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 …
On both my work box and my own laptop Opera is slower then IE8 (yeah that's right, slower) so along with it been more clunky than the other browsers I tend to avoid it for anything other than testing (in fact now I think of it, that's in the same boat as IE8).... not upgraded to IE9 yet.
We don't want Opera, we don't like Opera and the world has spoken. If Opera was so great it would be massive worldwide by now given the length of time it has been available and it hasn't happened. You can't blame MS for lack of market share, Firefox and then Chrome seemed to manage OK at taking market share away from IE and Opera has been around a lot longer than either of those. Even being given a prominant position on the browser choice screen that MS have to give you now it has still failed to make an impact. People have tried it, ditched it and gone to Firefox or Chrome or even stuck with IE. Why can't you Opera fans get it? You like it, it works for you - we don't care. You are in the minority - accept it.
Downloaded Opera 11.10, faster than Firefox 3.6.16 on Linux.
Still using Firefox as my default, but I will give Opera a new "chance".
Personally I think Opera made a huge error in forcing adverts, in your face, years ago, Just when it started to be interesting. Skipped it then.
But there are a number of sites so exclusively Microsoft (bad programming) that Firefox will not work, and then I have used Opera without problems.
Of course, if you use IE, you must be a Windows user, and that of course is up to you (or something forced upon you, poor soul),
As for market share, FIAT Uno probably has a larger market share than a Ferrari.
And as for the "we" you are "you" and not "we",
No offence, perhaps you should give Opera an other go. Perhaps you have never used it, anyway.
The car (browser) is freely available, the house (Operating System) it calls home *might* be free, but the real-estate (hardware) the houses sit on is not free (although it might be heavily subsidized by the home-builders). That would make MS a home-builder. Red Hat is also a home-builder, so is Apple, and so are many others. MS builds more homes than anyone else because they subsidize the real-estate, making their real money on after-sales extras (Office, Exchange, Share-point, MSSQL, .net) that will only seem to work properly (or perhaps at all) when used in their houses (even though all houses use the same kind of electricity). Apple makes their own real-estate AND the houses that go on it, they are unique and those houses are more expensive. Cononical, Mandriva, Red Hat, and other home-builders use any real-estate that is available to them, they cost nothing.
MS homes come with a shiny new Trabant (yes I know, the Trabby is no longer being produced), all of the others come with Ferraris, Rollers (Rolls Royce), or other more modern/higher-end vehicles.
There, I *think* that analogy is a little more complete, they (analogies) are never perfect, but if you're going to use them then go all the way.
Tried it, very nice, slick and works very well....
However 2 out of the 10 main sites I visit regularly, it refused to even load the content, just timed out. FF, IE and even Chrome loaded the pages flawlessly. One site I need for my job, so Opera is out the door I'm afraid.
Sorry, but Opera has been around long enough to make a difference and it hasn't, even all that bleating from their PR crew has still failed to make any serious impact. You like it, you use it. I like heavy metal, you may not. I like Marmite and Tomato soup powder sandwiches, you may not
Each to their own!
If you follow the MS marketspeak, you must also conclude that Chrome OS will be better than even IE on the Microsoft OS.
Why?
Simply. The Chrome OS is designed to support the Chrome browser and ONLY the Chrome browser. And not all those other applications that Microsoft has to support.
So if the market speak makes any sense it all it supports the Chrome OS much more so than anything that Microsoft sells.
Just tried the latest yesterday, as I always used to use it, but;
Why does it (and previous 10 version) not display pages on the register correctly?
In FF i get well layed out screens with the main page index, stories and comments section; in Opera it displays like a school project and is basically unusable.
Most other sites including banking and such are displayed almost identicaly to FF, is this some Reg conspiricy?
Shocking. M$ is once again self-advertising and yet once again open source blow hards are taking offense. I am shocked! I have NEVER seen this play out before.
Give me a break. Opera this and FF that and Safari is the best thing since spermicidal condoms.
Whatever. I am truly surprised that The Reg and any of you are surprised by this kind of shameless self-promotion. This is what pay-for software...no...this is what ALL corporations do. Repeatedly.
