IE no more?

[dee-u]

What can we use to download other browsers then?

[jmcilhinney]

I assume that that's a facetious statement but Microsoft have already said that IE isn't going anywhere just yet. Project Spartan (or whatever it ends up being named) will be the default browser in Windows 10 I believe, but IE will be retained for compatibility. Both IE and Spartan will include both rendering engines too, so you may not have to switch between them to get the advantages of both when required. The thing that I find amusing is that IE has been criticised, among other things, for being bloated and Chrome was hailed as being lean and mean when it was introduced, yet it appears that Chrome is one of the biggest resource hogs on Windows these days.

Microsoft have been improving IE and particularly making it more standards-compliant for quite some time now and I applaud them for that. It seems that they have finally come to the realisation that the weight of backward compatibility is just too great and they have decided to cut ties to that past with Project Spartan. That's probably the right approach. IE will still be there for corporates who have standardised on it but the rest of us can leave behind the weight of code and perception that has been holding it back. The trick will avoiding the trap that both Firefox and Chrome have fallen into. Both those browsers have become what they purported to oppose due to the weight of features demanded by the users who hailed them in the first place for being light-weight.

[Gruff]

I don't disagree with you. My gut reaction is that spartan will be a smaller footprint so as to run on more devices with fewer resources.

Regarding Chrome... what struck me when I first used it was that they avoided four different ways to get the same thing accomplished. Windows 10 still suffers from that problem.

[jmcilhinney]

Regarding Chrome... what struck me when I first used it was that they avoided four different ways to get the same thing accomplished. Windows 10 still suffers from that problem.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Give people one option for accomplishing a task and those who don't like doing it that way will complain that you're not listening to your users. There's nothing wrong with having multiple options for performing a task as long as the amount of code doesn't grow proportionally.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I think they should make Spartan Open Source. After all, it is going to compete with the other browsers, and with a name like that, it should compete naked, as the Spartans were wont to do.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

The thing that I find amusing is that IE has been criticised, among other things, for being bloated and Chrome was hailed as being lean and mean when it was introduced, yet it appears that Chrome is one of the biggest resource hogs on Windows these days.

One of the the main problems people had with IE was not the resource usage but how slow it was to use and render pages.

Even on later version of IE (not sure on IE10 as i havent really used it much) just simple thing like opening a tab takes forever.

The thing that really killed IE imho though was they didn't listen to web developers for a long time. And when proper alternatives came about that followed proper standards, Web Developers flocked to those browsers in large numbers.

Every web develop i have ever known hates IE with a passion and would do anything to stop supporting it if they could get away with it.

And Developers have families and friends, i know i moved my entire family and anyone who would listen on to an alternative browser in the IE6 / 7 days when Firefox and then Chrome became available as they where what i was using.

I will be interested to see how good Spartan is and how much traction it gets, i have no problem using another browser if its good.

[jmcilhinney]

One of the the main problems people had with IE was not the resource usage but how slow it was to use and render pages.

Even on later version of IE (not sure on IE10 as i havent really used it much) just simple thing like opening a tab takes forever.

The thing that really killed IE imho though was they didn't listen to web developers for a long time. And when proper alternatives came about that followed proper standards, Web Developers flocked to those browsers in large numbers.

Every web develop i have ever known hates IE with a passion and would do anything to stop supporting it if they could get away with it.

And Developers have families and friends, i know i moved my entire family and anyone who would listen on to an alternative browser in the IE6 / 7 days when Firefox and then Chrome became available as they where what i was using.

I will be interested to see how good Spartan is and how much traction it gets, i have no problem using another browser if its good.

I'd agree with much of that. IE is at version 11 now and it has improved significantly but I'm not sure that it renders as quickly as other browsers even now and it certainly didn't several versions ago. IE6 was an abomination to the extent that even Microsoft makes fun of it now. In my office, we try to avoid supporting versions earlier than IE9 if possible. If you can do that then there's no big deal as a developer. The issue is that there are still so many people who use older versions when newer ones have become available. I really wish that Microsoft would make IE upgrades required updates but they seem unwilling to do that, probably because of corporate standardisation on specific versions of IE.

I expect Spartan to be significantly faster. I imagine that IE is still slower now than other browsers in large part because of the weight of backward compatibility.

[Steve R Jones]

I was an IE fan boy for a real long time..... And MSN.com was and is my home page... After getting real frustrated at how long it took pages to load I tried FF portable and fell out of chair when I saw how fast it was.... I even sent in Feedback entitled: "What's wrong with this picture."

