
A new Microsoft browser? - cleverjake
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/12/a_new_microsoft.html
======
ynniv
_Recently the news broke that Microsoft may be working on another browser
instead of IE. After reviewing the available evidence I’ve come to the
conclusion that, although Microsoft is making a few adjustments, and a name
change for IE might be a good idea, the new browser will essentially be IE12.
Still, I think we web developers should support the “new browser” narrative._

This is how you start an article. I didn't read any farther, but my already
high opinion of quirksmode.org is even higher.

~~~
jmduke
In case you weren't aware, this is referred to as the _inverted pyramid_ (and
of course I totally agree -- this is how you start an article):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid)

~~~
Brakenshire
It's probably one of the reasons why the BBC News website is popular. All
articles were originally written so that the first three or four paragraphs
could be cut off, and presented as full articles on teletext (a tv text
service), so the whole story had to be summarized within that space. They
still write their articles in that way, even though teletext is increasingly
un-used.

I should say, though, that it does mean that the content of that summary, and
of the headline, becomes extremely important. For instance, you could
nominally cover a news story, but write a boring headline and summary, and
very few people will trudge through that to find the really important details
later on. You do sometimes find that occurring on the BBC site, especially
when it's a story which might raise a lot of controversy within government.

~~~
Mahn
> teletext is increasingly un-used.

Was there a time when teletext was actually used? Honest question, I was under
the impression that it just never managed to catch on.

~~~
iuguy
Teletext was pretty big in the 90s before broadband took off. It was easily
accessible to a lot of people, including older viewers. Television was the
primary source of media for a lot of people (followed by radio and newspaper),
and Teletext was pretty much the only way to get near real-time updates of
what was happening at any point in time.

------
thomasfoster96
One of the things I really want to see is both IE and Safari move to the six
weekly update cycle that Firefox and Chrome are using.

IE still has a major slice of the browser market share and this probably ain't
going to change soon. IE>9 have all been decent browsers for the time that
they were released, although they do seem a bit out of date 6 months later. At
the moment, if both Firefox and Chrome implement a new web platform feature,
it's often available to ~60% of web users within three months because of the
release cycle and auto updates. IE going to a 6-week major release cycle could
probably push this up to 80%-90% of users getting a feature within three
months, which would be awesome. (IE mobile is pretty small for market share,
so I'll ignore it at the objection of my Windows Phone using friends.)

Safari pretty much now works on a yearly major release cycle - which is better
than waiting two or three years, but it still sucks. Switching on Mac OS X to
Chrome or Firefox (or Opera) is simple enough. iOS, however, is pretty much
limited to whatever mobile Safari happened to have when WWDC rolled around
(save for minor updates whenever iOS 8 becomes 8.1, for example). I sort of
hope Apple uncouples core app versioning and updates from iOS and Mac OS X
updates soon, because that's mean they could move Safari to a much shorter
release cycle. iOS Safari is probably the most widely used mobile browser, and
keeping it at the bleeding edge would do wonders for the mobile web.

~~~
Silhouette
_One of the things I really want to see is both IE and Safari move to the six
weekly update cycle that Firefox and Chrome are using._

Whereas I would really like IE _not_ to do that, and ideally Firefox and
Chrome to move to longer cycles (minimum 6 months, preferably annual) for
their main public releases.

One good reason for this is that there is no point in having browsers support
new features within moments of someone conceiving them unless developers are
also keeping up with new developments at the same pace. Take three major
browsers on a six-weekly cycle and you literally need to be updating your
skill set every two weeks _and_ have projects to work on where those new
skills are _actually useful_. Unless all you do is write trendy web
development blogs for a living, you are not likely to be in this category.

Another good reason is that both Firefox and Chrome have horrible records for
quality since going to six-weekly release cycles, both in terms of
bugs/regressions and because they frequently implement new features that tick
boxes but have such poor quality of implementation that they aren't actually
useful for production work anyway. For example, right now, both Firefox and
Chrome have numerous glitches and performance problems in popular HTML/CSS
features like animations, web fonts, multimedia elements, and SVG, to the
extent that you can't reliably assume even relatively simple applications will
work without extensive and ongoing testing.

Recent versions of IE stand in sharp contrast to that pattern, and as such I
think IE now provides both a valuable brake on the industry and a
demonstration that having a solid, fast implementation of some features is far
more useful in practice than having unreliable and/or slow implementations of
more features.

(Edit: It's disappointing to see multiple downvotes yet no responses. This
happens all too often when I express the unpopular-but-based-on-hard-data view
that Firefox and Chrome are often slow and/or buggy when it comes to new
features, even though numerous articles and blog posts giving specific
examples in the areas I mentioned are yours to read for the price of a Google
search.)

