Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Sat Dec 15 14:16:01 CST 2012
Microsoft and all other browser builders have had to content with the incredible speed of advances in the internet especially when it comes to browser presentation and client programming. Many browser developers have tried to avoid client browser issues by doing all/most the computing on their servers and then pushing the results to the client. This may work temporarily but performance is going to be seriously hampers both for the client, who has to wait while a page is being remotely rendered and downloaded and for the BE data supplier who has to add more hardware and bandwidth just to support the clients. I have been complaining about this for a long while. Both Apple(Safari) and Google(Chrome) have taken a progressive approach by simply not worrying about trying to keep up with the ongoing trends and have just focused on building super fast browser layout engines, KHTML and V8 respectively and have been funding an OSS third party application for the latest and greatest HTML5, CSS3 and beyond. The company is called WebKit. (Note: the OSS KDE first created KHTML, Apple adopted it (swiped it), but then the product's designers forked, refocused and it became Webkit.) http://www.webkit.org/ Webkit is so fast because, even though it is developed in JavaScript, it compiles its' JavaScript into native machine code. If MS was willing to accept the new order mashup and embrace it, IE11 could be a leading browser contender with minimum effort and minimum costs. Aside: I do know there is a big pride thing in the way but going it alone is not the answer and having a proprietary developers browser does not make business sense on any level. Jim