
When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and nobody cared - robin_reala
https://paulbakaus.com/2015/03/13/when-ie-gave-us-beautiful-fast-touch-interactions-and-nobody-cared/
======
glesica
I think the reason nobody seems to care about IE today isn't that it is a
terrible browser, as in the past, but that it doesn't run on Mac OS or
GNU/Linux. There are certainly people doing development on Windows, but more
(at least of people who would use features like this) doing so on other
platforms. Until IE is cross-platform, many developers will continue to ignore
it because they have no reasonable way of using it and getting to know it.

~~~
adventured
Do you have stats to back up the premise that more developers (or those that
would use features like this) are on non-Windows platforms? Windows still has
roughly 90% of the total desktop + laptop market. I find it hard to believe it
doesn't still have a majority of such developers.

GNU/Linux is ~2% of the market.

~~~
ams6110
The subject article is about scrolling on mobile though. Almost nobody uses IE
on mobile devices.

~~~
Maarten88
And that includes the author of the article. The blogpost does not render
correctly on IE 11: part of the content is obscured by an overlay with links
and social buttons.

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avolcano
It's worth pointing out that Microsoft primarily invented this for HTML5
Windows 8 apps (along with some interesting, if incredibly underbaked,
JavaScript view libraries to go along with it). That is why the APIs here
might seem like way-too-high-level abstractions - they were trying to
encapsulate the UX features Windows 8 had, like scroll snapping within item
grids.

It was nice, and necessary, to use there because it made it relatively easy to
make HTML5 apps that looked and felt like a native counterpart on the same
platform. I don't know if they would have fit in on the general web, but it
was cool to see them take a crack at nicer touch scrolling in CSS.

~~~
josho
That certainly explains why the standardization process went nowhere. Ie. It
was a UI feature largely specific to a single platform's native UI paradigm,
and at that a platform with a minor marketshare.

Regardless, this is a great example of how innovation should happen. That is
browser vendors try out new things, and those experiments that succeed become
standardized. In this case it sounds like this experiment is a step forward,
but not quite reusable enough to support standardization across platforms.

~~~
paulbakaus
OP here. I actually agree, and that seems to be Google#s stance right now,
from what I've heard (I work for Google but wasn't involved in the technical
work on this feature so far). We might need an API that is slightly more low
level but achieves the same. My point was that we need this functionality, and
no other API offers it, so I took anything I could get :)

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msoad
I've worked with -ms-scroll-snap-points. It's very limited and an anti-pattern
for separation of concerns. You're putting logic of how scrolling should
behave in CSS. It's becoming very difficult to do more than just simple logic
with this. I've tried updating -ms-scroll-snap-points property on the fly but
it didn't work that well.

We need better scroll APIs for sure, but in DOM JavaScript API not in CSS

~~~
taeric
I'm curious on why logic of how scrolling should behave should not be in CSS.
If the concerns are DOM = Data and CSS = presentation. JS would be Dynamic on
either of those.

That is, if you can statically state your scroll points, it would seem that
CSS would make sense for that.

------
junglecode
Firefox is shipping the standardized features without prefixes:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945584](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945584)

------
jpetersonmn
It's kind of ironic that this article praises IE, yet the article itself
doesn't display properly in IE. The main article content is covered by the
current projects. Works fine in Chrome though.

~~~
paulbakaus
OP here. Thanks for the bug report! I'll fix. It's true, haven't used IE in
the while, but that wasn't the point of the article. I care deeply about the
web as a whole, and all of its evolution.

~~~
paulbakaus
...aaand it's fixed. Was a stupid recent spelling mistake.

------
serve_yay
The phrase "once bitten, twice shy" comes to mind, except instead of "once",
more like "a million bazillion times".

~~~
guelo
You mean like how entire industries were created after being bitten by IE's
XMLHttpRequest?

~~~
idbehold
No, that only happened once. He's talking about the "million bazillion times"
they ignored standards in favor of proprietary APIs which resulted in much
pain and suffering for both developers and consumers alike.

------
bshimmin
Just as the article says, I'd never heard of this. Looking at the example, the
CSS seems rather unwieldy:

    
    
      -ms-scroll-chaining: chained;
      -ms-overflow-style: none;
      -ms-content-zooming: zoom;
      -ms-scroll-rails: none;
      -ms-content-zoom-limit-min: 100%;
      -ms-content-zoom-limit-max: 500%;
      -ms-scroll-snap-type: proximity;
      -ms-scroll-snap-points-x: snapList(100%, 200%, 300%, 400%, 500%);
      -ms-overflow-style: none;
    

I don't really know if any of that stuff actually belongs in CSS as the
majority of people see it (and `snapList` certainly doesn't feel like CSS to
me).

~~~
werdnapk
This is hardly the worst of what some of the new "standard" CSS3 properties
looks like. Those MS properties actually look sane in comparison to recent
CSS3 properties.