~~~
altcognito
Since you asked:

Most Chrome and Firefox releases (in my experience) have been relatively
minor, and focused on security and bugs. Lets take a look at the last 4
releases of Chrome:

[http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/11/stable-
chan...](http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/11/stable-channel-
update_18.html) [http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/10/stable-
chan...](http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/10/stable-channel-
update.html) [http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/09/stable-
chan...](http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/09/stable-channel-
update-for-chrome-os.html)
[http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/08/stable-
chan...](http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/08/stable-channel-
update_26.html)

What argument could be made that longer release cycles would mean less bugs?
Is there going to be better QA? More stringent testing? Why would shorter
release cycles mean less testing?

No, longer release cycles would mean similar number of bugs, and security
holes would just sit out there longer. Chrome and Firefox is an example of
doing it right.

~~~
Silhouette
_Most Chrome and Firefox releases (in my experience) have been relatively
minor, and focused on security and bugs._

Serious security issues should be fixed as soon as possible anyway. This has
absolutely nothing to do with a regular schedule for planned releases, and all
of the major browser developers will already issue an immediate out-of-band
update for a sufficiently dangerous vulnerability.

 _What argument could be made that longer release cycles would mean less
bugs?_

Well, for one thing, you can't regress something if you don't change it. Both
Firefox and Chrome typically introduce a bunch of breaking changes every
update. Sometimes these are unintentional bugs. Sometimes they are deliberate
policy decisions, and in this case newer features are at far greater risk of
backward-incompatible changes, as with the CSS syntax and multimedia controls
examples I mentioned in another post to this thread.

The thing is, if your site/app used to work and it doesn't work any more after
your customer updated their browser, and now you're getting paged in the early
hours to be second/third tier support, it is highly unlikely that you care
about niceties like whether the browser developers consider the change to be
desirable. So if nothing else, every time every browser pushes out a major
update, a lot of people building sites or apps need to be testing that their
own projects still work, which is clearly a much greater overhead if you do it
eight or nine times per browser per year than if you only have to do it once
or twice.

~~~
Flimm
Is it not possible to run beta versions of these browsers to catch issues
early?

~~~
Silhouette
You can, but you still have to test against N different versions per year
instead of 1, which is still an N-fold increase in testing overhead compared
to annual releases.

You can automate some aspects of that testing to reduce the burden. However,
in the nature of web sites, some things will always need manual examination.
No unit test is going to tell you that Chrome has a layout bug where your
element that is styled to have a 100px width is being calculated at width 50px
anyway and your entire home page doesn't render properly as a result, nor that
resizing a responsive page in Firefox so it satisfies different media queries
and then changing it back to the original size might result in a different
layout (both real examples I've personally seen in recent months, BTW).

------
s_extra_s
It's a good idea to create a new browser that updates automatically every few
weeks like chrome rather than IE, which normally can't update automatically
because of corporate policies.

~~~
frik
IE 11 has automatic updates, check out its "info" dialog! Though I saw several
corporate PCs where the admins turned the autoupdate off.

Older IE got updates through Windows Update. The last IE version for WinXP was
IE 8.

If IE 12 doesn't come with a transparent IE compatibility mode and just starts
a IE 11 window, corporate admins will probably set IE 11 as default browser.

