised-that-ie-still-sucks

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ckluis
Have you tried 10? I ran a speed comparison in my VM and noticed it was faster
than Chrome on some pages (anecdotal not speed tested).

~~~
gaelian
I haven't tried 10. But I'm hopeful about it.

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quink
It isn't surprising that IE still sucks. In part, it sucks for the same reason
that Safari sucks, which is updates (or lack thereof). Google Chrome, when it
was first released, was a crappy browser with an excellent update and
installation infrastructure. But that's not the whole story.

All the little tweaks that have gone into Chrome have been through two
versions of public testing in Chromium and other varieties, and they are
mature. Even better, they come from an open-source ecosystem, where
innovations aren't driven by corporate needs. Google Chrome absolutely sucks
for some corporate applications, in some really simple areas.

Try slip printing from Google Chrome. It won't work. Internet Explorer on the
other hand isn't just a browser, it's an infrastructure. One that is tightly
integrated into the OS and where you can override everything. In the
mid-2000s, one didn't see a lot of alternatives to either Firefox or Firefox,
but the number of alternative shells to IE, some of which were even popular,
were overwhelming. More than that, an incredible number of applications
actually had IE running underneath, for whatever reasons. Usually to display
information, such as a help browser, or to provide some way of integrating
one's application with the WWW.

And that is the problem with Internet Explorer. It was never designed for add-
ons. It was designed to be an add-on. It was never designed to be updated, it
was designed to be integrated. It was never designed to have excellent
JavaScript, it was designed to have excellent integration into things like
DirectX and even AJAX.

There is a reason that IE was ahead, and still is in many ways. IE doesn't
suck considering what it is. It may suck for the thing it says on the tin that
it's being used for, but there's no reason not to use Chrome for web browsing.
Internet Explorer may be a sucky browser, but it's some pretty good
infrastructure as it happens. IE is plumbing, Chrome is something else
entirely. And IE happens to be the only kind of plumbing out there in the real
marketplace. It may be a curse, but there is no better alternative for many of
the things it can do.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
"It may be a curse, but there is no better alternative for many of the things
it can do."

What things are those?

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
It's curious that a straightforward question has been voted down. The previous
poster made some vague claims about IE being "plumbing" and the best
alternative for some "things it can do" but doesn't mention what they are.
Other than ActiveX integration which is not exactly a stunning recomendation.

~~~
quink
Oh, I didn't downvote it.

I guess one main difference is that a plugin for Internet Explorer can do so
much more than a plugin for Chrome can, and that the basic philosophy for IE
is that it's a relatively thin wrapper around mshtml.dll, one of the most
deservedly overutilised pieces of software of the past decade. Sure, you can
embed Webkit in things, but it hasn't happened all that much quite yet. Webkit
has even been designed for that, in some part.

But Internet Explorer has perfected it back in about '97, and that's the
legacy that IE is still built on. It has been doing VML since '98, and that
serves as the foundation of a canvas implementation that works even in IE6.
XMLHTTP has been in the thing in '99. You could run ActiveX widgets in IE.
That was the biggest feature of them all, probably, and it's still widely
used. Maybe not here, but in China, IE's market share in May was 72%, not
including IE shells. Not least of all because all the banks usually want some
ActiveX plugin that keeps your keyboard entry more secure (whatever). Chrome
and Firefox were 15%. Combined. South Korea, in July 2011? More than 92%.

Horrible a browser as IE6 was and still is, the target market was rich
application software that could use things like DirectX and VML and VRML and
XMLHTTP and all these kinds of outdated technologies that we've left behind
once Mozilla arrived and gave us some fresh air.

Sure, IE didn't do much in the way of progress in terms of the Acid Test or
JavaScript or CSS or HTML, but that was because the target market wasn't
really the same. The target market for IE was business in the early 2000s. And
it succeeded spectacularly, leaving a bad browser to drive oft-rotten legacy
applications.

It has provided a stable set of features for almost 15 years. They may not be
the best technologies... but the implementation was good enough. And all of
that in a browser that had a 95% market share. There are so many hooks and
places where IE can be extended that are a bit mindblowing. IE6 was a sucky
browser around a fairly well thought out ecosystem that was settled. There are
still things that can be done in IE that can't be done in Chrome. It was
sucky, but it worked, and IE has a thousand features in the background that
most people never even noticed. That, and group policies.

That said, I hate IE6 and IE7 as well as those F12 Developer Tools with a
passion that will burn a thousand years. But it's not all bad.

~~~
gaelian
I agree the browser is not all bad if you take into account the original
target market. But I stand by my surprise that even after the writing has been
on the wall for so long, times clearly changing even in the enterprise market,
MS still hasn't made it a priority to improve the day-to-day experience for
today's user.

Maybe I'm just expecting too much.

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Toshio
I thankfully haven't been required to touch the monstrosity in a long while,
but the overwhelming consensus in my community of web professionals is that
ie's javascript engine will never be on par with V8.

~~~
whiskers
I really don't think it's very important that it is though. Whether their JS
engine two (ten?) times slower than another won't really matter for the
majority of browsing.

They've really improved the rendering engine and standards support but the
experience of the application as a whole is still way behind their
competition.

Modern IEs failings come from a collection of bad/sloppy UX choices.

