
 Microsoft begs Web devs not to make WebKit the new IE6 - e1ven
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/microsoft-begs-web-devs-not-to-make-webkit-the-new-ie6/
======
cageface
Hard not to enjoy the schadenfreude of a company begging developers to support
web standards after holding the entire web hostage for _years_ due to outright
cynical negligence. Must be very tasty medicine for them.

They do happen to incidentally be right that we should try to adhere to the
standards but to compare the state of WebKit today to the darkest days of
IE6's reign is pure chutzpah.

~~~
FireBeyond
To complete the circle of irony, it seems that some of the developers who were
the loudest to shout about standards-compliant web design and development when
IE held the reigns are now guilty of much the same thing - the number of sites
(and indeed blogs that either implicitly or explicitly state the same) that
seem to have been designed with a "Looks great in Safari on my Mac, my iPad
and my iPhone, ship it".

For one (unnamed example), I recently built a launch page with a service that
purports to do just that, provide a landing page of the "Coming Soon" variety,
the ability to customize some links, provide some metrics, etc, and give your
users a single page as a placeholder.

The interface for this design - and more importantly the resultant page for
end users - is utterly horrific, largely unusable in Firefox, Chrome and IE10.

~~~
EricDeb
I thought Safari and Chrome both use webkit? Shouldn't your site be at least
usable in Chrome then?

~~~
kevingadd
There are numerous differences between Safari and Chrome. The two have
diverged quite a bit even if they are both technically 'webkit'.

------
jongalloway2
You have to actually read the article, because it's a little different than
the (kinda linkbaity) title implies.

The root issue isn't about market share, it's about writing browser-specific
code. That was a bad idea in 2002, and it's an even worse idea in 2012 now
that we have the benefit of history and are so many polyfills.

Writing --webkit-only code doesn't stick it to the man, it sticks it to the
web ecosystem that we all swim in. I had long and frustrating arguments a
decade ago with web developers who enjoyed writing IE-only code because they
were upset about a Netscape bug they'd hit last month. They were sticking it
to... everyone, a few years later.

Bottom line: if you're a professional web developer, act like it.

~~~
astrodust
I'm waiting for the people writing the CSS and HTML standards to do something
like be more proactive about approving extensions so we don't need the -webkit
garbage in front of rules.

It should be as simple as filling out a form requesting a property and getting
it within a matter of weeks at the outside.

If you can apply for ".poop" as a top-level domain name, there's no excuse for
not having a CSS registry.

~~~
hosay123
Can you imagine the size of the CSS spec if any old brainless mutt could add
to it on a few weeks' notice for the past 15 years? At which point, creating a
fresh browser implementation quickly becomes insurmountable.

~~~
astrodust
I never said that they'd all be approved. Surely an extension request from
someone the committee had never heard of would be rejected, but from the
WebKit or Mozilla crew they would give it consideration.

It would help break up the formalization process into smaller components.

Even then, until it's absorbed into the standard there's no obligation to
implement that property. It would just mean you could be assured that if your
proposal _did_ make it into the standard, you would already be using the
correct name.

------
taterbase
These are two very different scenarios.

Developers never had a chance to help IE grow. IE stagnated because it was
locked up and Microsoft was happy with it's state.

Webkit is open and being worked on by many people in many different places.
Webkit can grow with help from outside of itself. IE could not.

~~~
bmelton
Agreed on all points, and to add another: Webkit is in use by more than one
competitor. There are the occasional shootouts between Chrome and Safari to be
obvious, and so long as both wish to be preferred by their users, they'll both
continue to innovate or, at the very least, prevent the stagnation that IE6
became.

~~~
ernesth
> Webkit is in use by more than one competitor.

As was IE6: maxthon and some other browsers used IE6's engine. And Maxthon
users loved it because it was innovating.

~~~
r00fus
Browser shells don't count. We're talking rendering engine here. Trident
(IE6's engine) was fully controlled by Microsoft and until Chrome Frame came
out (and promptly not adopted at all) there was no way to change the rendering
engine in Internet Explorer.

------
flipstewart
Front end developers should be including unprefixed declarations along with
the prefixed. That's common knowledge.

But the real issue here is how damn long it takes for declarations to become
standard... border-radius is just now reaching that point and how long has it
been?

And sure there are plenty of historical cases backing up how long these things
take, but we should be out of that now. We use git. We're agile. We iterate.
Why don't the folks making the browsers, and more so, the folks making the
rules catch up?

~~~
nivloc
`border-radius` has been usable for about a year on everything except IE.
`-webkit-border-radius` has little reason to exist, and is only around for
token backwards compatibility.

~~~
astrodust
People put it in there to keep the vampires at bay.

------
mtgx
Isn't that a bit like saying don't make Linux a monopoly? Things are a lot
better with an open source "monopoly" than a proprietary one. In fact I'd say
an open source monopoly is even preferable.

~~~
spauka
Not at all. It's saying use standards when there is a standards compliant
alternative, because it's both better coding practice and because it means you
won't be screwing over your users and you won't be screwing over developers
who wish to write alternative implementations.