So developers of enterprise websites are stuck with IE 11 and its almost
finished but a bit broken HTML5 support for years to come :(

~~~
jlmorton
It would be really nice if all browsers had an expiration date. If they
haven't been updated in 12 months, they simply cease to operate in any way
except to update themselves.

~~~
Havoc
In which case I nominate you to field the billion support calls from people
confused why their "Internet" is broken. No rather just silently update it.

------
wideroots
I will give it a try if the new browser no longer supports ActiveX and has
better extension supports similar to Chrome.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
ActiveX isn't a major concern, in current IE if you look in the security tab
in the Internet context, it is pretty locked down and damn near depreciated.

Intranet is more liberal. But a lot of enterprises add their internal portals
to the trusted list if they still depend on ActiveX (as a depressingly large
number do).

Chrome and Firefox's extensions are better. Although Firefox's extension model
is a little clunky due to how old it is (or at least it was last time I used
it).

~~~
wideroots
If Microsoft kills ActiveX in the new browser, it will force everyone to stop
depending on ActiveX. You would be very surprised how many websites outside of
the U.S. still depend on ActiveX, and these are critical websites like banking
and government. Hence, killing ActiveX support is important to me.

~~~
contextfree
"Metro" and Windows Phone IE already dumped ActiveX and extension support.

~~~
Silhouette
Given how unpopular both of those platforms are, I'm not sure you're making a
very compelling argument there...

------
spdustin
They should go full-circle with FrontPage (which inspired many folks to get
into web apps back in the day) and call it Vermeer.

(From Vermeer Technologies, Inc., the original FrontPage server extensions
folks - fun random fact: it's why SharePoint service URLs have "_vti_bin" in
their path)

------
mrbig4545
lets hope they make it windows version agnostic, that way we can all start
supporting ie12, instead of being shackled to ie9

~~~
ben336
Eh? IE9 isn't the latest version available for any version of Windows.

8 is the latest for XP/Vista

11 is the latest for 7/8/8.1

9 is still popular because not everybody upgrades browsers, but giving users
who don't upgrade browsers a new option is unlikely to be helpful.

Communicating to them that IE is going away and that they should upgrade to a
modern browser, "Spartan" or otherwise, would possibly help this situation, as
the author suggests.

~~~
mrbig4545
ie9 is available for vista. although in practice, ie8 is the minimum we have
to support

------
Havoc
Sounds good. Let's hope Spartan is the mindset the devs are operating with.

------
ourmandave
My initial thought was it will be a stand alone version that you can download
and run next to IE6+ _instead_ of Chrome, FF, et. al.

So instead of replacing IE6 with the competition, replace it with Spartan and
MS gets to keep their browser market share and Corp IT can keep running IE6
apps.

------
nercury
For some reason, I immediately pictured a product rewrite gone wrong and
causing two versions of the same product appear, because the new one can never
catch up to the legacy quirks of first.

------
sunasra
It would be really great if they do more work on compatibility and memory
management(Currently chrome kills the system)

------
venomsnake
Does anyone have idea if the idiocy of integrating the IE browser so deep
inside the os is finally solved, that version updates are possible? And will
spartan be stand alone binary, like IE should have been at launch?

~~~
lostlogin
I don't have a good understanding of the history of IE but thought it was
embedded as a way of breaking Netscape - if that was ever true the time has
obviously passed for it to remain deeply embedded. However if this was the
reason, isn't that a good argument for the way MS constructed IE (which isn't
to say I agree with the strategy)?

~~~
venomsnake
It was the fact that it came with windows and free that broke netscape. That
the rendering engine is so embedded in the OS that the question is "will we be
able to bring IE X to platform windows Y at all" is just stupid.

~~~
DanBC
MS prevented vendors from bundling Netscape in Windows. MS used the fact that
IE was tied so deeply into the OS as a reason for not being able to unbundle
it. MS used APIs to favour IE over other software - MS made their OS work
better with their browser than with other competitor browsers.

