Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

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I wrote this on Reddit recently:

"It's about control, which leads back up to money.

"Windows is the default OS and IE the default browser. This is also why IE is broken. Microsoft doesn't want IE to render the same as its contemporaries because then you don't need to test on IE anymore, which means you don't need Windows anymore.

"Microsoft controls things this way and it's been part of their corporate philosophy for a long time -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They make something mostly compatible with the standard or competing product and then add proprietary extensions or quirks, and their marketshare alone forces people to take notice, and the hope is that eventually people will forget about the non-IE stuff and not bother to test on it anymore, meaning that now things don't work unless you have IE, meaning that you can't use the internet without Windows. That doesn't happen as often with the internet anymore, but as most of us know, it was quite successful for a pretty long time, and it's still successful for many non-web technologies (see DirectX v. OpenGL, etc.).

"And while things are no longer panning out to complete MS dominance, IE still plays a major role in defining what techs get on the web and what doesn't. For instance, crappy HTML 5 support because HTML 5 harms Silverlight. This is all intentional, don't fool yourself."

Not sure what you mean by "Microsoftie", but it'd be interesting to hear an MS advocate's or employee's position on this.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microsoftie

How many times must it be said that you should never assume malice where ignorance explains it?

Microsoft is full of smart people with good intentions. Do you really think that there are 100,000 evil, evil people who are on a crazy power quest to dominate the world by destroying computing for everyone else? No. These are people who love technology and honestly believe they are doing right by the world.

OK, so assuming that is true. How do I explain why IE is so broken?

Microsoft is an ENTERPRISE software company. Consumers are small potatoes, who, until recently, were completely ignored by the brass of the company. When enterprise customers have an itch, Microsoft will accept their damn good money to scratch it. If there's no itch, there's no scratching.

Many years ago, Internet Explorer rendered the web just as well as any other browser out there. Microsoft added proprietary extensions in order to be able to build things customers wanted. They didn't fix bugs that customers weren't complaining about. Maybe the individual engineers comprehended the importance of web standards, but leadership hadn't even heard of them. Besides, Microsoft wasn't even sure this web thing was going to take off. So when enterprise customers stop complaining - when their _intranets_ were good enough - Microsoft stopped investing in browsers. Simple as that: move on to the next thing that will make us money.

Lest we forget: Microsoft "embraced" the web by writing IE. Then they "extended" the web by inventing Ajax <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)#History>. Why did they do this? Because they simple would have been unable to build Outlook Web Access without it. Gmail would not exist as it is today without Outlook on the web.

I talk about OpenGL and Direct3D here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593801

Apple and Google are "extending" the web as well: <http://webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/>; Apple noticed an itch for their Mobile Me product, so they scratched it. This is how technology evolves. Web standards aren't created in a vacuum.

>Microsoft is full of smart people with good intentions.

I agree completely. All of the Microsoft employees I've come in contact have seemed perfectly competent and decent, and I believe they'd be capable of writing a compliant browser if management would permit it.

>Do you really think that there are 100,000 evil, evil people who are on a crazy power quest to dominate the world by destroying computing for everyone else?

No. Again, Microsoft employees are nice and good, and I don't believe that they believe they're "destroying computing for everyone else". I also never claimed Microsoft's strategy of EEE is "evil" or anything like it -- I think it's good business. That doesn't change the realities of the situation.

You can have a very wide base of well-intentioned people working under the direction of a handful of executives and C-levels, who don't always clue them in to the overarching strategy, or the exploitation of their leadership position.

I don't posit that Microsoft doesn't contribute to the progress of computing. I certainly don't think they do as much as they think they do, but C# is awesome, and Microsoft has done good things. I don't believe that it's an evil company and I don't believe that anything immoral occurs within MS at any exceptionally different rate than in other companies of similar size. Again, however, that doesn't change the fact that they attempt to leverage IE to make Windows a prerequisite for the web.

Everybody does this. Apple does it. Almost any proprietary software vendor does. It's about achieving the holy grail of consumer computing: platform lock-in. The goal of Apple, Microsoft, and others is to keep compatibility to a minimum so that you don't have the option to leave if you change your mind. DRM'd iTunes music, iPods, or things in other Apple-owned formats don't play on non-Apple products. Microsoft's products require Windows-based technologies. You start with one, start to build some documents and significant data up, and before you know it the cost of switching environments becomes prohibitive for non-technical users.

That's what free software is all about; it's not about keeping people from making money or anything like that, it's about keeping your data under your control and purview, so that you don't have to cross your fingers and hope that Apple doesn't decide iTunes now costs $500/user, and if you don't like it, or if you want to keep listening to the music you own (which just so happens to be encoded with Apple-proprietary formats) without paying the increased license fee, well, you're up a creek without a paddle.