~~~
minitech
For example…?

~~~
heeen
[https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/keyframe-animation-synta...](https://css-
tricks.com/snippets/css/keyframe-animation-syntax/)

------
WalterBright
Ironically, that web page doesn't render properly in IE.

(The right side of the article text is overlaid by the "Current Projects"
sidebar.)

~~~
bhauer
Amusing. It does, however, kick over to a proper layout when the width is
narrower. I had originally read this article on my Windows Phone and it
rendered just fine. It also renders fine in desktop IE if you make the window
narrow.

------
gtk40
I use IE11 almost exclusively these days when I'm on Windows, and this part of
why. But ironically, this article doesn't even work on it. (and zooming
doesn't fix the issue)

[http://i.imgur.com/jlNT8vt.png](http://i.imgur.com/jlNT8vt.png)

~~~
paulbakaus
Thanks for letting me know! Will fix.

------
zawaideh
I wish we had PointerEvents as well!

~~~
liotier
And NullPointerException while we're at it - if we're going to mix random
stuff in CSS properties, why not go all the way ?

------
malkia
I know it's on the web, and has to work on tons of browsers, thousands of
devices, but "15-20fps" have never been acceptable figure in console game
development.

Hell even 30fps is not acceptable for some games (fighting, racing, first
person shooters).

So having 60fps in the browser is incredible!

------
mathgeek
Part of the problem that IE has had for a long time, and that the CSS this
article discusses is a continuation of, is that IE sits in its own world as
far as CSS standards go. It sure sounds like the great tool for carousels that
this article discusses is still IE-specific. That means you can't use it on
any other browser, which effectively means it's DOA from the get go.

~~~
untog
Yet both Apple and Google do this, frequently, and fewer people complain.

~~~
reitanqild
It might be annoying that this happens today but bear in mind that MS brought
this onto itself by ignoring everyone but Windows users for year after year.
Our way or the highway.

Now that they have finally repented they will still need to reap what they
have sown. At least that seems to be a valid principle elsewhere. :-)

(Note that I say this as someone who is currently very close to be a fanboy of
"new Microsoft")

------
michaelbuddy
the windows browser on MS Surface Pro is also good, fast responsive, and the
only one with that quality of behavior on a touch device.

~~~
fuzzywalrus
I wouldn't go quite that far, MS touch has been hell with some pseudo states
as hovers often require holding a finger down as it treats a mouse hover and
touch hover the same in IE10.

Its unexpected when Android and iOS both freeze on the hover state.

------
anocendi
To be fair, IE gave us non-beautiful, non-fast interactions for .... how long?

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differentView
It's as if reputation matters.

------
otakucode
It's almost like the web was never designed as an application platform and
it's performing like a document presentation system with applications
shoehorned into it.

~~~
otakucode
Don't just downvote because you like the web as an application platform. I am
serious. The exact reason that these specific extensions being discussed are
not standard now, along with dozens of others that would make application
development much easier, is because providing an application platform is
explicitly not the goal of HTML, CSS, or the web in general.

~~~
striking
I do think that interactive documents are a very useful tool and that HTML and
CSS get us there; but I totally agree that HTML and CSS do not make good
applications. The web is for documents.

Now if only there were a way to make applications that were delivered in the
same fashion as documents, but not constrained by the same poor decisions.

------
putzdown
A pet peeve: The author sets his story "many years ago at Zynga." "Many years
ago" speaks to me of long years past; like, decades—surely at least a decade.
But Zynga was founded relatively recently, in 2007. Why do people in the tech
industry tend to talk about what is really a few years ago as if it were
ancient eons past? Is the author simply so young that < 8 years seems like
"many years" to him?

~~~
speakeron
I'm probably older than the average age here, but 2007 certainly seems a long
time ago to me. Especially in technology. No iPhones, no Android, no tablets
(that anybody used, anyway), no always-on high-speed internet everywhere, no
multi-core CPUs (ok, we had some two-cores), no Twitter (yes, it was going
then, but who was using it?). No music streaming.

Seems like a simpler age.

~~~
_delirium
Fwiw, there was definitely music streaming. Internet-streaming royalties were
even a political issue as far back as the late '90s, when the DMCA contained a
controversial internet-only royalty structure different from traditional
radio. Post-dot-com-crash, there was then a renewed burst of launches and
acquisitions in the mid-2000s. One of the bigger streaming services of the era
was Last.fm, founded in 2002, and acquired by CBS for ~$300m in 2007.