Of course the nay-sayers think their product is better...its THEIR product! Opera blows IMHO. FF has left my angry lately. Safari is a turd and Chrome is decent. IE9 is better than the 8 previous releases and for that I give M$ a http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_up_32.png but to all you haters for hating on a company for acting like any and every other company you all get a http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_down_32.png.
Over all this article gets a http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/fail_32.png
Are you actually trying to say is that, if one expects to have a complete web experience, one must use Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9?
While, yes, I agree that IE 9 is better than previous versions, that isn't actually the point. The point is that a MS shill is trying to convince the world that the Internet should only run on Windows. That means that websites should either support Windows and not support everything else (Macs, iPhones, Linux, Android, etc.), or write a different website for each one.
Then again, I might be inclined to believe that, as you also seem to believe that putting links to images actually puts those images into your post. Hey, look, a fail icon!
Actually if you read what he wrote then nowhere at all does he say that "if one expects to have a complete web experience, one must use Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9"
I've read his post forwads, backwards, sideways and even upside down a couple of times and NOWHERE does he say anything at all like the phrase you tried to ascribe to him.
If you disagree with someone then have the intelligence to disagree with what they actually said because to be honest I think your statement that fucking dogs makes you manly and more attractive to women is quite simply wrong and I think you should be ashamed of yourself for advocating the castration of every third male born to households with the surname "Lovell".
Note - Don't bother coming back and accusing me of being a Microtard or whatever the kids call each other these days, my post tells you precisely nothing about the platforms I use.
P.S. I think rather a lot of people who post on this site should look up the meaning of "straw man" and then hang their heads in shame.
What crashIO wrote was an attack on the article, and thus a defense of Dean Hachamovitch's statements. In my reply, I pointed out that the consequences of defending Hachamovitch's statements was, in fact, defending the statement that the Internet should only work correctly in Windows.
"Native HTML" implies that the HTML is written in a native language, that is, specifically for a single platform. Hachamovitch said, "The only native experience of the Web and HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9," which pretty much backs that up. This is obviously false; FireFox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari all have HTML 5 support. No one from those camps are saying that their browser is the only one that runs HTML 5 "natively."
Oddly enough, I never said that using IE 9 was a bad idea, nor have ever called anyone a "Microtard." In fact, I even refrained from assuming that the person I was replying to had no grasp of logical debate. Then again, some people seem to miss subtleties; can't win 'em all, right?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_down_32.png
people
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/stop_32.png
keep giving
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their comments this shit:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/megaphone_32.png
You can't put pictures in your comments, asshole.
My reading of their statement is that IE was not designed as a cross-platform browser, and thus by implication is more optimized for Windows in terms of speed (even if that's not true based on benchmarks). This says nothing about the *content* being displayed as being not cross-platform. That HTML 5 is platform and browser agnostic doesn't mean that the browser needs to be platform agnostic.
This "native" malarky is basically MS banging the drum about the graphics acceleration - AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN which, given that HTML5 is looking to replace at least some of the kinds of thing people used to do with flash (and could have done, but didn't, with silverlight) may actually, at some point in the future, be worth mentioning.
RIght now, the only real-world difference I notice is that IE is better at displaying 30,000 by 30,000 pixel images than opera.
I'm no M$ fan but that's not how I interpreted Hachamovith's comment.
I thought that he was talking about under-the-covers optimisations for Windows in IE to improve the performance of it's HTML5 implementation. As long as they are not thinking about subverting the standard itself, then I see no issue with that at all.
I know M$ are bad boys and they do have significant form in this area, but I think in this case the critics protest too much. Time will tell.
Yes, I tend to read the whole thing as nothing more than marketspeak for "IE9 uses more of the newest Windows APIs from the HTML5 renderer." Which is a bit expected, to say the least. But if they have no other way to differentiate their product, they have to go on and on about what they have in the most conveluted pseudo-tech babble possible.
"I thought that he was talking about under-the-covers optimisations for Windows in IE to improve the performance of it's HTML5 implementation."