------
jonchang
Did anyone actually bother to read the blog post[1] linked in the ars article?
Nowhere does Microsoft "beg" anyone to do anything, and in fact IE6 is isn't
even mentioned. Glad to see everyone is jumping on the anti-Microsoft gravy
train though.

[1]
[http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/...](http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/11/15/adapting-
your-webkit-optimized-site-for-internet-explorer-10.aspx)

------
nivloc
This sounds like a PR stunt.

Un-prefixed declarations are everywhere. They're part of every framework, and
what every developer tries first. Then comes -webkit, -o, -moz. IE hacks are
_far_ more widespread. filter?

I've been looking for sites without un-prefixed declarations for an hour and
come up short. If there is any merit to this, I'd love to hear it.

~~~
achal
I was able to gather the following links which may be interesting:

* IRC log of W3's meeting, where Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft bring up the possibility of being forced to support -webkit prefixes: [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.h...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.html)

* Article on Opera and -webkit prefix adoption: [http://www.netmagazine.com/news/opera-confirms-webkit-prefix...](http://www.netmagazine.com/news/opera-confirms-webkit-prefix-usage-121923)

* Mozilla's analysis of -webkit usage on the web: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708406> There's a lot of data there. Raw data is here: [https://bug708406.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=601...](https://bug708406.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=601449) . Some processed data in a spreadsheet: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=599084> . You may want to view others as well.

I haven't personally looked for sites that do this, but I use Firefox and have
a Windows Phone, and in both cases I have found that I've ran into sites that
were either Chrome only or simply looked terrible in my browser, not because
of technical limitations, but because the developers had really only tested on
Chrome. In some cases, I've ended up spoofing Chrome's UA in Firefox and found
that sites still worked.

------
ck2
Don't worry Microsoft, there is a version of chrome that runs inside internet
explorer without special privileges.

Problem solved.

~~~
wluu
Uh, not on the mobile. They're talking about Windows Phone 8, which has a
derivative of IE10 running on that phone OS.

~~~
zachrose
Man, I hear all this about not leaning on Webkit, and I would actually like to
try a Windows Phone for a while, but remembering that it has IE just sends
shudders down my web developer spine.

~~~
ygra
Just for the record: IE10 ≠ IE6.

~~~
zachrose
I've been hurt before, and don't know if I'm ready to trust again.

------
scotty79
I wonder if they ever considered adopting webkit for IE. Is there any reason
not to? Apart from MS pride.

~~~
avsbst
The main reason IE doesn't adopt webkit is that IE's current purpose is to
provide stability and backwards compatibility to enterprise customers. A large
portion of corporations have custom built webapps to provide basic services
like HR, Payroll, etc. and they rely on IE to provide consistent behavior for
these services.

Should they update their apps? Probably, but it costs money to build systems
like that and most corporations don't want to drop money on something that
already works perfectly fine.

Adopting webkit would completely disrupt all of these services, and Microsoft
would basically destroy its customer base/relations.

Alternatively, Chrome is about pushing the boundaries of what's possible on
the web. It's great for new companies, startups, and small developers, but as
they move fast and implement new standards / functionality they also break
stuff, and unlike Microsoft it doesn't really matter to the webkit dev team if
a certain medium size corporation's old payroll app no longer works because of
the latest chrome update.

Different browsers serve different purposes, and IE's is to provide stability.
Hence they don't adopt webkit.

(I was an intern with IE this past summer and I asked the very same question
minus the last part to my manager, and this was his response)

~~~
X-Istence
You can still use Webkit without requiring your browser to be bleeding edge.
You can still update at the same glacial pace that IE has updated by using
Webkit, shaking all the bugs out of it, and then releasing it.

There is no requirement that it be exactly like Chrome. Look at Safari on OS
X, that Webkit engine is not the same one that goes into Chrome. By the time
that Safari is released Chrome is already several Webkit versions ahead.

------
darren
Sure would be nice to get IE10 support into Zepto.js. IE support is one of the
main reasons we continue to use Jquery Mobile, but Zepto would meet our needs
(with a bit of re-work) at a much smaller download size.

------
caiob
This is SO NOT like that in A LOT of ways.

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chj
Why can't they just use Webkit then everyone will be happy.

~~~
pcwalton
There are, believe it or not, things that IE does better than WebKit. For
instance, IE uses Direct2D (essentially the state of the art for vector
graphics) for rendering.

~~~
warfangle
Yet it doesn't use WebGL (essentially the state of the art for hardware-
accelerated cross-platform three dimensional rendering in the browser).

~~~
pcwalton
Sure, there are lots and lots of things that WebKit does better than IE. I'm
just pointing out that it's a tradeoff; it's not cut and dry in favor of
WebKit.

------
randomfool
And I beg Microsoft to make it easier for me to test on IE- release IE for
OSX.

~~~
Mythbusters
You can download a free VM that runs on OSX to test.

