I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time.
I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't care if it's monthly, quarterly or yearly, but users shouldn't even realize that an update was pushed to their machine. This model has shown that it works for browsers, and not only that, it has also proven to be the best model. Is there any actual actionable plan on this?
Adding new features in IE15 is fine and good, but won't buy a dime in developer consensus, when we still waste time supporting 5-years-old IE browsers at any given time.
Your info is out of date, as they have already fixed the browser update issue. Modern IE will automatically upgrade when new versions are released - you can see this by looking at the adoption rates for IE9 -> 10 -> 11.
However, there are still a lot of users on IE8 and below, which did not have auto updating. As people gradually migrate away from these legacy versions and get onto the evergreen track, then the situation should improve until IE's overall upgrade rates match those of Firefox and Chrome.
I don't see how this is fixed. According to StatCounter, IE shares are: IE8 6.7%, IE9 3.8%, IE10 4.0%, IE11 9.0%. IE10 is supposed to have an "install new versions automatically" option and yet still has close to half the share of IE11, and IE8+IE9 share is still greater than IE11 share.
I'd argue that IE is primarily used in corporate settings, when silently upgrading software is a big no-no. Everything has to be tested by the IT/IS department and rolled out in a controlled fashion.
Last time I managed to find a study showing daily browser market share, I noticed that the drop for old IE versions during the weekend was significant but below 50%. So over half of those users are not corporate users.
I don't like citing numbers without a source, but I couldn't find one in 5 minutes Googling. If somebody has a link that shows fairly recent daily IE usage share, we can double check my recall.
I would also like to add that one technical solution for the "IE in enterprise" problem would be allowing parallel IE version installations. IE already allows to go into old version emulation mode, but it's not 100% faithful (I don't know the details).
If it was 100% faithful, sysadmin could simply update IE to the latest version for normal browsing (or even let it auto-update, since I'm sure no sysadmin believe that he/she can QA IE better than MS for general Internet usage), and forcing compatibility (through GPO) for Intranet sites that are broken in newer version.
But since it's not 100% faithful, the technical solution would be allowing to install an auto-updating IE in parallel to IE8, and then configure a policy to automatically switch to IE8 for Intranet sites (Chrome Enterprise does a similar thing; you can configure a GPO so that the user is automatically brought to IE when he/she browses to specific websites, e.g.: Intranet).
>I'd argue that IE is primarily used in corporate settings
I wouldnt make that distinction. While its probably true that some corporate users are still stuck on XP. Most non techy people I know (which is almost everyone) just buy a new laptop open it up and start using IE. They will probably never upgrade unless the computer tells them or does it automatically.
I would have agreed up to the past September, when Mavericks was released for free. Some big leaps in IE updates are tied to Windows upgrades, which are not free for users.
This has a direct reflect on Safari adoption. NetMarketShare gives these numbers for OSX adoption (which is the same of Safari version adoption):
10.9: 3.75%
10.6: 1.29%
10.8: 1.18%
10.7: 1.05%
So roughly half of OSX users are already using the last Safari version (which was released only 7 months ago), which is absolutely different from the situation you have with IE version adoption.
What would be the situation of IE version adoption, were Win7 a free upgrade for all WinXP/Vista users? I think we can agree that free operating system upgrade does have a measurable impact.
Nonetheless, I agree with the general point that Safari now sits in the middle between IE and Firefox/Chrome, and that's why I have not mentioned it in my original post.
I wonder if a re-branding is in order. I suspect I'm not the only one who feels an inner discomfort with IE. I even associate the logo and name with thoughts like "outdated," "broken," "difficult," and "cumbersome."
I realize they've come a long way, but it's tough to shake off 10+ years of negative experiences and associations.
None of the things listed as "not currently planned" are big surprises, though seeing WebRTC there is very disappointing. I've never seen "Object RTC" before, is it a competing effort, or a restandardization effort?
Object RTC is developed by a community group at the W3C. It includes people from Google, Microsoft and a number of telecom companies, amongst others http://www.w3.org/community/ortc/
Those two things are... orthogonal? WebRTC is a transport for media and data streams, which looks somewhat like SCTP-over-DTLS-over-UDP. getUserMedia is a way to get a stream which can then be sent over a transport.
Note that this site lists WebGL as "IE11+". That's false. IE11 has a flavor of webgl that's experimental (prefixed or not) that's reported as version WebGL 0.92 (this is basically an invalid specification conformant string, it's either 1.0 or something not done).
Huge gaps and bugs remain in Microsofts WebGL implementation which make it nearly impossible to use except for specific select usecases that Microsoft optimized for.
It took google and mozilla about 4 years to get a good WebGL implementation (and they're still not done). It'll take Microsoft years to come to bring their implementation on par with the rest of the WebGL world.
We shipped an update to the IE11 WebGL implementation to developers today as part of Windows 8.1 Update. We will roll this out to all IE11 users through Windows Update starting next week. There will be further updates to our WebGL implementation in the summer.