My take on that is similar but just a bit different; I'm wondering if he's laying the groundwork for a Shock! Surprise! announcement at some point in the future that IE10 will require Windows 8 or something, because of all the "native" APIs Microsoft will have packed in to support HTML5.
Or, err, something.
In any event, I don't think that word means what he thinks it means...
I _think_ what he was trying to say was that a program (web browser) optimised for the underlying OS will run better than one that isn't... and by extension such a web browser that's built to strongly support the emerging standard will, in theory, render HTML5 pages faster/more efficiently than a web browser running on the same OS that isn't optimised for that OS or one that doesn't as strongly support the emerging standards.*
That at least might make some kind of sense.
As long as they tightly integrate IE10 with Windows and not the other way around they should manage to avoid another billion dollar fine - I wonder if they'll bungle that as well as the speech-writers bungled that speech?
* although, if the OS-optimised web browser is coded by chimps it'll still run like a three legged dog so the initial premise may well be flawed anyway.
Chrome has Google's advertising monopoly.
IE has Microsoft's OS monopoly.
Firefox used to have Google's ad monopoly promoting it until Chrome arrived.
Opera's market share is actually quite high in several parts of the world. But becase the browser stats most people are looking at are almost exclusively looking at the US and Western Europe, the numbers end up being all wrong.
If they had counted the markets Opera is strong in correctly, it would have been a different picture.
It might not mean what you think it means. There are many languages with JIT compilers that compile write-once-run-anywhere code to native code, so it can run faster.
It does not have to mean they will extend html 5 with the an <asm> tag and put a bunch of x86 specific assembly code in there.
Microsoft specifically mentioned "native HTML5", not "our native HTML5 renderer".
To use your example this would be like boasting about how IE9 is great because it has "native javascript" simply because they use a JIT compiler on it - the output of the compiler is native, but the javascript itself is not.
It could be somewhat more native than the moment. Has anybody tried to convert an IE DOM tree to text? Does it even in some way represent standard HTML? No.
If this is the sort of "nativeness" that they're talking about then I'm all for it.
Incidentally, I wouldn't use this steaming heap of a browser if I wasn't forced to.
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.
Semantics or a form of Puffery on the part of Microsoft; I mean come on they are a business and they do have to attempt to maintain market share for their browsing experience. I know that Microsoft is attempting to rebrand HTML5 to a windows standard, but I would not got so far as to say “Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense”. Just my thought.
This coming from a non-IE user.
It's aimed at corporates, plain and simple.
We're talking corporates who live and breath microsoft - with armies of microsoft certified engineers with experience in nothing but ... microsoft products.
They are everywhere, all around you, in every office across the planet, these hordes of individuals who know nothing but... microsoft.
Show them a Mac and an almost involuntary sneer will appear. Show them a Linux box and not the slightest flicker of curiosity will result. Show them a command line and they walk away quickly.
... but they've probably all got iPhones ...
Now there's a native HTML experience ... oh, the irony...
I have seen a few comments suggesting that Hachamovitch just didn't understand what "native" means in the context in which he used it. Frankly, it seems quite unlikely that Microsoft employs a guy to market its software who doesn't understand basic software terminology.
If you want a proper, complete and satisfactory explanation try dipping into the book "On Bullshit" by Harry G. Frankfurt. It's short, inexpensive, and amusingly written. Best of all, it will explain in clear, simple terms something that techies always have trouble with: that some people use language deliberately to mislead.
Frankfurt explains how there are truthful people, liars, and bullshitters. Liars know they are lying, and do so deliberately. Bullshitters don't necessarily know whether they are lying or not, and they actually don't care. That's because they measure the value of their words, not by how much truth they convey, but by whether they help to accomplish a given purpose. To a bullshitter, a statement like "We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best Web experience on Windows. IE10 continues on IE9’s path" is like a lever designed to move a big rock. It moves the rock (increases sales) or it doesn't. You don't ask whether a lever is true or false, do you?
Actually, your specific example fails too. In "a big round ball", "big" and "round" are adjectives and "ball" is a noun. Of course taking the two adjectives together - "big round" - is meaningless.
