
The iPad is the new IE6 - ldayley
http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2011/01/ipad-is-the-new-ie6/
======
Yaggo
The title is totally unfair. If iOS 3.x was still widely used in 2020, then
the title would be justified.

> HTML wasn’t created for dynamic/interactive content, it was created to
> present academic documents.

Yep, and the internet was not created for porn, PTFE not for cookware, etc.
Technologies evolve.

> JavaScript performance on iOS is 100x worse than desktop.

No doubt and that's unlikely to change. iPad uses about ~100 times less power
than typical desktop.

> Canvas performance on iOS is so bad that it is barely usable.

Not hardware accelerated == slow on mobile. Hopefully the canvas will be
accelerated, too.

> A lot of people don’t upgrade their software, iOS 3.2 is completely
> different than iOS 4.2 and you should support both.

Should you? We are talking about consumer devices. I think it's totally fair
to ask the user to upgrade their platform (OS/browser) to get new features
(it's free!). That's what Apple is doing, anyway.

> The iOS simulator is different than the actual device.

I agree, would be nice if it emulated the actual performance of iDevice.

> It is very important to note that every single Webkit browser works
> differently and --

That's the curse (or blessing?) of an open source project. Still, WebKit
browsers (eg. Chrome / Safari) differs less than totally different browser
engines. Would you be happier if Chrome had come up with their own engine?

> \-- that older versions of the iOS has many bugs and missing features (the
> new ones as well).

No shit?

> Chrome and Safari have a bunch of rendering problems related with HTML5
> video and CSS3 as well when you start overlaying content and adding CSS
> transitions.

No doubt. That's the price you pay for having multiple implementations of
(loose) spec created by multiple participants. Which is still _far more_
better situation than having one closed implementation created by a single
company for few selected platforms (partially substandard runtimes).

> Android 2.0-2.2 also have many bugs related with HTML5 video.

Not iPad's fault.

> Apple bug tracker sucks, you can’t even see if anyone reported the same bug
> before, I won’t post anything there because of that and because I don’t
> agree with the company policy… -

Apparently Apple too suffers from "big company" syndrome.

> If you are a jerk, I will be a jerk with you as well…

Nice attitude.

> If it works well the end user will not care about which technology was used
> to create it.

Users have no clue, no news here.

> Don’t believe in keynotes, even better, don’t watch them…

Whether you consider it "amazing" or not, arguably Safari for iOS offers the
best browsing experience today in its class (handheld devices) and Apple has
advanced HTML technology a great leap forward.

~~~
brudgers
The analogy to IE6 is based on both requiring substantial duplication of
effort in order to render the page similarly to its appearance in other
browsers and to provide like functionality to web sites. It seems to me that
in part, Apple's intention is to make it less troublesome to develop and
maintain an app than it is to develop and maintain a rich media website which
handles iOS gracefully through the deliberate incorporation of
incompatibilities in the iOS browser (e.g. no Flash).

[edit] incompatibilities are different from non-compliance with standards.

------
rimantas

      > People complain that Flash has bugs only because they
      > never tried to do anything “complex” using HTML5 video
      > on the iPad
    

Yeah? So if one tries to do something complex on iPad, will Flash bugs
disappear? Or will people stop complaining about them?

I guess neither. Just another pointless rambling with little sense. Author
mixes many things without the proper understanding of some. Was this article
about iPad, or HTML, or CSS, or Flash, or …?

I am not sure how this even got upvoted. Take this:

    
    
      > I’m saying that the iPad is the new IE6 because we are
      > expecting it to be something that it isn’t,
    

Who is expecting what exactly?

> the same way that we were expecting that IE6 would have > the same
> features/performance/reliability than the latest > versions of
> Firefox/Safari

What does that even mean? IE6 was released years before even first releases of
Firefox and Safari.

    
    
      > It happened with IE6 and it is happening with the iOS
      > Safariright now.
    

No, it's not. Safari is not stuck with 10 years old version, and Safari team
is not disbanded, unlike IE team.

Flagged.

~~~
eitland
If it wasn't for the "Flagged." I would have upvoted you.

The post has some real issues, but I also find it raises valid concerns.
Supporting iOS/android/other devices can prove to become a real pain. OTOH the
lifespan of these devices are most likely to be far shorter than corporate
desktop computers, and IT departments won't have an option of installing older
versions of the browser on new devices.