[TysonLPrice]

I'm a long time Internet Explorer user probably more because that is what I started with and stuck with out of habit than anything else. It is also our company standard although our web applications are built to use a wide variety of browsers. I just bought a laptop with Windows 8.1 and so while I'm changing over to that I'm looking at changing browsers. I've been using Google Chrome and have been OK with it but I'm also looking at others. Along those lines here is a review I've been looking at:

http://internet-browser-review.toptenreviews.com/

[Shaggy Hiker]

The browsers of today remind me of C++ compilers in the 90s. Nobody implemented ALL the standards, and each implemented a different subset, and did so in different ways and to different extents. These days, none of that matters, because all the C++ compilers meet the ANSI standard. We'll be there with browsers, too, we just aren't there yet.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

The browsers of today remind me of C++ compilers in the 90s. Nobody implemented ALL the standards, and each implemented a different subset

Its not so bad anymore really unless you have to support old version of IE. When every business had IE6 deployed as there main browser, and then Firefox and then Chrome came out Web Developers finally had a choice and choose they did to abandon IE in large numbers so they didn't have to maintain hacks to allow there apps to run in IE. (it did take a while though to get past companies conservative nature and familiarity with only IE)

The latest version of Firefox / Chrome and IE mostly follow the same standards. IE was behind with supporting FlexBoxes (not sure if it still is in 11) and there are some styles which require you to add specific extra Firefox version, but on the whole it is a much better place to be a web developer than it ever was.

My only real problem with later versions of IE is the speed, they still feel slow when compared to Chrome, especially if you browse like i do by opening lots and lots of tabs.

[Shaggy Hiker]

It's not so bad anymore...until it is. I'm doing something using Indexdb, which works fairly well across all browsers, but not the same. The devices this will be used on will be running Chrome or Safari, probably, but Chrome doesn't handle BLOB types in Indexdb, yet. They say they're working on it, and it might be implemented this year, but I need it implemented last year. All others have it, but not Chrome. I can work around that, but it's a bit annoying.

[dday9]

I use to exclusively use Internet Explorer... Until I started doing web development and saw how much of a pain in the butt IE was to work with. I believe that IE 11 is by far the best that MS has put out, but it's still lack luster whenever it comes to development.

However I think that Shaggy hit the nail right on the head. When developing you have to account that what you do targeting one browser may or may not have the same effects on a separate browser and this is due to the lack of standards early in the internet's history and the lack of following the standards later on. Heck... IE still does not support a <main> tag!

Now with mobile web development on the rise and mobile web searches surpassing desktop web searches last year I predict that a new standard will be introduced fairly soon, even with HTML5 addressing mobile development. Until we get a new solid standard, I think that web browsers will be like C++ compilers in the 90s like Shaggy mentioned or the Unix wars of the early 90s.

[techgnome]

However I think that Shaggy hit the nail right on the head. When developing you have to account that what you do targeting one browser may or may not have the same effects on a separate browser and this is due to the lack of standards early in the internet's history and the lack of following the standards later on. Heck... IE still does not support a <main> tag!

Believe it or not, it's not a matter of following the standards or not... it's more of an implementation issue. The standards typically state that you have to implement a particular feature... but not HOW you implement said feature. Take the margin property... if I set a div tag 100px wide with a 10px margin all around... how wide is it "really"? In IE, it's 120px... they measure the width as part of the internal width, then the margin is wrapped around that. In other browsers, the implementation is such that the width is the width of the outset... so the margin is pushed inward, making the internal width 80px (100-10-10) ... I read a big long article about this sometime ago when I actually cared about it (and it's possible I have those examples backwards, but it does illustrate the problems of standards in many cases - even SQL has the same deal). It's because of these variations in the actual implementation that causes everyone to curse what ever browser they didn't develop in.

But that's the way of standards, often they just give the whats, not the hows.

-tg

[dilettante]

The IE story seems to have become yet another case of Microsoft blinders leading it to shoot itself directly in the brain.

Windows Vista users were never offered anything beyond IE 9, so as web sites began to drop support such users had little choice but to drop yet another Microsoft technology.

Then Windows 8 came along, and to help force users to give up Windows 7 IE 11 was only released for Windows 7 with features stripped out. Most of these didn't matter unless you had a Windows 7 tablet, most of which don't make the transition to Windows 8 very gracefully. So more users were pushed away to 3rd party alternatives. Of course that doesn't even begin to address the confusion of so many end users stuck with Windows 8 when they can't figure out why some sites work in one IE and not in the other IE (the Metro personality).

Now this "Spartan" thing comes along. Time will only tell how this is going to drive more users away, but if history is any indication...

I guess Microsoft just wants to die.

Sadly they are not alone. As others have pointed out Chrome, Safari, and worst in many ways Mozilla also made their share of major blunders.

What passes as "standard" in web browsers may look very different in just a few years.

[Shaggy Hiker]

It WILL look very different. The world will keep on changing, just as it always has. The difference with technology is that we are unusually impatient about it. Change is happening very fast, and possibly even accelerating, when it comes to technology. The standards of yesterday or dated by today, as well be the standards of today when we arrive at tomorrow. Every company would like to own the market, as MS did for a long time, but it just isn't possible to lock people to a technology anymore.

Javascript is going to be one of the next casualties, too, but HTML will be changing ever more, as well, and that will mean that browsers will keep on changing.