If there are specific use cases that you're interested in support for, please let us know what they are so that we can prioritise the order of our implementation.
Another measure that's also very useful is to run the webgl performance regression test suite every day to see if performance got worse or better with the changes.
Unfortunately there isn't a comprehensive GLSL syntax test suite, but GLSL has been much of a sore point in IE where some syntax that's valid GLSL would work except in IE (such as uniforms separated by a comma).
I've submitted some tickets to IE (and added more conformance tests to cover them) for some of the gaps (gl.SAMPLES, gl.STENCIL_BITS, gl.SUBPIXEL_BITS).
A thing that's also a sore point is IEs lack of support for very common extensions such as OES_texture_float_linear, WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc, WEBGL_depth_texture, OES_standard_derivatives, OES_vertex_array_object, ANGLE_instanced_arrays, OES_element_index_uint, WEBGL_lose_context. You can get an overview of the state of support on http://webglstats.com/
A note on floating point texture extensions. If you implement one extension (for instance OES_texture_float) you should really implement the companion extensions as well for texture_float_linear and color_buffer_float. Only the triplet of extensions provides comprehensive overview of support.
I think the demos above are fairly good usecases for gaps that you might have, because they exercise a lot of functionality, they're not bound to some specific framework (like three.js) but they are WebGL conformant.
Thanks for such a fast reply! :) I'm quite happy with Microsoft's recent push towards openness.
One additional suggestion: Perhaps you could also include a rationale on why a specific feature is not planned to be implemented: e.g. WebRTC. (Though I can anticipate this might not be feasible to do for strategic / management reasons.)
Thanks for the link. I always found it hard to know what is happening in new versions of chrome and which feature became available when. This is exactly what I needed - Thanks!
Also found chrome dashboard easier to use than IE dashboard but that's understandable as this is new effort.
And, if anyone from IE team is here, how about some consistency with developer tools with other browsers as well. The web developer UI in IE 11 is so different that I struggle to found simple things - maybe I am not good in recognizing new icons :)
I'm bewildered by the many "under consideration" entries. When all the other major players support something, and you want to be taken seriously, why aren't you throwing more engineers at the problem?
If feature status were a Facebook relationship status, many might say "it's complicated." ;-) Most of the time, it's not actually a question of engineering resources. Stay tuned as we update more and more stuff to "In Development".
I'm curious--does this imply internal-politics problems (e.g. getting other departments to expose, and possibly backport, APIs that Chakra needs to consume to do the features), or just weird engineering challenges specific to the Chakra codebase?
And here are some that they ship[1] that according to that page aren't in other browsers (or are listed as in development for one or more other browsers)
1. CSS Device Adaptation (@viewport)
2. CSS Scrolling Snap Points
3. Exclusions
4. Encrypted Media Extensions (only they and Chrome ship it)
5. Grid
6. IME API
7. Regions
8. Screen Orientation API
9. Streams API
10. Web Crypto API
[1] These are listed with a status of "Prefixed" on modern.ie/status.
Anyway, I think most of those aren't part of the w3c standards (yet). But I think it's good to see them publicly state their roadmap.
It's a good point. It makes it embarrassingly (for Microsoft) clear who the leaders are when it comes to browsers.
That said, despite Google's leadership in this area, Chrome's support of "new browser features" is often sloppy. They ship some features in quite broken states, and don't get around to fixing them until a lot later. The Chromium issue tracker has over 56,000 open issues. Google are going for quantity over quality when it comes to new features.
They are considering if they can skip some features just to retain some lock in, or competition is already too strong for them to do it. That's "under consideration". "Not considered" means they decided that competition is too weak yet and they can just skip that in order not to increase interoperability (for example WebRTC). Implemented features means they think competition has won and they have no choice but to go along even if they didn't want before (for example WebGL).
Can somebody on the IE team comment on when specific SVG features will be added? I am interested in using a <use> tag with a xlink:href to an element in a different SVG file. This is part of the SVG spec and works in the latest versions of Chrome and FireFox, but does not work in IE 11. Any plans to fix this?
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I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't care if it's monthly, quarterly or yearly, but users shouldn't even realize that an update was pushed to their machine. This model has shown that it works for browsers, and not only that, it has also proven to be the best model. Is there any actual actionable plan on this?
Adding new features in IE15 is fine and good, but won't buy a dime in developer consensus, when we still waste time supporting 5-years-old IE browsers at any given time.
However, there are still a lot of users on IE8 and below, which did not have auto updating. As people gradually migrate away from these legacy versions and get onto the evergreen track, then the situation should improve until IE's overall upgrade rates match those of Firefox and Chrome.
I don't like citing numbers without a source, but I couldn't find one in 5 minutes Googling. If somebody has a link that shows fairly recent daily IE usage share, we can double check my recall.
