Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense Microsoft has a wonderfully amusing talent for undoing its own good work. Last month, Redmond unveiled Internet Explorer 9, a Microsoft browser that finally embraced web standards in a very big way. But any goodwill it may have won from the web community has already been undermined by the company's latest efforts to remarket …
Aren't Chrome, Firefox and Opera also native? They are written in the OS's language and compiled for Windows specifically.
Don't they use the same API's IE9 takes advantage of? (Opera with jumplist integration and Firefox with WebGL)
And aren't they more advanced as they can provide a consistently high degree of performance on multiple platforms (including XP) while M$'s developers can only deal with Vista and above without their heads exploding.
Same as the bad old days they'll soon be rolling out "helpful" HTML5 "extensions" and proprietary tags in the spirit of IE and ActiveX in another fresh attempt to completely own (subvert) the Internet, open standards and once again break everything they touch, with browsers being hamstrung for years yet again in order to support them.
Please, MS, I know you can't help yourselves, but quit now while you are not ahead.
"IE9’s approach to taking advantage of what the operating system offers – from the native graphics stack to jump lists in the shell – maximizes performance, usability, and reliability...The best HTML5 is native to the operating system, so Web sites have the fewest translation layers to pass through."
That does strike me as quite fryesque.
Just more trouble for me.
We develop using the Firefox browser because the IE debugger kinda sucks.
Then we make damn sure it works in IE because our customers are sometimes locked in.
I have an entire book of crap that IE just will not do well and we just program around the penciled in bad things.
Now I will have to pencil in a lot more bad things.
Thank you, mickeysoft for making my job so damn much more satisfying.
I live for your changes.
From a usually impartial site, this article is almost offensively biased and pretty moronic actually.
The entire point of the IE10 preview was to demonstrate that HTML is fully hardware accelerated in IE10 on Windows 7, on both the browser and the desktop level; the experience makes the alternatives look and feel like a joke. IE10 manages to offload enough of the work to the GPU that you could probably watch 720p - possibly even 1080i - video quite comfortably in a browser on a low-end Netbook. Try that with Firefox on Linux, and you'd be lucky to get 3fps or less.
Microsoft haven't at any point implied that HTML5 is a native Windows technology, or that it was developed for Windows, or that it's designed to run on Windows; they've simply stated that the best currently available experience is on Windows/IE, which is true.
You fail pretty hard in your comment, Michael.
In case you didn't notice, Microsoft specifically used the term "NATIVE HTML5." So your attempt at making up excuses for MS doesn't really work.
The "fully hardware accelerated" nonsense is also another lie from Microsoft. Firefox is fully hardware accelerated as well. As is Opera.
And "best experience" is still not the same as "native." Even if IE9 had the best experience on Windows (which it doesn't, since Chrome, Firefox and Opera are all well ahead of it in the user experience department), it still would have nothing whatsoever to do with "native HTML5."
"[made IE9 for] Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience"
Please explain what a native HTML5 experience is. Please also explain what a non-native HTML5 experience is.
As for 720p videos on a netbook running linux: I call shenanigans. Ubuntu with 1366x768 resolution, an Atom processor and a GMA500 worked for me. This was in flash though, and I haven't tested it with an HTML5 video.
Anything that windows runs it runs does so "natively". If Windows runs an emulator that emulator runs natively, the application running ON the emulator is NOT running natively, but the emulator is.
Saying that IE implements or runs "Native HTML5" is nonsensical marketing baffelgab. HTML [insert version here] is a markup language that is interpreted by the browser. The browser implements the native calls to the OS to carry out the instructions. By definition this is not "native".
If Microsoft is the only one who can speed up the interpretation of HTML 5 in a browser on Windows, then it would seem to indicate that they have something special to speed up how the operating system is being interacted-with by the application, which in this case is Internet Explorer. What does that mean? Special APIs just for the in-house MS developers?
This could be construed as a demonstration of unfair competitive practices with the rest of the Windows application developers? i.e. one set of dev tools and API calls for Microsoft, and another less-well-performing set of tools and API calls for everyone else.
Absolutely nothing new under the Sun (At least when optimized for viewing with Microsoft Window Shades, naturally.)
Way back in the dim and distant past a marginally anti-corporate US government had the temerity to prosecute Microsoft for, amongst other things, integrating Internet Explorer into the Windows Explorer shell and thus, they felt, unfairly gaining market share over their competition in the Web Browser market. (I.E. Netscape, who had the gall to actually think they'd be able to sell their product for actual money to actual people. Anyone else remember the retail boxed commercial releases of Netscape?)
Microsoft's defense argument, which was really made in an actual, grown-up court room, was that the integration made everything work faster, possibly the most obviously stupid lie the company has ever uttered in public. Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of software can see that combining two, large complex programs like Explorer and Internet Explorer could not help but result in a sum more complex, and therefore slower, than if they had been kept separate.