[dilettante]

JavaScript seems to retain incredible traction though, with attempts to band-aid it going in numerous directions but never quite altering its essence. Then you have so many striking off in different directions trying to add new browser APIs to support all kinds of different things, Mozilla now pushing a "Fetch API" to replace XMLHttpRequest.

I'm almost surprised we haven't seen more prominent proposals to completely replace HTML with some kind of binary markup, something like a serialized DOM that a browser could load extremely quickly.

Any of those changes would need to keep the old-mode in parallel for quite a while though.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

Javascript is going to be one of the next casualties

I know you don't like JavaScript Shaggy but until there is a credible alternative i just don't see how its going to disappear.

Already we have TypeScript which is a super-set of JavaScript and i wouldn't be surprised if as a language it evolves or mutates further but some sort of client side web language with the power of JavaScript is kinda essential to web development at least for the foreseeable future.

[Jacob Roman]

I hate IE with a passion. Soon I'll be using Spartan to download the latest Mozilla Firefox using the Hololens on Windows 10

The future is bright already

[Shaggy Hiker]

To be fair, I don't think JS will disappear. JS is the language in browsers kind of like ASM is the language for CPUs. They aren't tied together nearly as tightly, so there is always the possibility of a compiled binary language like dilettante suggested, but also as he suggested, even if such a thing became popular, the JS engine would remain for a LONG time. Still, JS is analogous to ASM, and like ASM, I believe that higher level languages will come along that will replace JS in practice, if not in fact. The most prominent current such thing is TypeScript, and that's a good model. TypeScript doesn't result in anything that isn't JS. All that TypeScript generates is valid JS, though somewhat formalized. That's how I would expect this to progress.

JS isn't a bad language, but it currently allows LOTS of things that make it harder to work with than it needs to be. Just having an Option Explicit would remove loads of bugs during development and speed up development time. However, there can't be a true Option Explicit in JS as there is in VB, so what there needs to be is a more nuanced approach. The compiler would keep track of the known declared variables, and could simply color new spellings differently when first encountered. That alone, would save people time.

Another, similar thing has to do with the semicolons. In most languages that use them, semicolons do nothing more than introduce bugs. They could be dispensed with entirely, and only remain for the sake of tradition, but in JS, semicolons are essential, because the language isn't compiled, and can be minified. Without semicolons, a minified JS file would be pure garbage. That doesn't mean that semicolons need to be left up to the developer. I'm not an expert with JS, but it sure seems to me that there is a consistent set of rules for where semicolons need to be such that a tool could be created that would put in all missing semicolons, or at least parse a file and suggest those locations.

The language isn't bad, it's just that an implementation of a higher level tool could be made that would result in valid JS, but would make it easier for developers to avoid trivial, but costly, mistakes.

[techgnome]

Sounds like what you REALLy want isn't necessarily a change to JS, but rather maybe a smarter editor for JS.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

A better IDE would certainly help, and is fairly likely. Technically, TypeScript is just a JS IDE that restricts you from doing certain, otherwise valid, things as well as helping you with a few others. Perhaps that really is all I want, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't result in a different language that compiled to JS (which would be semantically entertaining, at least). I just think that the current state of things is unevloved, and better things are coming.

[SJWhiteley]

I have a ASP.NET web page, quite complex. I couldn't remember how I did some things on it, so went to the VB code to see how I did things: nothing there. No .NET code at all. All done through JavaScript (To be fair, it was a number of AJAX calls, with VB on the back end).

The speed at which JS operates, now, makes heavy duty JS code work well. Ironic that the Web Browser was a real solution for light weight clients, but too much JS killed them, until more powerful client computers came along.

JS does need a better editor, though. Maybe a class builder or something, to make it easier to 'build' the code, but nothing too extravagant. I'm always missing a parenthesis, semicolon or curly brace, somewhere which just wastes time as you build an application, breaking your concentration.

[techgnome]

look at Aptana Studio ... it's what I use for a majority of my PHP development. It's got the concept of a "project" which can include PHP as well as JS. And the intellisense is second to only that of VS. If I include a PHP file that has a class definition in it, it's available in any PHP code block I'm then in. I think the JS parser it just as good too. But it is also very good at auto inserting brackets and parens when it detects opening ones, you're still on your own with the semicolons though. But even still it's really good with trying to figure out when you missed a ; } or ) and not only that, it tries to work backwards to put you in the neighborhood of where it is missing from. It is not a light weight editor though. It's pretty heavy and has a sizable footprint. It's less than VS I think, and it covers a number of languages. That's why I like using it when doing web development. In the same manner that I can move from an XML file to an HTML, to VB to a SQL file in VS, I get the same kind of crossing with Aptana. It's also got intellisense for CSS woot woot!

-tg

[dee-u]

Is the Aptana Studio a freeware? Looks cool based on your description.

[techgnome]

There is a free version and a paid version. I use the free version. I haven't found the need to go to the paid. there's a couple of limitations, but unless you're doing a lot of hard-core web development, it's probably a non issue. And it's supported on multiple platforms. I've used both the Windows and Linux versions.

-tg