The original expression, however, was "native HTML5 experience". While "native" is an adjective, "HTML5" is a noun - NOT an adjective. So "native HTML5" is perfectly good English (although, as it turns out, not very meaningful).
Why don't you learn English?
Who knows English, who only English knows?
Some languages are more flexible than others, and in some adjectives, nouns and verbs are interchangeable. In Dutch and German I could easily use HTML5 as a verb, and in context it would even make sense. For example: "we're currently HTML5-ing our Webinterface."
That said, I can see what an HTML5 experience is. You /can/ use HTML5 as an adjective. Perhaps this strokes against the 'Current Best Practices of English Language Usage' but it certainly does not disagree with semantic rules of other languages.
So it is possible to deliver an HTML5 experience. And, when the look and feel of a website is akin to a local app, one might even say, indeed, a native HTML5 experience.
Please note however, that the keyword here is 'experience'; a clever marketing word that has nothing to do with any technology involved. It is subjective, unmeasurable and only vaguely defined in terms of look&feel (which in turn is also subjective and unmeasurable). And you can claim exclusivity on a certain kind of experience, simply by changing the definition.
So, there you have it. IE can deliver a native HTML5 experience, at least from an end user perspective. Programmers, developers, administrators et al might get confused by using otherwise well defined jargon in such a marketing manner. But that is sales people for you*). They will gladly tie some buzzwords together with vague concepts to form sentences that reveal nothing to the initiated.
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*) If you like this sort of thing, we at work call our serverpark 'the fat clients' we call the patch panels 'the servers', we call desktops 'thin clients' and we call the databases 'the intranet' ... all according to real life misuse of IT jargon by sales people and consultants.
"Who knows English, who only English knows?"
Not I. My first language was Spanish, and I also get by in Portuguese, French, and German. (plus a smattering of Latin, Greek, Russian, Italian...)
In any case, you missed my point, which was that (unlike "round") "HTML5" can be used as a noun. So the expression "native HTML5" is perfectly grammatical, contrary to what david 12 asserted. I did not say that "HTML5" could not be used as an adjective - indeed that thought crossed my mind as I wrote.
And yes, continuing in this vein, I have also noticed that "round" can be construed as a noun (e.g. "a round of drinks").
It isn't contradictory at all. Making IE standards compliant means I can write code that will run on any browser on any platform. That's good for me as a developer. As a user of the web Microsoft are saying that I will get a better, more specifically faster experience if I use Windows 7 and IE. They may be right or wrong - I don't know - but the strategy is perfectly logical and does not contradict a move towards embracing standrards. If they were saying that sights would *only* work on Windows that would be a different story. But they're not. They're just saying they will work better.
But I am finding IE9 at least on par with Google Chrome right now. Possibly a bit more responsive and with faster start up times.
Also, this seems a rather nit-picky thing to write about. As others have said they could have meant native as in built specifically for Windows. Another possibility is that they could have meant "Faster than using something like chrome-frame". They could have meant many things. If people know what they are talking about then it's generally wise to ignore marketeese.
I use FireFox 4.
I don't care who does or doesn't like whatever browser.
I don't care which browser is slower or faster.
I don't care which is prettier.
I don't care he who has the most plugins wins.
I don't care which can or can't parse native or in-native pages.
I really couldn't give a rats bum.
The one thing I *CAN* assure you, is that after reading this article, I laughed. :-)
The MS wonk is trying to put the frighteners on non-technical punters who account for most of the MS revenue. MS are desperate to keep selling licenses, and they are just doing what you or I would probably do in their situation. They need to frighten home user Joe Bloggs in to staying with what he has been familiar with for 20 years. If the housewife starts noticing Apple or Linux, they are finished.
I would normally agree with this. But one thing that throws me off is that calling something "native" has been around for a long time, and it has never caught on outside of tech circles. So the "Joe Bloggs" that you mention probably wouldn't understand what it meant anyway. 'native' isn't even one of those terms that would seem attractive to a person that doesn't know what it means.
When I heard Hachamovitch make the comment during his presentation I mentally intepreted it as saying it was the fastest HTML 5 implementation on Windows. Despite the other potential interpretations of his exact word, I'm sure that was the essential message.