------
chc
I'm not sure a browser's <video> tag not supporting all the features this guy
wants makes the iPad "the new IE6." Seems more than a little hyperbolic to me.
<video> is one of the shakiest parts of HTML5 in general, particularly with
the whole codec thing.

~~~
ugh
That comparison is just badly chosen and unnecessary [0]. He argues that some
aspects of iOS are a little bit like aspects of IE6, not that the “iPad is the
new IE6”. Writing that as the headline is just asking for trouble and will
only lead to people not discussing the substance of your article but screaming
at each other.

I’m all for just ignoring that comparison and focusing on the substance of the
article. Please. (Because the substance, unlike the comparison, is actually
interesting.)

[0] Some would call it “linkbait”. And yes, this was a very lame attempt of
trying to get away with using a word I usually hold in contempt. Shame on me.

~~~
pyre

      > this was a very lame attempt of trying to get away with
      > using a word I usually hold in contempt
    

Why not use a more general term then? Surely this practice pre-dates the
internet (and therefore also the term 'linkbait').

~~~
ugh
Sensationalism and hyperbole are probably the right words.

------
jasonkester
Video I can actually live with. People seem to be willing to click _something_
in order for a video to start playing, regardless of what the app in question
is doing.

It's Audio that is the killer oversight. Just like Video, Audio can only be
played on iOS Safari as the result of a user click. They don't have to click
the play button specifically, but they have to click _something_.

That means you simply can't write a video game that has sound. Every clip
needs to be "prepared" with a user action that you convert behind the scenes
to a .load() so that it can .play() when you want it to. And if you "prepare"
a different clip, you can no longer play the first one, except as the result
of a new user interaction.

Add to that the bonus that you can only play one clip at a time. And that iOS
tosses them out of memory every time you load a new one, and suddenly your
rich, interactive presentation, game, or whatever is reduced to a boggy
buffering-screen-having mess.

I wish we could hope for them to fix it in future versions, but the opposite
is the case in practice. Up until iOS 4.2.1, there was a nice workaround that
got your audio/video clips playing in some cases. iOS 4.2.1 specifically
addressed that loophole.

~~~
fooandbarify
I understand where they're coming from - browsers shouldn't let websites just
play sound automatically because it is annoying as hell. I _hate_ Flash sites
that do that. So drawing the line somehow is tough, I guess.

~~~
phoboslab
So why not ask the user for permission to play audio? It's already being done
with geo-location and storage.

~~~
joubert
Submit feature request.

------
kennet
I am probably in the minority on HN thinking this, and it's a pity that there
is no chance of this ever changing, but lets go with it anyway:

HTML, CSS and JS are a very bad way to create websites today. It could be
worse, but it's bad enough. They were decent once, when we didn't need them to
the extent that people are using them today.

As others have mentioned, the signs of this problem is when people are writing
language X to language Y converters to accomplish the same job, because
language Y is detestable. This would be your HTML, CSS and JS. Tools like
HAML, SASS and CoffeeScript are a very good sign of this.

For myself, there are two things that are really pissing me off: 1) Lack of
security by default, 2) Lack of choice in client-side scripting. I am at the
whim of JavaScript which is pretty terrible. Of course, there is no hope of
anyone producing a browser that offers an API, and a set of languages that can
access that API. So it's just JS. That's _fucked_ to me. I have more gripes
but I'd like to keep this post short.

On the server side, it's easier. We have more choices, because our clients are
not tied into a specific server technology; I used to write PHP, but since
then I moved on to something that's a lot more thought out for serving
webpages. MVC is the ideal for this kind of thing. The server will give the
browser what it wants, and this does not concern the customer. On the browser
end? We are screwed. There is quite likely nowhere to go.

Unfortunately, we have four big companies (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and
Opera) pouring in a lot of money to keep this technology afloat. And it's very
sad. These companies should be leading the way, not holding back technology.

 _Very_ sad.

~~~
orangecat
I agree completely. Javascript is just a bad language(1), and HTML and CSS are
fundamentally unsuited for the kinds of apps that we're using them for. After
years of effort we've managed to get to the point where they sort of work, but
it could have been much better.

(1) Yes, I know the cool things you can do with closures. Python and Ruby do
them too, without the insane misfeatures like default global scope and bizarre
implicit type conversions.

~~~
__david__
> Python and Ruby do them too..