Creating some kind of "native" implementation of HTML5 on Windows may enable UI components to be built out of HTML5 which may or may not be something users want, but that won't do a single thing to benefit regular web browsing.
In my experience "native" in Microsoft-speak always means "proprietary modifications designed to ensure the features we create can only benefit Microsoft paying customers, and we won't give them a choice about getting those features or not if we can possibly avoid it."
This idiot loves IE9. It finally just works and is fastest in real world feel. Yes, I tried them all, and my system is modern. Seems too much is being taken from the statements. I think all he meant by native is a browser simply developed only for Windows devices, with no worry of how to run it on different OSs. I don't think he meant html5 will run best on Windows, that's just stupid; he really meant html5 will run best on a browser made specifically for a platform (making it "native").
Am I being thick here or am I not the only one to not really see any problem with MS statement and get the impression the competition has misinterpreted the statement?
The statement is basically saying that IE9 (the application not the HTML5 open standard or web) has been written to run natively on Windows and take advantage of that, as opposed to say a Java based IE9 which would run cross-platform. It has FA to do with not adopting the open standard of HTML5.
The only thing stupid with that I see, is that Microsoft always produces applications native to their own OS – or was IE8 actually a Java based browser?!? So, in that sense it is a load of marketing nonsense.
The problem is that Microsoft is lying. They are trying to coin the term "native HTML5," as if that's even possible. The whole point of HTML5 is to be cross-platform, not native.
And no, the statement is not saying that IE9 is native. It specifically says "native HTML5."
Also, Opera, Chrome, Firefox and other browsers are native browsers as well. They were compiled and written specifically for Windows. They may have cross-platform components in the source code, but were still compiled as Windows applications.
So Microsoft's statements do not make sense no matter how you look at it.
The statement in the title of this post is about HTML, not a browser. If you still don't see the problem with it, please find examples of:
1) some windows-native HTML5 code.
2) some Linux-native HTML5 code.
3) some MacOS X-native HTML5 code.
and post it here
If M$ adds support in their OS for HTML 5 so that the OS can render it more quickly, I fail to see the danger. Does it mean that Windows could render pages more quickly than my Linux notebook? Possibly. Does that mean at all Linux users will instantly adopt Windows as their favorite OS? Doubtful. We'll continue to enjoy the the "great" performance of the Linux desktop made possible by the umpteen layers of abstraction between the desktop, windows manager, X windows and graphics drivers.
I see NaCl in Chrome as far more "evil". Google is delivering machine code in the browser. That serves to undermine HTML 5 and open standards by orders of magnitude more than M$ talking about "native" implementation of HTML 5 rendering.
what account the HTML renderer runs with.
If it's embedded in the OS (as previous version of the IE HTML renderer have been), it could be running with the SYSTEM account which will give it unrestricted access to the computer.
This is not a good idea because it means a maliciously-crafted website could install things.
A few disgusted browser/open/web folks will get angry. websites will publish stories and views. Webdevs will wakeup to see what's up with this native thing. webdevs will embrace IE10, maybe not as much as they used to but still a 60-70% of them still treat IE as no.1 platform. MS will create a new standard. They done it in past , they'll do it again.
I wonder what happens at windowserver level once you use Cocoa to write your application GUI? Lets say, how does Safari handle the complex pages or it doesn't need to handle as it is operating system's job to do it?
Also how come there were gfx cards that could do amazing level of 2d acceleration back in the day and today companies/developers brag about whatever crazy 3d acceleration framework they abused today?
..."2D acceleration" meant little more than having a honking great RAMDAC pumping pixels to the screen at inordinately high rates. That 2D part of things hasn't really evolved at all since then because it doesn't need to.
However, the GPUs in a modern 3D graphics card can be re-jiggered to process all sorts of numbers.
I have a chance to see some of the latest 64bit browser technology using an unstable (advanced and very changing Linux system) aptosid. And my browser of the moment is Firefox 4.2a1-04-13-2011-x86-64 nightly build installed last night. I am using it right now.
Something in an environment like that... needs to be stable as a reference and a standard... html5 seems to be it now.
Videos on vimeo, youtube, BBC and elsewhere all seem to be working well,
Using the new standards... vimeo was not working with Firefox 3.6.18 and told me to get with a "modern" browser. Very funny since they seem to be pushing the envelope the most. Very fine high res videos with taste. And at high frame rates. Sorry, I can't speak to the use of IE whatever... but the current and next standards of the internet seem to work just fine with or without the presence of Microsoft.
I hope that Microsoft finally sees the truth of it all and does not try to gum up the internet with more gubber code of their own creation.
I'm with commenters Adam Azarchs and skelband and others on this... I don't think there's anything wrong with "native HTML5 support". <b>As long as Microsoft faithfully comply to the HTML5 standard</b>, they're free to remove whatever layers they want between HTML code and x86 instructions...