With this interpretation in mind it seems the only sensible thing is to ask one of those benchmark organizations to compare the relative performance of HTML 5 on the available browsers at that time the comment was made.
If the claim holds up that IE has the fastest HTML 5 support on Windows then the article is nonsense. If it doesn't hold up then the correct response from the Firefox (and other browsers) vendors would have been to point out the claim is incorrect instead of throwing mud and fud on the basis of an an interpretation of someone's comments.
That the chosen course was to sling mud says to me that Hachamovitch is correct and IE has, at the moment, the fastest HTML 5 implementation on Windows.
However it is a bit of an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument because none of the implementations are that shabby and just how many fps does a browser need?
While I agree with most of what you've said. The "problem" is that from past experience MS has a tendency to take a standard and bend it to their way until it breaks. This is still the major reason so many are stuck with HAVING to use IE6, since no newer browsers work with HTML+JS code like IE6 does (not even IE7), these poor guys've got some IntraWeb sites they use for their daily work. And these were created in the years of M$-IE's dominance, so the HTML & JavaScript (or probably rather VBScript) was done specifically for IE6. They can't use any other browser, since those specifics of IE6 is not available in FF, Opera, Netscape, Safari, etc. ... not even is it available in IE7, never mind 8/9/10.
So while the "native HTML5 experience" statement "should" mean that the user would "feel" that it works as fast as if it was done specifically for Windows, that might not have been what Hachamovitch "meant". Perhaps a slip, or rather a forced-market-speak-mis-meaning to encourage people to think their product is "better" while it actually means their product is more of the same. I might be wrong in this, but (call it the conspiracy-theorist in me) I don't think so.
Apart from that, native code is usually faster than interpreted (even if interpreted through a JIT compiler). BUT!!!! The "usually" is quite an important word in that sentence. It's also possible to create a native program which is the absolute most inefficient thing available! AND!!!! plonking all the code to natively run HTML5 from libraries of the OS so that IE10 is "optimized" would most certainly mean Windows would become more bulky (read "slower") than its predecessors already are. M$'s OS's have always been swamped with useless CR@P which hogs the RAM & CPU for no reason whatsoever , this is just "more of the same". So IE10 gets optimized, but you'll need 50GB RAM to have IE and Word open at the same time!
Reading the article I wanted to laugh, however because I've seen what M$ usually does - it actually makes me quake instead!
"M$'s OS's have always been swamped with useless CR@P which hogs the RAM & CPU for no reason whatsoever..."
Not quite. There is at least one very good reason: to make sure punters have to keep upgrading to the next still-more-powerful Intel-based PC, with bigger hard disks and masses more RAM. That keeps Intel, the RAM manufacturers and the hard drive people happy with Microsoft, so that they keep nodding and making sure their products and policies fit in with the Redmond line. If you want to run the latest and greatest version of Windows, guess what? You're going to need a hardware upgrade! And if you decide to buy a new PC, guess what? It will come with the latest and greatest version (and fattest) of Windows invisibly built into the price!
Meanwhile, Microsoft gains by not having to bother designing and optimizing its software; instead, developers just reuse vast libraries from previous product generations, letting them get to market sooner. The only people who come off badly are... you guessed it, the punters! (That's you and me). We keep on buying more and more powerful computers, and more and more expensive software... just to keep on doing the same things we did before.
It's so beautiful it would make me gasp with joy... if it weren't so evil.
I always find it amusing how a sales pitch from a company incites a riot in the tech community.
You know that Papa Johns claim they have the "freshest ingredients." Argh!!!! Rawr!!!! Let's get the pitchforks!!!
But if nothing else, it's a funny catastrophe of blowhard techie flame wars that offers some comic relief from the daily grind. Thanks for the lulz!
As long as the darn thing shows facebook and porn, its not like the average user gives a flying fork about what code the browser is running.
For the vast majority 'optimized to run native HTML5' is simply marketing babble, like those shampoo adverts that claim 80% more shiny hair with new added shinerine molecules.
