I agree, but still - hooray! IE has been slooooooowww to change for a long time, while other browsers have innovated rapidly.
If IE does something better than everyone else, no biggie - they'll catch up quickly. Meanwhile, IE is actually aware that they have to compete on standards. That's a wonderful thing to see.
Of course, without Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and others kicking their butts, Microsoft would never have done any of this. Competition helps the user. And now maybe it will flow the other direction a little.
I agree that the IE team finding and pointing out problems as they implement features is great but I think by saying the other browsers will catch up quickly you mean release an actual finished browser with this feature 100% to spec long before Microsoft get around to it.
Debunking IE marketing claims competitively could be the new Acid3 test when it comes to getting browser programmers excited about fixing bugs in obscure corners of the specs.
You know, philosophically speaking, I'm not sure competition really does help the end user. Is a constant search for something better good? Is life now bad? Do we really need it to be improved? Perhaps the idea that it can be improved -- or even should be -- is itself a negativity creator.
Beyond those questions, some of the tactics and strategies used by competitive companies don't lead to better lives. For example, if VHS had never been in competition with BetaMax, our lives would be better because Betamax is better than VHS. Perhaps if there was less competition, many of the startups that are put out of business every day would survive longer and provide even more better life. Sometimes competition destroys the best alternative.
Little things like that make me wonder about our conviction that competition is better.
Further still, imagine if all the energy spent competing was spent collaborating! Imagine if we all focused on a better life, rather than two separate teams focusing on two separate paths to that better life. Mozilla team + Chrome team could be a better scenario than Mozilla team vs. Chrome team.
So, my point is, It's not really that clear cut that competition makes our lives better. Another example, in many countries around the world with single payer health care systems, the people live longer, have lower infant mortality, and disease than in the U.S. where there is competition for health care provision and insurance.
So I'd like to see some evidence for the claim that competition makes lives better and products better. And, even if they do, does it matter that those products have become better? Does the fact that our lives will be better 10 years from now mean we can't be happy today? Should we not focus on being happy with what we have? If competition weren't the status quo, maybe there would be something existing right now to make our lives better than our lives currently are, but we simply don't know about it. It's not here. It doesn't exist. If it did exist, perhaps our lives would be better, but we only believe they are better because we can compare our lives with this thing existing with our lives when it didn't exist.
Would our lives be better if we could colonize mars? Would we have been able to colonize mars if we had worked with the Russians during the cold war? How much more progress would have been made if we had collaborated? Instead, competition has led to nuclear proliferation -- is that a good thing?
If there were only one browser, my life would be better. I wouldn't have to develop for four... wait, five browsers. I'd be able to spend more time focusing on the features and requirements of the system, rather than IE showing a div a little higher or than Firefox. Or Chrome throwing an error on an Ajax call. Or adding IF statements to handle key presses.
Take it to the logical extreme. What if there were 20 browsers each with 5% market share? Would life be even better still?
For a couple of years, there was only one browser: IE6. We've already seen what happens. MS had the dominant browser, and slacked off on improvement. Do you really think life would be better for either the users or developers if we were still stuck with IE6? You can thank competition for that.
Browser makers do cooperate. They work together on web standards. Two major ones share the same open source rendering engine.
Betamax was not "better" than VHS. It was better in image quality, but it was inferior in the length of material that could be put on a single cassette. Consumers voted with their wallets, and decided length was more important than video quality.
Your argument focuses on whether incremental improvements produced by competition make us happier and, with respect to those, you might be right.
But, in the larger view, competition is what made anyone invent Betamax at all. Or flat panel TVs instead of CRTs or cell phones instead of telegraphs.
Competition is why we're walking, talking, and building tools, instead of being one-celled creatures without a nucleus. The question of which state of being is better is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's also why we are creating a spaceship earth that is uninhabitable by humans, but plenty fine for single-celled organisms. The future of humanity is left as an exercise for the reader.
Yeah, in the comparisons they did, IE definitely came out on top. But I didn't really have a problem with the attitude of the post, "look at our shitty implementation" is not really worth writing home about.
Not to mention it sounds like they're using it as an excuse as to why it took so long. They should have just done something simple in IE7 and iterated from there.
First specified back in 2002, border-radius was already supported by Firefox 1.0 in 2004 as –moz-border-radius. Almost three years later, Safari 3.0 followed with –webkit-border-radius. In December 2009, the specification became a Candidate Recommendation. A few weeks ago, Opera’s 10.50 release was the first to add support the property without a vendor prefix.
This kind of wording continues to perpetuate that vendor prefixes are bad. Opera should only have implemented the property without the vendor prefix (although, technically, there's no such thing as a "property without the vendor prefix" and "a property with the vendor prefix", they are really two different properties with, by design, potentially different implementations) if it conforms to the agreed upon standard (I don't know if it does, Opera is good about that, so I assume it does). I don't expect anyone else to provide a bare border-radius property that doesn't conform to the standard, if they can't conform to the standard, they should be using vendor prefixes.
You know what we haven't seen enough of is vendor prefixed property names that provide different implementations so that developers and designers can try out different things in the same browser as a way to move towards a standard. -moz-foobar-a and -moz-foobar-b could be two implementations of the same property, that perhaps render differently based on an ambiguity in the proposal and which one gets picked for the foobar property is based on actual in-the-wild-use based on developer needs.
Unfortunately, the time when 95% of the users will have a decent browser is still years ahead of us. I wonder if by the time IE9 with rounded corners support is widespread, they'll lag behind the other browsers on css transforms...
then ill be impressed about improving an edge case on a feature other people implemented 5 years ago.