------
nawazdhandala
I actually think Microsoft is re-branding IE rather than completely rewriting
it.

~~~
gosukiwi
Rumors say it's the same rendering and javascript engine but the UI will get
more similar to Chrome and FF and there'll be extensions. Also yeah no
backwards compatibility it seems, and more regular updates. Sounds good to me.

~~~
userbinator
_but the UI will get more similar to Chrome and FF_

I don't think this is a good thing at all. People choose to use different
browsers partly because they have different UIs, and UI changes are
particularly jarring as evidenced by all the "I'll use browser Y" complaints
when browser X changes something about their UI... only to be followed later
by "I'll use browser X" when Y changes. There's no longer any real choice,
it's just an illusion of choosing between narrowing alternatives.

Especially to see browsers' UI turning into clones of Chrome is sad, since I
personally _hate_ the "hide everything away that could possibly confuse users"
and the associated "treat users like idiots" mentality that's particularly
prevalent in browsers today. IE is one of the few browsers remaining that had
relatively more UI, but I'm not surprised to see it disappearing... the trend
seems to be to turn browsers into glorified televisions, with UIs like this
one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8670503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8670503)

------
brickmort
I don't mean to be so disparaging, but Microsoft really should just take IE
out back and shoot it.

~~~
matthewmacleod
That's not really helpful. IE is no longer a shitty browser; why should it be
killed off?

~~~
nailer
It really is. Even in IE11 there's a bunch of busted basics. The CustomEvent
constructor is broken out of the box.

Edit: see details in post below.

~~~
demallien
I don't mean this to be a personal attack, so please don't take it that way,
but comments like this read to me as being written by a young, inexperienced
programmer. I happen to know that this is not your case, but without checking
the username, I would immediately classify this comment as such.

The people over at Microsoft are not idiots - even though Microsoft is no
longer the new hotness, they still pay developers well, and have some pretty
tight engineering going on. So when you say "The Event constructor is broken
out of the box", my first instinct is to assume that the Microsoft engineers
have implemented the constructor in their way for reasons that you're not
smart enough to have grasped.

But, as I said, I know that you aren't a young inexperienced programmer, so
you probably have some good reasons to make the claim, which leads me to the
point of this rambling post - why is the Event constructor broken in IE? I'm
curious to know what specific problems you have with it.

~~~
nailer
Sorry, I didn't provide details because I probably just assume everyone here
is a JS developer, which is probably a bad idea.

IE11 has no CustomEvent constructor. You have to polyfill it with
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/CustomEvent](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/CustomEvent).
Microsoft's official Twitter account @iedevchat has pointed people to the same
one: note the article article says for IE10, but the issue and fix is required
for IE11.

It's a simple fix, but CustomEvent is ancient, and it's surprising what didn't
make it into IE11.

------
ChrisNorstrom
At this point, Microsoft has pulled the plug on so many of its products &
services over the years that developers and users are cautiously avoiding
everything it puts out. Even if it's good.

From Zune (iPod competitor), to Kin, to Origami (small touchscreen laptop), to
Games for Windows Live (steam competitor), to Live.com (google competitor v1),
Bing.com (google compeititor v2), Expo (craigslist competitor), whats-it-
called? (twitter competitor for natural disasters), Expression, Silverlight
(flash competitor), Windows Live Spaces (wordpress competitor), Windows
Phone...

Microsoft loves to start things, then leaves them to rot.

The Micro-Cycle:

1) See someone make money. Get starry eyed.

2) Rush into industry with product.

3) Let product/service rot.

4) Sunset product/service.

~~~
joenathan
Google abandons projects swiftly when they think that don't make sense; Wave,
iGoogle, Reader, Glass?, Buzz, Plus?, Answers, Google Video, Google
Checkout/Wallet, Orkut, Picasa, Gears, etc... When you are a large company you
need to focus your resources into areas where you can be effective and not
stretch yourself too thin.

~~~
TheSoftwareGuy
Did I miss something? When did Google give up on glass?

~~~
joenathan
They haven't yet, but with Android Wear replicating its functionality while
being much less expensive and more socially acceptable, it's not hard to see
that Glass doesn't have much of a future.