Anyone who actually understands what HTML5 even means is probably competent enough to judge Microsoft's implementation on its own merits (and I suspect probably doesn't run IE anyway.)
So what's this debate about?
I noticed a huge billboard ad proclaiming "The Web is now available FULL ON" in huge letters. In the top right hand corner was the Microsoft logo and the bottom left corner "Internet Explorer 9 and the e" along with a link to a promotional website. I've seen two of these so far, but can't remember the link. Hum.
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Two things surprise me here - and really, neither of them should.
The first is that so many people are willing to continue believing any explanation that characterises Microsoft as stupid, or liars, or just plain evil, even in the face of perfectly reasonable discussion about how this is almost certainly just a misinterpretation of some poor phrasing. Microsoft has historically been the most open ecosystem (I'm not talking open source code; I'm talking about the openness - as opened to a locked-down and heavily controlled state), the most compatible environment in which the widest range of software can work on the widest range of hardware. Openness has always been the key to Windows success, and the key to the success of money-spinners like Office as well - the more systems that have Windows, the more can run Office and all the other programs that make money for MS.
I don't really understand why, against that backdrop, everyone suddenly believes that Microsoft should be trying to breed an atmosphere that ignores the spirit of openness and intercompatibility by telling very easily disproved lies about something like HTML5 - to A ROOM FULL OF DEVELOPERS. I could just about bend my mind around the idea that MS might go into a room full of foolish end-users and try to sell them on the idea that HTML5 will only work as part of an IE9 + Windows solution. But to suggest that Microsoft would try to make that statement, or to make any statement about there being such a thing as "native HTML5" to a room full of the very people who know this stuff as well as anyone, if not better, makes absolutely no sense. Everyone would see right through that, everyone KNOWS everyone would see right through that, and everyone knows that such an attempt would fail.
That would make about as much sense as Boeing marketmen going into a room full of pilots and saying that their new plane is better than all the others because it's designed to fly through treacle, which is what the sky is made of.
The second thing which surprised me is how readily people are to believe that, because I disagree with the angry pitchfork-wielding consensus, I must therefore work for The Beast. I know it's difficult for some of your narrow minds to conceive, but some of us are able to form opinions for ourselves without them being formed by either a corporate mastermind or an angry mob. I don't work for Microsoft, and in fact the points that I made were related largely to making sense of what was said, rather than defending anything that Microsoft has done.
I'm actually a brand and marketing consultant, so I understand the broader landscape of Microsoft's strategy for marketing IE9, and how they're trying to position it as an integrated part of Windows, and how - by extension - they're trying to say that the best way to experience the web is with IE9 in a Windows environment. They've already started explaining that proposition with positions like "the beautiful web", and they're now trying to take that further by stating that the web isn't just more "beautiful" with IE9+Windows, but also performs better.
I think that what a few of you seem to misunderstand here is that when I'm trying to explain what their marketing position is, it's not because I'm part of their marketing machine. I can explain to you what the 'master race', eugenics and concentration camps are too, but that doesn't make me a Nazi.
Honestly, some of you really need to put the pitchforks down, take a deep breath and reach out for a bit of logic to guide you here, instead of just furiously spitting teeth at the sheer brazenness of it all. Marketing can certainly distort reality - in fact, in many ways, that's exactly what it's there to do - but marketing is also about KNOWING your market before you try to make a pitch to it. Microsoft may do a lot of stupid, stupid things, but going into a room full of people who know their stuff and trying to tell them that up is down doesn't make a lot of sense - and Microsoft going into a room full of developers and trying to sell them on the idea of "native HTML5" when none of them, not one of them, is going to swallow that pill, is one of those concepts that's so completely batshit crazy that the only people it makes to appear stupid are those who are trying so hard to believe that that's what happened.
This was a marketing-based pitch to sell developers on the idea that they should continue developing for the Windows ecosystem, because Microsoft's marketing machine will be spinning around the idea of IE9 being integrated with Windows, and IE9+Windows being the best/prettiest/highest-performance way to enjoy the web/HTML5/web-apps etc. It really isn't any more complicated than that.
