a global unified operating system has been a big part of the proliferation of computers amongst the general public

a single browser is easier to code for than 5

the most prevalent browser is the standard, not an arbitrary 3rd parties standard

I also don’t think the typical Web production methodology of making one semi-round peg and hammering it into both a round and square hole is realistic or practical. The QA time is ridiculous and really can’t be tolerated. There are way too many browsers now to do browser-by-browser development. We should be thinking about what our clients and users are doing, not what Microsoft is doing (e.g. finally supporting child selectors or some other thing.)

If you make an HTML 5 website with XML, PNG, JPEG, M4A, M4V content, you can clone the front-end as Flash 9 in 2-3 days of ActionScript3 coding and use all the same content. That sounds like a lot of work at first, however it completely solves the Microsoft problem because the single Flash 9 movie:

- works identically in IE 5.5, 6, 7, 8 on Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, Seven (also in IE 5.5 on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X)
- works identically to the HTML 5 version seen in non-Microsoft browsers

… so the website runs as designed in all major browsers, with no IE development at all. No MSHTML, no CSS hacks, no JS libraries, no Windows Media Player, no reason to care whether your user has an iPhone or IE 5.5 running on Windows 98 (the site looks the same in both, even the custom OpenType fonts and the audio video controls are identical.)

We’re about to launch a site that’s built in this hybrid HTML 5 / Flash 9 way. It was just an experiment at first, but it turned out so well that we’re doing all our sites like this going forward. Our ActionScript3 time went from 0 to 3 days but every other part of the development process was reduced by at least 25% and that more than made up for it. The project was under-budget by a lot compared to our previous sites. And it’s a better Web application that does more for many users under many circumstances.

The QA time was especially reduced by 90% because we QA’d our own work and not Microsoft’s. And QA was much more pleasant and less-stressful because instead of seeing our work busted up arbitrarily in various Microsoft browsers, requiring us to go into the code and deliberately break it yet keep it working in white-hat browsers, we saw the site looking perfect in all IE’s, looking exactly as it did when running in Flash 9 on the Flash developer’s machine. No surprises at all.

Media encoding time was also reduced considerably from typical because we just made 1 audio or video file per item and that works for all users.

Creatively, we are now designing with way more animations and richness because we know we can build that in a straightforward way in both HTML 5 and Flash 9. I mean, we’re showing the full 2009 presentation with layers and compositing and animation and full MP4 audio video on DOS machines! It’s very different from hoping you can get a child selector from Microsoft some time soon, should they deign to bestow such a gift upon you.

During this project, we only had to go to look up one Internet Explorer -related thing, and that was how to write the trademark (R or TM) for all versions of IE and for Windows 98 through Seven when we detailed our IE support in the documentation. What MSHTML is doing now or until the end of time is no longer any business of mine. I’m studying HTML 5 with Apple and Google and all the cool kids and it is awesome.

So I would encourage my fellow Web developers to solve the Microsoft problem for themselves in whatever way is appropriate to the kind of work you’re doing. But don’t settle for this halfway crap anymore, and this constant tracking of Microsoft bugs. If you step back from it for a moment and consider that Microsoft makes over US$1,000,000,000 in PROFIT per MONTH because you’re working around the bugs they aren’t paying to fix.

Even if you choose to build 2 HTML front-ends (one to Microsoft spec for Microsoft, one to HTML 5 spec for everyone else) I think you will find that to be more productive (based on my experience doing HTML 5 / Flash 9) than trying to make one document for all of today’s and tomorrow’s browsers. Of course, making just one HTML document for all versions of IE is a challenge in itself, which is why we used Flash.

Uh… I be happy to support 20 browsers. There’s a word called “standards” that browser developers should consider.

There’s several problems with your statement:

1) IE was and is the standard today because it is the most used.

2) No-one follows the w3c to the letter and this makes it defunct.

3) The reality is no browser works the same, firefox height issues are a joke even now. Webkit browsers treat embedded objects differently in the DOM.

…but the point is that MS has ignored the developer community as a whole for too long, and the only people that support them are those developers who develop specifically for MS, so they think they’re high and mighty above the rest of us. We need to support each other in the industry rather than bicker about the best browser, and anything that gets us closer to seeing all browsers accepting the same standards is great news for all.

You do realise that personal computers in the true sense of the phrase has only exploded because of the existence of one unifying operating system?
Without the domination of windows everyones applications would have had to be written for 20-30 platforms – innovation would have been a joke. I mean just look at Apple Macs…it STILL takes an age to get innovative software to get released on pc and mac and thats just 2 platforms.

If we’d jsut gone with MS this whine about standards would never have happened – MS were the standard.

http://ie6update.com/

What do you think?