Just as there are many implementations of Java Virtual Machines -- as long as they comply faithfully to the Java language spec, more power to them, and more power to us!
Of course, we all know the real dangers: differing implementations/interpretations of the HTML standards by different browser makers. But this is true whether they're "native" or not.
"HTML isn't native. It's cross-platform!"
Do you idiots even know how software works? Obviously HTML is an open standard, that isn't the point. Support for it still has to be built, you know, in code. The Microsoft claim clearly centres around where that code lives, anyone can see that if they take a moment to actually read something.
Wow. I'm a little surprised by how many people have got the wrong end of the stick here. Most of it seems to originate from incredulity and noise made by those with a vested interested in being opposed to IE9 (Opera, Mozilla et.al), but there sure are a lot of people gladly eating up the Pie Of Stupidity.
No-one spoke of "native HTML" (as opposed to "non-native HTML"); the mention was of "native HTML5 experiences", where the adjective "native" describes the noun "experiences", not the noun "HTML". This might seem like a semantic point, but it actually goes to the heart of the point that was being made: the native element is the browser within the OS.
Microsoft is trying to create a marketing point of a browser integrated and designed for the operating system that it runs on. IE9 is designed for Windows, and Windows only (and soon, it will be on Windows Phone too). IE9 is not available for iOS or MacOS or WebOS or Android or any flavour of Linux; it's not even available on older Windows versions. This is an internet browser that, in marketing terms at least, is designed to work at its best with certain operating systems, which is why it is supposedly offered only within those frameworks. Tight integration with Windows hardware acceleration paradigms and components such as Silverlight support this proposition on paper at least, although demos of IE9 HTML5 performance on desktop and mobile both seem to back up the hype to some degree. The blurring of lines between a website and web-app with pinning of sites to the Windows 7 taskbar - with jump lists and elements like the new Hotmail 'new messages' notification - also support the marketing of IE9 as both a browser and an integrated element of the OS.
Ultimately though, it comes to the point that Microsoft is trying to drive home here. They argue that all these lovely browsers that happen to run on Windows are all well and good, but as good as the Firefoxes and Chromes and Safaris of this world are, they're not built in such a way that uniquely supports the requirements of a Windows system, which - they will also argue - IE9 is; the end of their argument is that because IE9 is designed to work so closely with the OS, that makes it the best possible solution through which to get the best possible HTML5 browsing and app experience.
I'm not going to discuss whether or not that is true, because I believe that there are far more intelligent and knowledgeable people that read this site who will make the arguments for and against much more capably than I ever could, and I hope to learn a good deal from those discussions.
I simply wish to point out that the whole basis of the article - despite being an enjoyable bit of fun at Microsoft's expense - is undermined by the misinterpretation of what was said. Of course, there's no "native HTML", and Microsoft isn't pretending otherwise. But the marketing strategy of Microsoft for IE9 is very clearly geared towards the browser as an integrated component of Windows, and this is what was being spoken of early with mention of 'native experiences'. I'm always up for poking fun at Windows - or anyone else for that matter - when they deserve it, but I find it a bit more difficult to have a laugh at someone's expense when it's based on a distortion of the truth.
Either the guy from Opera isn't very intelligent or he's deliberately misrepresenting what was said - after all, cross-platform browsers suffer most in a world where platform-specific browser development is king - but either way, he should shut the hell up, and El Reg should take the microphone away from his piehole.
In fairness, of course, he's clearly not the only person to read into this the wrong way, but I usually consider El Reg the voice of reason in a crowd of lunatics foaming at their mouths and bursting a tit in disgust. Why, Reg, why are you not shining a light of clarity upon these poor fools? Why are you perpetuating the foolishness?
The word "experience", in the context of a discussion of HTML5 and browsers, is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to muddy the water. It's subjective, it's emotional, and it is carefully chosen to be entirely unmeasurable.
A "native HTML5 experience" makes about as much sense as a "rigorous ice cream" or a "compiled fit of rage".
Oh, hello there, Microsoft shill.
Seems you are spinning out of control:
"No-one spoke of "native HTML" (as opposed to "non-native HTML"); the mention was of "native HTML5 experiences","
This is WRONG WRONG WRONG. Here is an EXACT quote:
"The best HTML5 is native to the operating system"
Again:
"The best HTML5 is native to the operating system"
And again:
"The best HTML5 is native to the operating system"
Microsoft is lying. HTML5 isn't SUPPOSED to be native. It's supposed to be CROSS-PLATFORM.
Also, Firefox, Chrome, etc. are all native Windows applications. You FAIL as always, shill.
I think that by native he means the HTML5 interpreter (i.e. web browser) itself will run native code optimized for the particular CPU.
In other words, the HTML5 interpreter will be written in native code.
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