Obviously standards are determined by the needs of their users, and there's nothing whatsoever wrong with proposing or implementing benevolent extensions. That's not what MS is doing by making IE misrender. They're utilizing their position to keep Windows and IE relevant and necessary.

I think you get the picture here. It's just how things operate. I don't particularly hate Microsoft and I'm not opposed to using their products when I feel they're the best fit for the job. You can't seriously assume that Microsoft is just _that_ bad at making a good browser, and holds it off for so many years, and so on. Ignorance doesn't match up, imo.

I appreciate your views as they are far more balanced than the average lock-in conspiracy theorist. You seem to have thought this out thoroughly and I respect that.

I'm telling you now that lock-in has never been an explicit goal of any team I have worked for or with. Lock-in is often an unfortunate side effect of prioritizing customer paint points and integration, while downplaying the importance of engineering.

"What is my escape plan?" is a very real question that enterprise buyers consider. Microsoft software does, in fact, offer escape plans. You just need to think at the enterprise level instead of at the consumer level. Consider our server technology: someone builds an intranet app for their enterprise which uses .NET, IIS, Windows Server, etc. Their app is now tightly bound to a Microsoft stack. Each of these individual components has evolved together due to business needs and it is quite difficult for open source software to replicate any piece of the stack. That is more an accident of process than anything else.

Now lets say Microsoft server licenses are too expensive and your enterprise decides to move to Linux. The Microsoft licensing costs are already sunk. The enterprise doesn't say "Oh dammit. We've got to get rid of all these old Microsoft servers and move everything to Linux!" Why would they do that? If it isn't broken, don't fix it. Instead, they keep on running the old servers and put up with the old problems because they have already paid for that stuff. It's in the past. Enterprise customers don't buy individual components. They buy "solutions". Sure, if you get a Microsoft server stack, you're locked into the Microsoft server solution. But you wouldn't ever change any one piece of that stack anyway even if you could. Enterprises simply don't operate that way.

Now, in the document space, you want your old data to keep on trucking if you decide to switch to OpenOffice or something. Customers want that escape plan and if they don't get it, they won't buy. So Microsoft spends the money on developing that escape plan. Engineering decides that the existing standards aren't sufficient (it's true, the open spreadsheet standards still are not finalized for cell functions!), so they go build their own, but apply for standardization so that others can replicate the standard. They documented that spec in incredible detail because there was A LOT of skeptics. They had to silent the skeptics to convince governments to buy Office.

Lock-in hurts Microsoft too. Our customers expect escape plans, but we're not going to spend dollars developing escape plans that customers haven't asked for. That's just bad business.

Microsoft doesn't want IE to render the same as its contemporaries because then you don't need to test on IE anymore, which means you don't need Windows anymore.

Are you implying MS are purposely breaking IE in order to sell Windows licences to web developers? How many licenses exactly do you think are on the line here?

There's one here. I'm an Ubuntu user, but I have a paid copy of XP that I use in VMWare so I can test IE6 & 7.

EDIT: But I'm probably an outlier.

I'm not saying none exist. I have a windows machine that I use mostly for IE. But (a) I didn't buy it for that purpose, it already existed and (b) I would probably want to use sites I work on in IE even if it worked perfectly. It's the most popular browser. They don't have to break IE.

You could try out "ie4linux" (unofficial, of course) http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

I've heard it's nice, I think it's essential IE files and wine slapped into a pretty package - but I've also heard/seen that you can have several versions of IE for testing stuff out. Might.. be nice. I dunno.

It's illegal to use Internet Explorer without a valid Windows license, even through Wine.

I do also use ies4linux. It's quite good for testing how IE handles CSS layouts, but it doesn't render fonts the same way IE renders fonts on Windows (presumably because the fonts available differ on Ubuntu).

I am implying that. Microsoft's motivation behind IE is to exploit their dominant position to crowd out the rest of the competition. As I explain in my first post, compelling Windows licenses for testing (and, by the way, many are on the line, I think) is just a small part of the overall plan (possibly the only part that's working really well right now).

Microsoft wants IE to be different because they hope that eventually companies will decide it's not worth the cost to support or utilize the technologies that have smaller marketshare.

For a while, this worked with IE and there were large swaths of the web inaccessible through other browsers. Recently, it hasn't been working as well and in fact has been backfiring as frustration with Internet Explorer mounts and developers shy away from supporting it, or imbue it with lesser features, which is why IE is much more compatible than it used to be, but still not _quite_ there.

This strategy still works well in other areas and has been part of Microsoft's philosophy for many years -- see the Halloween memos for more.

Microsoft really has no incentive to continue Internet Explorer _except_ control. They leverage it to try to make Windows a requirement to browse the web, which would render OS X, Linux, and any other potential competitors comparatively useless for desktops. That's the mission and goal of Internet Explorer.

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