Joe Walker - microsoft tag

IE8 Review

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:53:58 GMT

I've been playing with IE8 beta 1, and I've got some thoughts ...

In terms of user visible HTML rendering features, I think IE 8 beta 1 is possibly the biggest release of IE in nearly 11 years since April 1997 when IE 4.0 alpha 1 was released. The history shows mostly bug fixes, and chrome changes since then. Maybe transparent PNG or Bidi text are bigger than Activities? It looks like that's going to be the feature that most people talk about, so I'm going to talk about some of the other stuff. There are 3 big things I'm interested in, and a few smaller features:

6 Connection Limit

I've been testing the new 6 connection limit. It works perfectly in my testing, Without any cookie or window.name hacks, DWR can do reverse ajax using comet to more than 2 browser windows:

DOM Storage

IE is way behind everyone else in implementing HTML5 features. So this is catching up to everyone else. It will be interesting to hear from the Dojo guys on this.

// sessionStorage also available
var store = window.globalStorage["http://www.example.com"];
store.setItem("key", "value");
var value = storage.getItem("key"); // == "value"
store.removeItem("key");

JavaScript Debugger

Firebug has been a stick that's been used to beat up IE for a while, and they've got an answer now. Unlike the other features, there isn't a screenshot in the release notes...

Firebug is still much better, in my opinion so far. But this is certainly a huge step forward compared to fighting with Script [Editor|Debugger] or Visual WebDev.

Acid 3

IE 8 does very badly on Acid 3 (17/100). However given that it's so new it's probably not fair to ding it too much. However it does need to improve big time:

WebKit Nightly: 87%
Opera 9.5b: 64%
Firefox 3.0b3: 61%
IE 8b1: 17%

For comparison, the released versions:

Firefox 2.0.0.12: 50%
Opera 9.26: 46%
Safari 3.0.4: 39%
IE 7: 11%

Given that they are innovating, I'm prepared to give them time to get the number up.

URL Bar Goodness

I didn't see this in the release notes anywhere. On Firefox I've got an add-on called LocationBar 2 that does some nice widgetry with the URL Bar:

Well it looks like IE8 has something similar built in too:

Cross-Domain XHR

The standards are still evolving on this one, but somewhat annoyingly IE8 seems to be going in a different direction from everyone else:

var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); 
xdr.open("POST", "http://www.example.com/xdr.txt");
xdr.send("Data for post body");

What is missing?

Lots. Still. No SVG/Canvas. No updates to the JScript implementation at a language level (it looks like there have been some performance increases though).

Let's not forget that Microsoft have more resources to get this right than almost anyone. If Opera can manage to create a first class browser, so should Microsoft.

And Finally ...

I loved the irony of the download recommendation. If you're downloading IE8, you might also like to download - IE6!:

Reducing the Edit-Compile-Test Cycle

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:43:30 GMT

There's a fairly obvious link between developer productivity and the edit/compile/test cycle. One of the big things wrong with Enterprise Java is that you swap the edit/compile/test cycle for an edit/compile/deploy/test cycle and one of the things right about PHP is that edit/compile/test is just edit/test.

I've previously complained about IE7 and the fact that you couldn't install IE7 with other IEs and the old tricks were reported not to work. The issue is that a good chunk of IE is embedded in the OS so randomly replacing bits of the OS with older versions gets a bit hairy. However is it really too hard for them to test a few configurations of DLLs to get it to work? It's a shame that Firefox can host a foreign IE renderer, but IE can't.

On the other hand Microsoft wants to sell you VirtualPC.

So you install an extra 1Gb of RAM, ignore Microsoft's advice about buying VirtualPC and get VMWare for free instead and set about an edit/compile/switch to vmware/test cycle. You might need to buy a copy of MSDN too because I seem to remember that it is illegal to install the same copy of XP twice on the same machine, but I could be wrong there.