<snip> the openness and hardware support drivel because it's just that, drivel. reminded me of the Phoenix OS pitch ("because Linux is good but doesn't support modern hardware and games". Seriously, look it up, you're in for a laugh: http://forum.pcinpact.com/topic/132943-nouvel-os-projet-phoenix/ .It's in French but should be OK with an automated translator. Can't be worst than the original). On second thought, if the quoted bit didn't cause a major coffee/monitor encounter -on at least 3 levels-, don't bother.
Now for something completely different:
You assume that head honcho for IE, speaking at a major MS event, just had a tongue slip over the CORE DEFINITION of his project. And went on detailing how NATIVE HTML5, with fewer interpretation layers (ideally: none?), is better. Just a slip, indeed. That's, erm, don't know how to put that because "preposterous" is obviously too weak. The guy probably had a team weighting each and every word of that speach, for a couple weeks. That's anything but a misunderstanding.
Secondly, you seem to think that the audience was 100% educated web developpers. My personal opinion on the competency of *some* webdevs notwithstanding, you dramatically underestimate the proportion of mid-level manager who attend these events just for the junket factor, and to bring back the latest meaningless buzzwords. These are historically MS' trojan horses, and my bet is that they were the real target for the speech.
Thirdly, EVEN if the audience had been only -or or mostly- comprised of webdevs on top of their game (btw, I am Santa Klaus, bow to me), there is always the trickle effect. Journos do tend to report announcement made in these big events, if only to justify their expense reports. And then the shills and the fools go like "if he said that at a major tech event, "to A ROOM FULL OF DEVELOPPERS" (to use your capitalisation, however false the assumption might be) then it must be true, right?
Oldest trick in the "MS guide to FUD marketting" book.
I didn't say it was a "slip of the tongue"; I said it was some poor phrasing. The structure of this phrasing is as if Amazon were to say that its site provides an "integrated shopping experience", and for every other website to cry foul and start shitting their guts out in fury at the absurdity of the suggestion that there's any such thing as "integrated shopping" in and of itself. Of course, there isn't, but when you put it into context, it makes some sense.
What I find inexplicable in this whole nonsense situation that's exploded is why, if 'native HTML5' is supposed to be part of some major Microsoft offensive to distort the truth and misrepresent the way that HTML5 is supposed to work, there's been no other mention anywhere else, on Microsoft sites or materials, of what this 'native HTML5' creature supposedly is. If it's the next big Microsoft thing, something that's been weeks and months in the planning, and pored over by teams weighing up each and every word of the speech as you suggest, why is there nothing anywhere defining what native HTML5 is versus ordinary, non-native HTML5? Where are the Microsoft supportbase pages? Where are the Microsoft marketing pages? Where are the Microsoft press packs, detailing native HTML as a 'thing' compared with bog-standard, unremarkable, peasant's HTML5? Perhaps all those waving their pitchforks will insist that the explanation is that Microsoft destroyed all such references as soon as the backlash began. Riiiiiiight. Sure.
Regarding your second and third oh-so-compellingpoints, if we indulge your position to the point that every last person in the room had been a mid-level manager with zero development experience, it wouldn't make any difference in terms of perpetuating the apparent lies that you and others seem to believe Microsoft was trying to sell. At some point those managers would take their marketing buzzwords back to the actual developers who DO know their shit, and when they start hearing about "native HTML5" as a thing, those real developers aren't going to be blinded and bedazzled by the marketing bullshit any more than if they'd been in the room themselves. The point, which you either ignored or were too stupid too understand, was that Microsoft had nothing to gain by trying to sell a big lie about development to the developers themselves, whether through middle manager intermediaries or directly. And even if the room itself hadn't been filled with true-blood, experienced, career developers, thousands will have been watching online.
To put this into the similar example I made in an earlier post, you're saying that the plane makers have gone in to tell a room full of pilots that the sky is filled with treacle, not air. You're also saying that, if half or all of the room were filled with airline managers rather than pilots, that upon hearing the story from the managers, the pilots would actually believe it because they'd be hearing it second-hand with a load of marketing buzz phrases to convince them.
