Google chrome: Shite?

[mrcharly-YHT]

Flipping heck, Ben, we aren't talking about 'obscure'; even things like the placement of nested DIVs is handled incorrectly by IE.

sorry but i'm going to ask for an example. don't worry if you haven' got one i won't take it as an indication that you're making it up but i am curious about this.

Ben, I'm kind of too busy to write you an example.

Just try googling 'IE and div'

Or read this:
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/internet-explorer.shtml

[Euan Uzami]

Seriously, to me this is just proof that they are bad engineers and don't understand the basis of good technical design.

We come full circle here really.
IS IT because they literally don't understand the basis of good technical design, or because they prioritise other things than how easy it is to write for.
For instance if I was writing a web site my first port of call would be to use aspx. I wouldn't even think of using anything else. Which is exactly what microsoft want you to think.
The apparent evidence may be there, but anthropologically speaking, the notion that they , en masse, 'don't understand the basis of good technical design' simply doesn't sit well, because they have lots of employees and can afford the best people -so if they want to do something 'well', they can. I  think that it's because they don't want to make it easy, not because they can't or don't know how to. I appreciate that doesn't help you a great deal, but that's the way it is.

[Greenbank]

The Victorians understood the interest of normalisation and propelled Britain way ahead of the world partly thanks to this. I work for an industry -construction industry- which is far less high tech than the IT industry and even "thickos" like us know that normalising stuff equates to profit but MS refuses to do it. They are just living in a parallel world and have no consideration whatsoever for their stakeholders.

The building blocks of IT are reasonable well standardised (although not perfect, as these examples attest) but that's as far as it goes. The majority of IT stuff that people use are built from these components in their own unique way.

The deeper problem is that the underlying standard is ambiguous and limited, and gets interpreted in different ways by different people resulting in browsers that work slightly differently.

The same argument can be had for the construction industry. It's not as if the construction industry has a 'standard reference house'. Almost every house is unique at some level (pipework, layout, etc), even in a row of terraced houses.

On top of that you've got the problem in that the standards lag behind implementation (you only need to look at the Browser support for HTML5 as a good example). Can't do certain things using HTML4? Stick up a Flash applet and say bollocks to anyone who can't run Flash. (Replace Flash with DHTML, AJAX, Silverlight, Java, ...).

HTML4 didn't do everything (easily) that MSFT wanted for Outlook Web Access and so they implemented their own extension in their own browser to solve the problem. What would have been bastardish is that if they'd prevented non-IE browsers from using OWA at all, instead it will still run but with slightly reduced functionality. Waiting for a new and improved standard that implements everything required is out of the question as they'd miss the boat by *years*.

By the time HTML5 is finally ratified as a standard there will be applications/uses for which it is obsolete. There will be numerous extensions and not all browsers will be able to cope with everything. It's just the way IT works. Designing and implementing stuff is much more fun than writing standards. Designing stuff with an open mind is more fun than designing stuff with one hand tied by restrictions imposed by the need to exactly follow a standard.

The web didn't become what it is today by following standards. (Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing.)

[Panoramix]

The Victorians understood the interest of normalisation and propelled Britain way ahead of the world partly thanks to this. I work for an industry -construction industry- which is far less high tech than the IT industry and even "thickos" like us know that normalising stuff equates to profit but MS refuses to do it. They are just living in a parallel world and have no consideration whatsoever for their stakeholders.

The building blocks of IT are reasonable well standardised (although not perfect, as these examples attest) but that's as far as it goes. The majority of IT stuff that people use are built from these components in their own unique way.

The deeper problem is that the underlying standard is ambiguous and limited, and gets interpreted in different ways by different people resulting in browsers that work slightly differently.

The same argument can be had for the construction industry. It's not as if the construction industry has a 'standard reference house'. Almost every house is unique at some level (pipework, layout, etc), even in a row of terraced houses.

Concrete blocks, bricks and joists sizes are all normalised, panels sizes are in multiple of 600. You are free to design exciting stuff using these building blocks and life would be boring if all houses or websites were the same. You nearly always build bespoke stuff but using standard "blocks", sometimes you can't but you know it is going to be dear.

I had the chance to work on highly bespoke stuff: North Lincolnshire Sports Academy, Scunthorpe and you would be surprised how much off the shelf elements there are. There are indeed complicated bespoke bits but the aim is to minimise the occurences all the time.

Microsof t attitude is equivalent to somebody turning up saying: " We manufacture 50% of concrete blocks and from now on we will make them 50 mm shorter for no reason but to create major inconvenience to anybody not using our system. By the way your plasterboard sheets are the wrong size now but it is OK because we have a new expensive technology that will waste your time and money. We don't care cos' you will have no choice but to buy it to solve the problem we have created for you.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Excellent summary, Pan.