DWR has been using HostedQA recently. HostedQA for me is JUnit + Cruise Control + Selenium + an army of browsers. We've been testing DWR using HostedQA for a while now and it rocks. It's helped us find bugs, and the plan is to set it up so we can test with a whole bunch of browsers so I don't even have to mess about with Firefox profiles. To a certain extent it can make the edit/compile/test cycle an edit/check-in cycle.

Google is 800 trillion times faster than Microsoft

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:52:58 GMT

Fred: Could you tell me where on the LAN the docs for Project X are?
Shiela: Oh, they’re not on the LAN, I found them on the Internet.
Fred: Much better – I’ll Google for them.

There is something very wrong when I can do a free text search over 20 billion pages stored on 80 million geographically distributed servers in “0.60 seconds”, but trying to find the same text in a few thousand docs stored on 1 Windows server takes 20 minutes and then gets the wrong answer.

Yeah – apples and oranges, and the title is flamebait, but there is something wrong when I’ve got more chance of finding a doc somewhere on the Internet than on the file server in the room next door.

What good, simple solutions are there to the local search problem in the corporate environment?

P.S. If you are thinking of suggesting Google Desktop as a corporate search solution then you deserve a turbo wedgie for not considering what it will do to the network and servers when all those clients want to update their indexes.

Microsoft innovating ways to shoot themselves in the foot

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 10:13:07 GMT

Ajax, Internet Explorer, Netscape, GMail and Outlook on the Web - the story of how to learn from your own past.

All the way through their anti-trust trial Microsoft were claiming the right to innovate, and everyone else was pointing out how little Microsoft actually innovated new ideas, and usually just purchased the new ideas.

The truth was probably somewhere in between the two. One case however where they really were guilty of total lack of innovation was with Internet Explorer, where they let it sit for years without touching it.

Irony 1

In the anti-trust trial, Microsoft were accused of killing Netscape with their desktop monopoly. Microsoft accused Netscape of killing themselves by failing to update their browser for ages.

Following the trial Microsoft copied Netscape by failing to update their web browser and so losing market share; Thus proving both that the were right (Netscape did contribute to their own decline) and that they are silly enough not to learn from their own recent past.

Why did Microsoft stop updating IE?

During the 90s they became worried that if you can do everything you need through a web browser, then you wouldn't need Windows. Linux+Firefox or MacOS+Safari would do just fine. So they wanted web browsers to be the poor relation of Windows.

However one area where Microsoft really did innovate during this time was the invention of the ActiveX control behind Ajax; this ActiveX control was created for Outlook-On-The-Web. They are just now starting to be rightly proud of an invention that really does alter the way the web works.

They didn't mean to fundamentally alter the web - all they meant to do was to write a cool web based e-mail program. But they did both.

Irony 2

The really big irony is that while they were arguing about how much they were innovating, they were having a policy of not innovating on the browser front at all. However while they were trying not to innovate they accidentally created an innovation that could end up killing the very thing that gave them the monopoly in the first place.

The fears of the 90s are starting to come true; partly thanks to Ajax, the Web is becoming a more successful platform than Windows is.

The irony meter is now pegged.

Irony 3

Ajax was made possible by an ActiveX control that enabled Microsoft to write a very cool web-based email program. Maybe they realized the potential of what they had created and decided to keep it quiet, or maybe they just forgot how cool it was, but the ActiveX control went very un-sung for a number of years until it was made famous by another web based email program - GMail.

I'm sure we'd call the script contrived if we read it in a book.

Robert Schoble

Nothing to do with Ajax, Netscape or Webmail, but everything to do with Microsoft and foot shooting; I noticed that Robert Schoble is moving his blog. It was hosted at weblogs.com, but it looks like he is going to Wordpress. Isn't that going to be a foot shooting? I wonder what percentage of his current subscribers will re-subscribe? Can the problem of where his feed is be solved using 302 redirects? Maybe he should be moving to an RSS redirection service like feedburner instead. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.