

Translation From MS-Speak to English of the “Native HTML5″ announcement - st3fan
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/04/15/nativity-scene

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brianwillis
It must be an interesting moment in a software developer's career when you're
offered a job on the Internet Explorer team. On one hand, regardless of how
small your contributions are, your work will be used by millions of people
around the world. On the other hand web developers will treat you as guilty by
association until the very end of your career.

~~~
pushtheenvelope
I can't resist this one, can I please have a go? I know you didn't
specifically ask for my opinion, but perhaps it gives some food for thought.
Forgive me if this is more off-topic than you would like.

As someone who joined the IE dev team relatively recently, I must say I had
much of the same ambivalence you express in your first sentence. To add to
that, I was a Mac user and moved from the Bay Area -- not exactly the bastion
of Microsoft love -- and still have friends who are skeptical of my move. For
me, the decision boiled down to two things:

(1) Web browsers have intrigued me for about a decade, and this gave me a
chance to help push the web platform ahead. I love how through a process of
public discussion and consensus some of the largest technology companies come
together to build these (more or less) mutually compatible and complex
platforms (a.k.a web browsers). Notice how I skipped past much of internet
history there? You might say that, well, there are other browsers out there
that I could have contributed to, and I will then ask which one do you think
needed the most help? ;)

(2) Where would my small contribution be able to have the most impact. As you
rightly point out, IE remains the most used browser (on the desktop at least)
and every line of code I write may some day be exercised by hundreds of
millions. I cannot emphasize enough just how fulfilling this is to me. When I
was graduating and interviewing, Facebook liked to say that their user to dev
ratio was a million to one, and our team easily tops that.

How's it like to be an engineer on this product? Lots of fun and very
challenging. Much (as my limited view sees it) boils down to adding new
features and/or rewriting older subsystems for performance reasons. Simple
enough, but when you factor in about 15 years of legacy code, much of whose
functionality has to be maintained (or emulated even in the new subsystems),
life becomes very interesting very fast. I _suspect_ Firefox and Chrome are
running into some of these challenges with the Electrolysis project (FF) and
adding in graphics hardware acceleration (Chrome), which is perhaps why
they're taking longer than anticipated.

Do other web developers treat me guilty by association? I don't know :)

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jonah
I don't see you as guilty necessarily, especially as a relatively new member
of the team. Your point about the complex and nasty legacy stuff you have to
deal with is good too.

From my perspective, the IE team's priorities are _weird_. That's all. Yes,
the race for performance is super-important as we're pushing our browsers to
do more and more but if IE can't _DO_ the same things other browsers do I
don't really care how _fast_ it can not do them. ;)

EDIT: grammar.

~~~
willifred
To me it makes perfect sense. For many people, web browsers have very little
to differentiate them. Chrome's single major differentiator is that it's fast.
If you asked the average person what's different about Chrome— they probably
wouldn't care so much about the robustness of the html5 or css3 support—
they'd say that it's fast.

Microsoft can attack on that front very aggressively. So they're taking the
one thing that most people know is different or special about Chrome, and
saying, 'IE is faster. Faster canvas, faster svg.' Seems like a great strategy
to me.

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praeclarum
I really don't understand why people are whining so much about this.

I think native is justified given that (1) they are (finally) JITing their JS
and (2) their graphics renderer in using the new DirectWrite lib which is very
close to what the WDDM graphics drivers talk. They're saying that they're
running much closer to the hardware than they did in the past.

Why are people being so negative about it? Better browsers are better for the
web. Period. Exclamation point.

~~~
wikyd
1 isn't exclusive to them, so doesn't add to their point of being "native." 2
comes with a ton of caveats, if I'm not mistaken. Other browsers also take
advantage of graphics cards for certain kinds of rendering.

I have no evidence for this, but I think that IE is trying to ride on the
positive association people have for "native apps" on mobile phones.

~~~
praeclarum
I don't see how exclusivity has anything at all to do with a technical point
(I am considering "native" a technical point.)

But I'm tired of defending them.

I honestly just don't understand people's negativity. I'll say it again,
better browsers make for a better web. You can laugh at their marketing pitch,
but we should all be excited that they put a thoroughbred horse in the race.

~~~
wikyd
When they claim they are the _only_ native browser, then the feature set that
defines native better be exclusive to them.

It's not negativity to call bullshit on a claim. There are plenty of things
Microsoft could be touting about their browser without making up marketing
speak.

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obtino
Although I agree with the author's frustration, the link's just another rant
on the press release.

Anyone care to explain to me what their "Native HTML5" really means?

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derefr
Taking a random stab: the fact that _native apps_ —i.e. non-webapps—that embed
the MSHTML web view control to render some of themselves, will now be capable
of using HTML5 features in the pages they display within those controls, might
get called "native support": as in "installing IE10 _provides_ native HTML5
support to Windows."

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yuhong
MS already removed WGA validation for IE upgrades when they released a new
installer for IE7 in 2007.

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joshu
what the fuck DOES "native html5" mean, anyway?

~~~
taken11
they have digitally native coding monkeys now