The building industry is far more mature than IT, and uses more sophisticated planning tools.

[Euan Uzami]

Microsof t attitude is equivalent to somebody turning up saying: " We manufacture 50% of concrete blocks and from now on we will make them 50 mm shorter for no reason but to create major inconvenience to anybody not using our system. By the way your plasterboard sheets are the wrong size now but it is OK because we have a new expensive technology that will waste your time and money. We don't care cos' you will have no choice but to buy it to solve the problem we have created for you.

Correct, if over-emotive.
The contrariness of that only underlines the point that the reason they do it is simply to create a commercial advantage for themselves, rather than specifically to inconvenience other people and waste their time and money.
It is playing the game using dirty tactics, admittedly - that it is ethically and technically wrong is where I think we agree,  but where we disagree is that I do not accept suggestions that it is through carelessness, stupidity or spite that they choose to break standards - it is simply greed. (Sorry if that is not what you are suggesting.)

[Euan Uzami]

Excellent summary, Pan.

The building industry is far more mature than IT, and uses more sophisticated planning tools.

it should be, it's been around longer

[frankly frankie]

Microsof t attitude is equivalent to somebody turning up saying: " We manufacture 50% of concrete blocks and from now on we will make them 50 mm shorter for no reason but to create major inconvenience to anybody not using our system.

Shimano once tried to introduce a new standard pitch for bicycle chains, of 10mm (instead of half an inch) - which would have led to a lighter and more compact drivetrain.
They failed on that one, but my point is that you can be selective about the examples you choose to illustrate the importance of 'standards'.  Choose the cycle industry, or photography, and see how far standards get you.

IE now - why does everyone conveniently ignore that it is the single most-used browser, by far?  For purely practical reasons, web designers should, arguably, start from this point.  Otherwise they're just masturbating.  I largely agree with Ben's earlier posts.

[Panoramix]

Microsof t attitude is equivalent to somebody turning up saying: " We manufacture 50% of concrete blocks and from now on we will make them 50 mm shorter for no reason but to create major inconvenience to anybody not using our system. By the way your plasterboard sheets are the wrong size now but it is OK because we have a new expensive technology that will waste your time and money. We don't care cos' you will have no choice but to buy it to solve the problem we have created for you.

Correct, if over-emotive.
The contrariness of that only underlines the point that the reason they do it is simply to create a commercial advantage for themselves, rather than specifically to inconvenience other people and waste their time and money.
It is playing the game using dirty tactics, admittedly - that it is ethically and technically wrong is where I think we agree,  but where we disagree is that I do not accept suggestions that it is through carelessness, stupidity or spite that they choose to break standards - it is simply greed. (Sorry if that is not what you are suggesting.)

I don't think that they are careless or idiotic, they've just stopped behaving like engineers. Even though they employ clever people I wouldn't ask KPMG to design my house or my software as I know that I wouldn't get value for money. Equally when I see something that has been designed by MS, I will be suspicious because I know that they have a history of making poor engineering choices. I am open minded and I recognise that Excel is a decent piece of software for instance but word, IE and windows could  be much better and I sometimes vote with my feet.

I am proud to be an engineer and elegant design matters to me , I can be quite passionate when I start talking about timber structures, equally I have no shame in being seen as over emotive when I criticize a company that has wasted my time through their bad designs dictated by political rather than technical agendas.

And google is the proof that you can be commercially succesful thanks to superior design though I must admit that I sometimes fear that they are starting go the MS path.

[Greenbank]

Microsof t attitude is equivalent to somebody turning up saying: " We manufacture 50% of concrete blocks and from now on we will make them 50 mm shorter for no reason but to create major inconvenience to anybody not using our system. By the way your plasterboard sheets are the wrong size now but it is OK because we have a new expensive technology that will waste your time and money. We don't care cos' you will have no choice but to buy it to solve the problem we have created for you.

Correct, if over-emotive.
The contrariness of that only underlines the point that the reason they do it is simply to create a commercial advantage for themselves, rather than specifically to inconvenience other people and waste their time and money.
It is playing the game using dirty tactics, admittedly - that it is ethically and technically wrong is where I think we agree,  but where we disagree is that I do not accept suggestions that it is through carelessness, stupidity or spite that they choose to break standards - it is simply greed. (Sorry if that is not what you are suggesting.)

Agreed.

