What's frustrating to me is that they could fix the problem of high usage of old IE versions. They just seem to be unwilling to.
They could add in IE7's and IE8's rendering engines into IE9 as compatibility modes, push out IE9 as a forced or automatic update and have HTML5 ready to use in a few weeks. But they seem to be more worried potential whining from update-averse users than holding back the technological progress of the entire internet.
Who to piss off: the IT department at almost every major corporation worldwide who pay us billions of dollars a year, or a bunch of bloggers who run Firefox on Macs and would still hate our bones if we cured cancer tomorrow.
The entire point of the suggestion is to break compatibility with IE6 so that the rest of the world can stop having to code against it. Breaking compatibility with IE6 has freaking enormous switching costs for some users.
(Let me hum a few bars: you use a $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded. This is hypothetical, but not very hypothetical, if you catch my drift. A forced free upgrade to IE9 would create an organization-wide emergency for that customer, instantly, and it would be a cold day in Hell before they every do business with Microsoft again.)
The entire point of my suggestion is that a newer browser doesn't need to break compatibility with older browsers to allow people to stop supporting them. Backwards compatibility makes it possible for Microsoft to do a forced upgrade without screwing anyone over. Once a significant majority people are using IE9, it doesn't matter if they're still relying on its backwards compatibility for existing websites, new websites can just target IE9's native rendering engine and ignore older versions of IE.
I didn't mention IE6 backwards compatibility, because no one running IE6 is going to upgrade directly to IE9; they don't run on the same OS. Even if IE9 was made a mandatory or automatic upgrade, people relying on IE6 wouldn't have to worry. IE6 would have to be dealt with differently than IE7&8, which is fine, it'll get to insignificant market share soon enough on its own.
The currently existing alternative is just to install Chrome or Firefox for the current web and leave IE6 in place for legacy internal applications. But then browsing the web isn’t seen as a useful part of people’s jobs in most companies.
> $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded.
You can make it entirely realistic by saying the company that made the CRM now has a version that supports Firefox and IE7-8 but it costs $5M to upgrade the license. I've had so many of those cases at my current job.
IE9 does have compatibility modes for IE7 and IE8 already (somewhere on the official IE blog there's a flow chart describing how IE decides what rendering mode to use for a given page; it's terrifying)
My understanding is that IE's entire user-base consists of update-averse users these days - everybody who can stomach the idea of changing browsers is already using Chrome or Firefox.
Not quite. IE8 is making huge gains in market share, but almost entirely at the expense of IE6 and IE7. The overall IE marketshare is holding somewhat steady at 60%. I think what you're seeing is Windows users are perfectly happy to take an upgrade that Microsoft offers, but either afraid to branch out to a non-MS browser or else just don't know how to do so. Windows 7 shipping with IE8 has a lot to do with it, too, as people buy new laptops, etc, and never touch the browser it comes with.
No they certainly could not. Have you ever worked in a big company before? The end users get their updates from in house sources. Introduction of MS updates is strictly controlled. If they can't quantify what the change will do then it's not going in. Of course security patches get priority and something like a browser version change has broad sweeping effects that are extremely difficult to quantify.
So if MS did what you ask tomorrow, nothing would change in 99% of big corporations.
They campaigned extensively for users to switch to newer version of IE. They don't force it because lots of company still have IT policies of using IE6 (or whichever comes installed with the OS, I suspect).
I forget where I heard it, but in some interview a Microsoft exec claimed no one at MS likes IE6 and they all want to see it die, but that they have signed long running service agreements which basically makes them contractually bound to keep it alive. Now this could all be bullshit, but that appears to be the official line.
Apple policies are not 'harmful' to general consumers. They're unappealing to certain tech-savvy consumers, but those people are a niche. The average phone buyer has priorities more in line with what a curated app store provides, and that's why other companies are following Apple's lead.
Even if Google decides to focus on making Android appeal to a broader audience and starts following Apple's strategy, the market will still exist for open devices. Either someone will cater to it (which I am confident Google will continue to do), or the market has become so small that no one will bother. Either way, it's just the free market at work, not some evil conspiracy.
From what I understand, the article is about the fact that Apple may be keeping track of the devices' position at all times, as part of the OS basically.
The prompt that asks you every time if you want to give your location is for when you're using apps.
The way they have things set up, it's going to be hard for them to keep their generous deal with AT&T intact while opening the iPhone up to other carriers. The second the iPhone is available elsewhere, Apple loses a lot of the leverage that got AT&T to pay the iPhone's huge subsidy.
You can bet that if Apple could negotiate terms with a second carrier that would increase their profits, they would be all over that. I suspect they're having a hard time finding a generous enough offer to compensate for a weakened deal with AT&T.
It seems that some people will never learn that going for market share first isn't always the path to maximizing profit. I could understand these arguments when Apple wasn't doing so well, but now it's just silly; Apple has, for ages, been extremely consistent in prioritizing margins over market share. By all measures, it's working brilliantly for them.
Success through high margins is less visible and less obvious than success through high market share, and I'm guessing that contributes to the strange idea that Apple is somehow making a mistake with a high-margin lower volume strategy, but come on, they make more money selling cell phones than almost any other company in the world.
Apple could certainly license their OS to other vendors. But in doing so, they would be throwing out an extremely successful business model for one that eliminates their biggest differentiation from their competitors: the polish and quality they can provide by having complete control over all aspects of their products.
That would be a good theory if their page wasn't titled "HTML5 and web standards." There's not much room for interpretation in that.
I suspect that they simply let their desire to make the demos really impressive distract them from the original point of the demos. They could, I imagine them thinking, make some cool demos that would work in Chrome and Firefox and Safari, or they could make some even cooler demos that showed off things only available in Safari, and have a nice way to promote Safari to boot.
The problem is, once they did that, it went from a showcase of HTML5 standards to a showcase of proprietary Safari features that might be standards eventually. Oops. I'm rarely critical of Apple, but this is one of those times that makes me wonder if anyone there had their brains turned on.
My interpretation is Apple wants to influence what the final standard is going to look like. This is their vision for it which is largely based off the current W3C working draft. What's wrong with that? That's how the process is supposed to work. Apple has a few features not presently in the working draft that they want to see in the final standard. Here's the demo and you can get the WebKit source code to see how it works. The W3C, which Apple is a member of, may ratify it as part of the standard or they may not. I don't think there's any indication it will effect WebKit's ability to follow the final standard.
That’s something you can do. I don’t think it’s nice of them to throw around buzzwords while being so completely irony resistant, it’s just that I don’t think it’s a reason to be greatly angered.
The point is that the iPad is helping, and will continue to help, HTML5 become the new best medium for rich content. Apple isn't always concerned with using whatever is best or most practical at the moment. Sometimes they want to help along less established technologies that have the potential to be even better.
They could add in IE7's and IE8's rendering engines into IE9 as compatibility modes, push out IE9 as a forced or automatic update and have HTML5 ready to use in a few weeks. But they seem to be more worried potential whining from update-averse users than holding back the technological progress of the entire internet.