Ruby has decent lambdas/closures, but Python absolutely does _not_. Its lambas
are horrifically limited. Because of that alone, Javascript is a much better
at functional programming than Python.

I agree that default global scope is a misfeature, but the solution is trivial
--declaring variables--which I think makes the language much more readable
anyway. I quite dislike the Python style of coding in which the local
variables are just causally used without listing them somewhere--it's too easy
for things to get lost. On the other hand, maybe I just need better syntax
highlighting? The new "use strict" should completely fix accidental globals,
as I understand it.

People complain about the implicit type conversions but I'm not sure I've had
that pose a problem in real life and I've written my share of Javascript. I'm
not even sure what that kind of bug would look like. I'd love an example.

~~~
glenjamin
I don't agree with your assessment of python closures. Just because you have
to name all inner functions doesn't mean they're not proper closures.

------
YooLi
The iPad/IE6 part is just thrown in for shock value. HTML5 not supporting
everything this guy wants has nothing to do with IE6-like crappiness.

~~~
chime
I've been developing a PhoneGap app using JQuery & LessJS on the iPad now for
3 weeks straight. It is an absolutely amazing experience. It is nothing like
the nightmare of developing for IE6, even when IE6 was considered the best
browser.

------
daniel02216
At least the iPad is being updated frequently, and nobody's stuck with an old
version (except original iPhones...), unlike IE6 was.

Sidenote: This blog's highlight color is green on black? Ick.

~~~
ergo98
Lots and lots of users don't upgrade. I can't find it right now, but one iOS
dev did a story on fragmentation in that camp based upon their own metrics,
and it was scary. Perhaps this will resolve if they start doing OTA updates.

User "error" for sure, just putting that out there. Just because Apple makes
updates available doesn't mean that most users have installed them.

~~~
saturdaysaint
The iOS dev that saw major fragmentation would have an interesting story on
his hands. Statistics I've seen indicate that %90 of iOS users are on 4 or
greater -
[http://www.maclife.com/article/news/nearly_90_percent_iphone...](http://www.maclife.com/article/news/nearly_90_percent_iphone_users_running_ios_4_0).

~~~
ergo98
[http://www.droidsector.com/blog/2010/12/02/android-and-
ios-f...](http://www.droidsector.com/blog/2010/12/02/android-and-ios-
fragmentation/)

I'm not sure if the bump numbers are broadly relevant: who is the average user
who will be running bump? It isn't a general iPhone user, but instead is a
technologically savvy individual usually in a place like San Francisco. There
is no relevance there to the broader market.

------
benjoffe
> I’m saying that the iPad is the new IE6 because we are expecting it to be
> something that it isn’t, the same way that we were expecting that IE6 would
> have the same features/performance/reliability than the latest versions of
> Firefox/Safari.

This makes no sense, IE6 was released 3½ years before the first version of
Firefox, and was really the _best_ web browser at the time.

~~~
pyre
This just sounds like the author came into the mix long after IE6 starting
showing its age, and knows nothing except for people complaining about how
much it sucks compared to the latest versions of Firefox and/or Safari.

The analogy still falls flat on its face because what people expected IE6 to
be (by the time Firefox and Safari were around) was _improved/updated_ , which
it wasn't because Microsoft disbanded the development team (and only decided
to get back into the game when their dominance started to crumble).

------
jacques_chester
The <new popular thing> is the new <old busted thing> is a great way to get up
voted.

Here are some candidates I could try.

 _Android is the new Ford Pinto_

 _Facebook is the new Absolute Monarchism_

 _YCombinator is the new Standard Oil_

 _Tesla Motors is the new Netscape_

 _Cerulean is the new Azure_

~~~
benbeltran
X is the new Y is the new Top 10 List Blog Post.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Does that mean this would be the ultimate linkbait heading: _"Top 10 Xs that
are the new Ys, plus puppies."_