The building blocks analogy is flawed in that it's comparing things on different scales. HTML/Browsers aren't the equivalent to standardised concrete blocks or 600mm wide plasterboard sheets. The IT building blocks are smaller/more-fundamental things such as TCP sockets, IPv4 addresses, data transmission protocols, the concept of a display, etc upon which applications are built.

HTML and browsers (or standards and software) are the equivalents of buildings, where there's a huge variance. They're made up of the basic, standard, building blocks. They aren't the building blocks themselves.

[Greenbank]

I don't think that they are careless or idiotic, they've just stopped behaving like engineers.

Because they never really were 'engineers'. The software side of IT is closer to art than engineering, with a huge dose of applied guesswork.

In software there's nothing like the level of rigour that goes in to making buildings.

Software Engineer A: We knocked up this prototype of the building, I set the foundations to be 10cm deep but it fell down in a 5mph wind, killing all 200 people inside it.
Software Engineer B: Ah, ok. Let's double the depth of the foundation and try it again.
Software Engineer A: Tried that. Collapsed again. Another 200 people dead.
Software Engineer B: Ok, keep doubling the depth until it doesn't fall down.
...etc...

[Euan Uzami]

I don't think that they are careless or idiotic, they've just stopped behaving like engineers. Even though they employ clever people I wouldn't ask KPMG to design my house or my software as I know that I wouldn't get value for money. Equally when I see something that has been designed by MS, I will be suspicious because I know that they have a history of making poor engineering choices. I am open minded and I recognise that Excel is a decent piece of software for instance but word, IE and windows could  be much better and I sometimes vote with my feet.

I am proud to be an engineer and elegant design matters to me , I can be quite passionate when I start talking about timber structures, equally I have no shame in being seen as over emotive when I criticize a company that has wasted my time through their bad designs dictated by political rather than technical agendas.

And google is the proof that you can be commercially succesful thanks to superior design though I must admit that I sometimes fear that they are starting go the MS path.

As a software engineer i often have disagreements with colleagues because of a discrepancy between the business solution and the engineer's solution.
As in, I want to write the business solution, they want to write the engineer's solution. They will argue for the elegant solution, sometimes I will agree, but I will to some extent argue in favour of shortcuts and hacks for the sake of getting a feature to market quicker, usually by showing that the elegant solution's advantages can be boiled down to what-ifs.

[Euan Uzami]

Because they never really were 'engineers'. The software side of IT is closer to art than engineering, with a huge dose of applied guesswork.

In software there's nothing like the level of rigour that goes in to making buildings.

Software Engineer A: We knocked up this prototype of the building, I set the foundations to be 10cm deep but it fell down in a 5mph wind, killing all 200 people inside it.
Software Engineer B: Ah, ok. Let's double the depth of the foundation and try it again.
Software Engineer A: Tried that. Collapsed again. Another 200 people dead.
Software Engineer B: Ok, keep doubling the depth until it doesn't fall down.
...etc...

excellent analogy

[Panoramix]

I don't think that they are careless or idiotic, they've just stopped behaving like engineers.

Because they never really were 'engineers'. The software side of IT is closer to art than engineering, with a huge dose of applied guesswork.

In software there's nothing like the level of rigour that goes in to making buildings.

Software Engineer A: We knocked up this prototype of the building, I set the foundations to be 10cm deep but it fell down in a 5mph wind, killing all 200 people inside it.
Software Engineer B: Ah, ok. Let's double the depth of the foundation and try it again.
Software Engineer A: Tried that. Collapsed again. Another 200 people dead.
Software Engineer B: Ok, keep doubling the depth until it doesn't fall down.
...etc...

But engineering is an art! When we design buildings we go through similar design loops. Obviously we try no to kill people in the process. For standard stuff we modify our design until we can prove it to work for non standard stuff or novel products we go to the lab and break stuff until we are confident that it is not going to kill somebody. Obviously for a computer scientist the chances of killing through negligence are fairly low and prototypes are not so expensive but it is the same spirit. I can't remember how many buildings I have designed but I haven't had two which are the same. Of course we sometimes get boring jobs where we can guess the solution from the start but equally if I ask you to write a script that parses a text file you will manage to write it without thinking too much.

There are extreme instances of iterations to get to a working solution. For the job I have linked to above we've done too many iterations for me to remeber how many. Generally you tweak a bit the structures and the forces will travel where you don't want them to, we had to remove one member for architectural reasons and it nearly drove me mad!

[sas]

IE now - why does everyone conveniently ignore that it is the single most-used browser, by far?  For purely practical reasons, web designers should, arguably, start from this point.  Otherwise they're just masturbating.  I largely agree with Ben's earlier posts.