To drag this back to the current situation and ram it into your face one more time, you're seriously suggesting that developers would be more likely to believe something that makes no sense to them simply because they've heard it from a middle-manager? And moreover, you seriously think that Microsoft believed that too, and that that was the reason they chose - that they specifically pored over and deliberated, and ultimately selected - that particular phrase of "native HTML5", believing that a sizeable chunk of the audience in attendance and watching on the web wouldn't know any better? And you genuinely believe that Microsoft decided that the best time to try to con its developers with such a foolish gambit would be at its developer-focused event? And you believe that Microsoft didn't consider for a moment that at least of its developers somewhere might put up a hand and say "hey, this 'native HTML5' thing isn't a thing at all?'"
Wow, you're really not very bright, are you? Astonishingly, eyewateringly stupid, in fact.
By the way, Microsoft isn't the first to use the phrase 'native HTML5'. This Google Chrome Extensions page - https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gncnbkghencmkfgeepfaonmegemakcol - for example made mention of "native HTML5 notifications" last year. Another example popped up on Comscore - http://www.nedstat.co.uk/nedstat-news-archive/374-stream-sense-supports-native-html5-video - in 2009, referencing "native HTML5 video". The HTML5Rocks site - http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/dnd/basics/ - also made mention last year of "native HTML5 drag and drop".
So why do all of these examples go unadmonished, yet when Microsoft tries to talk of "native HTML5" in the context of an integrated IE9+Windows solution being supposedly best for browsing and web-apps (at least in terms of how they'd *like* to be perceived - whether that perception is true or not is an entirely different discussion), it's time to go crazy, ignore all logic, and instead seek and believe every possible reason - no matter how improbable or foolish - to portray Microsoft as knowingly telling unbelievable lies to the very last group of people who could ever believe them?
What Hackmanovich was actually on about?
Whilst it could be better worded, what he is essentially getting at, is that IE9 and IE10 are designed to use all the abilities of the underlying operating system to render HTML5 and execute JavaScript at quickly as possible. That means that it *should be* more efficient, faster and use less power.
Their use of hardware acceleration for graphics and animation was so obvious, that it caused Google and Mozilla to slap their collective heads, wonder why they hadn't do it before and rushed out their implementation of that hardware accleration.
He isn't saying that HTML5 can only be run "natively" on Windows 7, but that currently IE 9 is the only one that tries to exploit the underlying hardware and operating system to its fullest. That doesn't mean that it has to stay that way, the other browser makers can do the same, the APIs are open, and they can try and do the same on Linux, OS X, UNIX etc.
I'm not a big Microsoft or IE fan, but they have certainly woken up, smelled the coffee and have shaken up the other browser producers. That, at least, is a good thing, even if I don't use IE9 as my main browser, I am glad MS brought it out.
Yes, we understand perfectly.
Wassisnameovich was trying to spew FUD and fool people into believing that there's something special about HTML5 in IE10.
It's pure BS that IE9 is the only one to exploit the underlying hardware for HTML5. HTML is a damn markup language!
Only region I can find on Statcounter where Opera matters is the Commonwealth of Independent States (ie the former Soviet Union) where Opera enjoys up to 30% market share. Globally Opera has 2% market share. The population of the CIS states is about 250m, the world population is approaching 7,000 million.
nuff said
In fact a fan of firefox.
I've read almost all the comments on here, and I still think that the people shouting, "it's marketing-speak, folks," probably have the right of it.
I first saw the "native" and felt my brain do a quick flip - what, did this actually mean? Well, I think it didn't mean anything much as it was written.
What I suspect he meant was this new browser will be the best place to view sites using HTML5, because we built it with HTML5 in mind. The "native" thing was just sloppy phraseology when what he mean was that IE9 was optimised for HTML5, and that as a result you'll get better results on IE9 (preferably plus Windows 7) than you will using other browsers on other platforms, when looking at a site crafted with html5 in mind.
But he really REALLY meant was, "This latest version of IE is way cool dude," but didn't have the nerve to come out with it in front of a Windows crowd.
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