I would also like to add that one technical solution for the "IE in enterprise" problem would be allowing parallel IE version installations. IE already allows to go into old version emulation mode, but it's not 100% faithful (I don't know the details).
If it was 100% faithful, sysadmin could simply update IE to the latest version for normal browsing (or even let it auto-update, since I'm sure no sysadmin believe that he/she can QA IE better than MS for general Internet usage), and forcing compatibility (through GPO) for Intranet sites that are broken in newer version.
But since it's not 100% faithful, the technical solution would be allowing to install an auto-updating IE in parallel to IE8, and then configure a policy to automatically switch to IE8 for Intranet sites (Chrome Enterprise does a similar thing; you can configure a GPO so that the user is automatically brought to IE when he/she browses to specific websites, e.g.: Intranet).
I wouldnt make that distinction. While its probably true that some corporate users are still stuck on XP. Most non techy people I know (which is almost everyone) just buy a new laptop open it up and start using IE. They will probably never upgrade unless the computer tells them or does it automatically.
This has a direct reflect on Safari adoption. NetMarketShare gives these numbers for OSX adoption (which is the same of Safari version adoption):
10.9: 3.75% 10.6: 1.29% 10.8: 1.18% 10.7: 1.05%
So roughly half of OSX users are already using the last Safari version (which was released only 7 months ago), which is absolutely different from the situation you have with IE version adoption.
What would be the situation of IE version adoption, were Win7 a free upgrade for all WinXP/Vista users? I think we can agree that free operating system upgrade does have a measurable impact.
Nonetheless, I agree with the general point that Safari now sits in the middle between IE and Firefox/Chrome, and that's why I have not mentioned it in my original post.
I realize they've come a long way, but it's tough to shake off 10+ years of negative experiences and associations.
Huge gaps and bugs remain in Microsofts WebGL implementation which make it nearly impossible to use except for specific select usecases that Microsoft optimized for.
It took google and mozilla about 4 years to get a good WebGL implementation (and they're still not done). It'll take Microsoft years to come to bring their implementation on par with the rest of the WebGL world.
If there are specific use cases that you're interested in support for, please let us know what they are so that we can prioritise the order of our implementation.
Another measure that's also very useful is to run the webgl performance regression test suite every day to see if performance got worse or better with the changes.
Unfortunately there isn't a comprehensive GLSL syntax test suite, but GLSL has been much of a sore point in IE where some syntax that's valid GLSL would work except in IE (such as uniforms separated by a comma).
I've submitted some tickets to IE (and added more conformance tests to cover them) for some of the gaps (gl.SAMPLES, gl.STENCIL_BITS, gl.SUBPIXEL_BITS).
A thing that's also a sore point is IEs lack of support for very common extensions such as OES_texture_float_linear, WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc, WEBGL_depth_texture, OES_standard_derivatives, OES_vertex_array_object, ANGLE_instanced_arrays, OES_element_index_uint, WEBGL_lose_context. You can get an overview of the state of support on http://webglstats.com/
A note on floating point texture extensions. If you implement one extension (for instance OES_texture_float) you should really implement the companion extensions as well for texture_float_linear and color_buffer_float. Only the triplet of extensions provides comprehensive overview of support.
Personally I'd like to see these run in IE of course: http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/15/soft-shadow-mapping/ http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/04/high-performance-js-... http://codeflow.org/webgl/deferred-irradiance-volumes/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/trails/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/barycentric-wireframe/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/ssao/
I think the demos above are fairly good usecases for gaps that you might have, because they exercise a lot of functionality, they're not bound to some specific framework (like three.js) but they are WebGL conformant.
One additional suggestion: Perhaps you could also include a rationale on why a specific feature is not planned to be implemented: e.g. WebRTC. (Though I can anticipate this might not be feasible to do for strategic / management reasons.)
Also found chrome dashboard easier to use than IE dashboard but that's understandable as this is new effort.
And, if anyone from IE team is here, how about some consistency with developer tools with other browsers as well. The web developer UI in IE 11 is so different that I struggle to found simple things - maybe I am not good in recognizing new icons :)
The best I can think of is googling for release notes for current beta/aurora [1][2] for "coming soon" but it lacks long term things.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/29.0beta/releasenotes/
[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/30.0a2/auroranotes/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q2-Goals
https://wiki.mozilla.org/2014
Edit: forgot this one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases
(I work for IE)
[1] These are listed with a status of "Prefixed" on modern.ie/status.
Anyway, I think most of those aren't part of the w3c standards (yet). But I think it's good to see them publicly state their roadmap.
That said, despite Google's leadership in this area, Chrome's support of "new browser features" is often sloppy. They ship some features in quite broken states, and don't get around to fixing them until a lot later. The Chromium issue tracker has over 56,000 open issues. Google are going for quantity over quality when it comes to new features.
My Stack Overflow question on the topic is at:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22516712/svg-use-tag-with...