Ummm, hardly anyone ignores it- they specifically go out of their way and put in disproportionate effort to code websites which work with IE. If you look at individual browser share than IE is ahead. If instead you look at standards compliant browsers vs IE then it's much more even.

The argument over greed vs deliberate inconvenience is irrelevant. The consequences of deliberately breaking standards aren't exactly unclear- the whole point is to obtain commercial gain by causing inconvenience and unnecessary work for people.

Edited to add:
Usage share of web browsers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Europe Firefox and IE are pretty much even, so standards-compliant browsers are actually in the majority.

[Euan Uzami]

The argument over greed vs deliberate inconvenience is irrelevant. The consequences of deliberately breaking standards aren't exactly unclear- the whole point is to obtain commercial gain by causing inconvenience and unnecessary work for people.

to play devil's advocate, i.e. i'm not saying i agree with this, but they would argue that you're only causing inconvenience and extra work for yourself by choosing not to use MS development tools.

[border-rider]

to play devil's advocate, i.e. i'm not saying i agree with this, but they would argue that you're only causing inconvenience and extra work for yourself by choosing not to use MS development tools.

Given that there is a hefty proportion of people not using IE, and that there are standards for browsers, and a certification process, it's not unreasonable to expect IE to meet the standards and for anyone writing a site to those standards to have it work in all browers.

[pcolbeck]

Very shortly IE wont be the most common browser any more.  Portable devices will form the largest group of devices used for web access and a huge majority of those don't run MS operating systems and thus no IE. Apples devices with Safari are currently the leaders here but Android based products are out selling them rapidly. These will be the main target audience for we sites soon and compatibility with them will be more important that IE compatibility. Windows CE / Mobile or whatever they are calling it this week is dying fast.

[Panoramix]

Microsof t attitude is equivalent to somebody turning up saying: " We manufacture 50% of concrete blocks and from now on we will make them 50 mm shorter for no reason but to create major inconvenience to anybody not using our system. By the way your plasterboard sheets are the wrong size now but it is OK because we have a new expensive technology that will waste your time and money. We don't care cos' you will have no choice but to buy it to solve the problem we have created for you.

Correct, if over-emotive.
The contrariness of that only underlines the point that the reason they do it is simply to create a commercial advantage for themselves, rather than specifically to inconvenience other people and waste their time and money.
It is playing the game using dirty tactics, admittedly - that it is ethically and technically wrong is where I think we agree,  but where we disagree is that I do not accept suggestions that it is through carelessness, stupidity or spite that they choose to break standards - it is simply greed. (Sorry if that is not what you are suggesting.)

Agreed.

The building blocks analogy is flawed in that it's comparing things on different scales. HTML/Browsers aren't the equivalent to standardised concrete blocks or 600mm wide plasterboard sheets. The IT building blocks are smaller/more-fundamental things such as TCP sockets, IPv4 addresses, data transmission protocols, the concept of a display, etc upon which applications are built.

HTML and browsers (or standards and software) are the equivalents of buildings, where there's a huge variance. They're made up of the basic, standard, building blocks. They aren't the building blocks themselves.

Well I don't think that the scale is relevant, panamax being an exampled of something big that got standardised for the general good. If you take the example of a super container, its size will be standard to fit in locks, at a lower scale, there will be standard gear boxes diesel generators and pumps which themsleves will be made of standard nuts and bolts. And yet ships come in all forms and shapes to suit the client requirements.

[Jaded]

IE as a world domniator will fail. Much like Windows will too.

Partly because domination never really works long time, but mainly because since  (and arguably a bit earlier) Bill Gates left the company to that fat sweaty man Micorsoft has had no direction and no vision.

[Jaded]

Are you sure he didn't say he was going to squash Google, by sitting on it?

[vorsprung]

As a software engineer i often ...

From your comments about Chrome and browsers I assumed you were a hairdresser or something

[Euan Uzami]

As a software engineer i often ...

From your comments about Chrome and browsers I assumed you were a hairdresser or something

[clarion]

When I got this laptop from Our Kid, it had Chrome on it.  I used it.  It's a browser.

Last night, it was b0rkened.  So I used IE.

Hmm.

This morning, I've downloaded Firefox, which I have on my PC.

So far, it's faster.

[barakta]

When I got this laptop from Our Kid, it had Chrome on it.  I used it.  It's a browser.

Last night, it was b0rkened.  So I used IE.

Hmm.

This morning, I've downloaded Firefox, which I have on my PC.

So far, it's faster.

My work PC install(s) of Chrome won't work, it corrupts downloads even after I rip windoze settings out and tried Chromium and waited a version.  I only have it cos Google Earth installed it again.  Else I use FF and sometimes Opera (which is annoying).