[dba-Tech] FYI: Moving to "nirvana": if Microsoft were to shift to WebKit, you can thank Opera.

Hans-Christian Andersen hans.andersen at phulse.com
Sun Feb 17 15:22:34 CST 2013


Hi Shamil,

I am not the least bit concerned about testing suites like Selenium. They have to maintain their own web driver for multiple browsers anyhow, so there is no reason they can't port their web driver from Chrome/Safari across, since they are also WebKit browsers.

It seems you are also suggesting that some businesses outside automated test suites have been using this feature for scraping and what not. My first impression is that this was a bad decision. There are far better tools for doing said job (ie. curl) which are just as simple to use. But, even so, I find the concept that such a small subset of users should be able to hold back the progress of technology, especially in an area where interoperability and standards are important. And I can't imagine that Microsoft should care. If they really can't provide a compatibility layer, then they should just fork IE into two versions: IE and IE Classic and let the dinosaurs continue using the old version. After all, it seems MS is already killing extensions like ActiveX in IE 10 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh920753(v=vs.85).aspx).

Smart move. Now they just need to upgrade to WebKit.

- Hans


On 2013-02-14, at 3:26 AM, Salakhetdinov Shamil <mcp2004 at mail.ru> wrote:

> Hi Hans --
> 
> <<<
> This is interesting. Could you possibly provide a few examples of where it is used in a manner that is important in some way?
>>>> 
> To Automate web applications testing:  http://watin.org/documentation/  ( http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXeloE2gh )
> 
> To Automate repetitive tasks when web browsing is a part of a larger desktop application, e.g.
> 
> " Efficient data entry through browser automation"
> 
> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/338036/BrowserAutomationCrawler
> 
> " Microsoft Web Browser Automation using C#"
> 
> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5452/Microsoft-Web-Browser-Automation-using-C
> 
> The above is just a generic example - for that case Google API can be used of course but there could be many other cases when there is no any web API and (as I noted above) web browsing functionality is a part of a larger desktop application.
> 
> In the past (no web services/no web APIs) Microsoft Web Browser Automation was used in (VB6/VBA) apps for web crawling/scraping....
> 
> To see more examples browse:  http://www.codeproject.com/search.aspx?q=web+browser+automation&x=0&y=0&sbo=kw&pgnum=5
> 
> or google by "microsoft web browser automation".
> 
> -- Shamil
> 
> P.S. I guess Microsoft Web Browser Automation is also used in Selenium ( http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/index.jsp ) for IE testing automation...
> 
> Четверг, 14 февраля 2013, 1:36 -08:00 от Hans-Christian Andersen <hans.andersen at phulse.com>:
>> 
>>> AFAIK Web Browser Automation is widely used.
>> 
>> This is interesting. Could you possibly provide a few examples of where it is used in a manner that is important in some way?
>> 
>> - Hans
>> 
>> 
>> On 2013-02-14, at 1:32 AM, Salakhetdinov Shamil < mcp2004 at mail.ru > wrote:
>> 
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