Realdodo: Where is the future of IE?

The upcoming release of IE8 is no longer news. Many critics and developers who hate Internet Explorer have a crush on IE, which is not news.

The most significant change in IE8 is its full support for CSS 2.1. IE8 introduced the compatibility model, a complex new feature, to be compatible with non-standard Web pages. in the outside world, IE8's painful choice in terms of standard support and compatibility is simply to put a stone on its own feet-I know now, why.

I once asked the ie pm responsible for CSS 2.1 Standard Support. Why do I start to do standard support now, but I didn't do it before? Why do I choose CSS instead of DOM. he also felt powerless. After all, no matter what new standards are supported, it is a major operation for IE. IE is an architecture determined before standards are generated. It is not easy to support so many standards that such powerful functions can be achieved. for example, with support for CSS 2.1, IE has rewritten a lot of core code and spent a lot of time ensuring correctness, performance, and compatibility, which is not enough. in comparison, it is easier to develop WebSlice and Accelerator.

IE is a bit like NetScape. who can think of it? When IE 5 beat NetScape in all aspects, IE is the world's most standard browser. It fully supports HTML 4 and CSS 1, and it is very small, it is an order of magnitude smaller than NetScape. the victory of IE is definitely not only because it is bound to Windows, but because it is much better than NetScape. netScape dragged on a heavy burden of history, and did not dare to make too many changes in every upgrade, for fear of problems with those websites that use their own unique features. As for standards, of course, they are left behind. this is like IE.

After several years, Firefox was born from the wreckage of NetScape. Firefox became IE and IE became NetScape. when Firefox is able to easily and quickly develop new versions, IE should also consider compatibility with antique browsers such as IE6. when Firefox updates the browser version forcibly by means of automatic updates without authorization, IE also needs to fix the IE6 bug and release IT tools to prevent many companies from upgrading the IE version. alas, I am so tired of developing IE.

There are many people who hope that Firefox will one day defeat IE and free the Web Front-end developers who are currently in the "hot water. however, I think this is definitely not the trend of the future. Firefox or the Mozilla Foundation will never do this. the alliance in the browser world is not so good. Standing on the cusp of the storm, not only can't make money, but also need to make efforts to compensate for the reputation, the loss is not worth the candle.

Taking browser vulnerability fixing as an example, IE7 under Vista is already very secure, which is countless times better than Firefox, basically immune to buffer overflow and DEP, however, we still feel that Firefox is safer, and the root cause is public opinion-oriented. IE has built a solid city. If it can still be broken, it will naturally feel a sense of accomplishment for attackers. at the same time, news always focuses on the security of IE. After all, most computers around the world are in danger, which is definitely big news. once and for all, the reputation of IE is also established. as for how secure Firefox is, that is not necessarily true. is the Firefox plug-in made with XPCOM really safer than ActiveX? Actually, technically speaking, there is no technical problem with the Firefox version of rogue plug-ins.

According to the information I got from my chat with IE PM, the most important fields of IE are enterprise-level applications and RIA. these two aspects happen to be the weakest part of Firefox. in this field, the real opponent of IE is Google Chrome, so the next version of IE will take a lot of actions against Google Chrome's features. maybe we have to go through three more versions before IE can be replaced, but at that time, other competitors did not know how much it was. for IE, it is time to learn about Firefox and come to Phoenix Nirvana. I guess there will be major changes in five years. I will wait and see.

1. Silverlight provides a browser-free experience
2. PCWorld: Firefox browser declared dead