~~~
jacques_chester
_Top 10 Xs that are the new Ys, with benchmarks vs Redis, Mongo and MySQL!_

~~~
benbeltran
Top 10 Xs that are the new Ys with benchmark vs Redis, Mongo and MySQL and why
it proves google is evil.

------
saturdaysaint
He's a little bit late to the punch here - if we're on the eve of another iPad
announcement, which we probably are, every area of performance will probably
see significant improvement (Apple typically adopts the best ARM chips
available, which is probably a dual core chip now).

He makes a very interesting point, though. The current generation of media
tablets are exceptionally slow devices that could easily be in use for four or
five years. I think users may expect the lifecycle of these devices to be
closer to a TV or PC (say, 3 - 7 years) than a phone. As HTML advances to be
capable of everything that Flash is now capable of, developers might be held
back to target devices that are roughly equivalent to a 10 year old PC.

------
csomar
Yes and no. Web Apps are not only about videos. It's a new addition to the
HTML5 toolbox and you can't judge that quickly. Let browsers first work more
on it.

However, don't overlook HTML, JavaScript, CSS, HTML5 that quickly. Look at
companies like Sencha, they have built extremely great and stable products
with JavaScript. Not that stable, but they are still great.

Flash is cool, too. But I think only if used in its' own. Try to look at
activeden.net and some samples of XML websites and you'll see how amazing they
are. JavaScript isn't a thousands mile from it, but if Web Developers were
using the best practices and improving their JavaScript code, their pages will
be lighter and they'll have better performance.

But why target the iPad? Steve says what he thinks will convince his audience
and sells more iPads. He's a much more of a sales man. He's trying to attract
developers to HTML5 since it's the only way to kill Flash and get HTML5 to the
top.

My Opinion: It's very good. I want diversification. Everyone uses a different
platform and built something elegant. I don't like censorship of any of its'
kinds. (like banning flash apps or websites, though, it's still an Apple
decision). Let everyone decide which platform he wants to use, let him decides
his target audience, his business model and make happy customers.

------
dmotz
Beyond the question of the iPad, I have to object to promoting a blanket
attitude that web developers should shy away from pushing out progressive web
technologies just because they aren't yet tried and tested and may not work
perfectly on every device.

Although the web's evolution is lightly governed by a slow moving standards
consortium, it's really the hackers that push the cutting edge to become new
standards that any browser needs to stay relevant. If the developer community
shies away from pushing new technologies out of fear and inconvenience, the
pace of progress slows. I don't want that to happen.

I applaud the bigger players taking steps toward progress even when it's an
investment with not much visible payoff at this point. (cf. HTML5 support on
Youtube)

Just remember to know your audience, but don't be afraid to nudge them if
they're missing out on something in a legacy browser. Use progressive
degradation but don't have too much remorse if there's no legacy alternative
and you have a saavy audience.

We're talking about websites, not missile guidance systems. Take risks. In an
open system things aren't perfect, but if we stop, things stop moving.

------
mwg66
The problem with IE6 (now) as the lowest common denomination is the lack of
upgrades. It wasn't a bad browser when it launched but it sure is now. I don't
see there continuing to be a significant share of MobileSafari 3 or 4 in the
coming years. People upgrade. So the analogy is unfair and misrepresented.

------
Samuel_Michon
_"The iPad is the new IE6"_

I disagree, there are worse mobile browsers. I'd say Opera Mini is the new
IE6, the lowest common denominator. Try to make anything slightly interactive
for Opera Mini, you'll never sleep again.

------
othermaciej
OP's rant seems ranty. But if anyone's project is having serious specific
problems with HTML5 video on iPad Safari, please file bugs and post the links,
I'll do my best to get them looked at.

------
j_baker
Aha! So Safari is the new browser that everyone hates because it doesn't
adhere to standards... because it only adheres to standards? I think the
author actually has a reasonable point, but he lost it by making a totally
inflammatory and inaccurate comparison to IE 6.

------
sid3k
There is similar blog entry I had written, about mobile web browsers and
Internet Explorer;

<http://io.kodfabrik.com/2010/09/23/ie9.html> (Thoughts on IE9 and
Teleportation)

------
bambax
I don't know about iPad and IE6 but what I know is that this site
(millermedeiros.com) does not react properly to zoom (CTRL++): the page widens
but the font size does not change!!

It's therefore incredibly annoying to read from a distance.

------
statictype
He talks about interactive video - what does it mean for video to be
interactive?

~~~
jpr
Probably the way youtube videos are interactive, you click to close the ads.

~~~
badmonkey0001
I'm betting he's probably talking about features like having a queue, embed
code popups, tweet from within the video and things like that. Such features
are considered "basic" in any decent interactive flash based player.

For your YouTube example, don't look at the player while the video is
playing... look at the interface between videos. That's an interactive video
player.

