<Glazblog/>

Et selon moi, Microsoft se fout de la gueule de ses clients européens à un point que même Apple est écrasé en la matière :

• Microsoft Web Expression 2, sur le Microsoft Store USA : $299,95
• Microsoft Web Expression 2, chez Amazon.com : $199,99
• Microsoft Web Expression 2, sur le Microsoft Store France : 419 EUROS !!!, soit au taux du jour $530 !!!

A few weeks ago, I said on this blog that Microsoft should/could be more disruptive in the browser's world. During the W3C Technical Plenary Meeting in the south of France a couple of weeks ago, I said what I had in mind : dropping the implementation of a proprietary rendering engine and moving to an open-source engine like Gecko or WebKit. It was greeted with smiles. You know, the kind of smiles that mean "tssss, yet another glazmanism...". Not everyone smiled though.

Steve Ballmer was recently in Sydney, Australia and a student asked him a "cheeky" question:

"Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?"

Steve Ballmer's answer:

"Open source is interesting, Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

Guess who's smiling now ?...

Seen yesterday evening just in front of the Film Festival Palace in Cannes (photo by Chris Wilson):

After careful study of IE8's behaviour, I have discovered the Webslices "specification" available here is... well... underspecified. Reminds me of the gooood ol'times of the first browser war. Let me give you two simple examples :

1. the "spec" says multiple entry-title elements are allowed. Great. But what's the intended browser behaviour if more than one entry-title is specified ? It appears that the browser is supposed to make a whitespace-separated string with all these entry-titles, but that's said nowhere.
2. far more important, the "spec" lacks information about how the contents of a webslice's popup is created in the case of an in-page webslice (ie not a feed). The spec says:
   • remove everything inside the body element BUT the descendants of the element carrying class hslice that carry themselves class entry-content (and of course the subtree they're the root of)
   • remove all atributes on body
   • preserve stylesheet links and style elements in the head of the document

   But it appears this is not enough... IE8 extracts the CSS styles applied to the hslice element and apply them to the webslice popup's body element... Two possibilities : a) it serializes all computed values that differ from the initial value. b) it climbs up the cascade to find all style rules - including inline - applying to the hslice element and tweak them to make them apply to body.

Item number 2 is not a neglectable issue since it makes IE8's behaviour hard to understand to web authors. From a product point of view, I just don't understand Microsoft here, but you could say it's not the first time, eh ? When you introduce such a new feature in a browser, that's to trigger massive market adoption. Underspecifying the feature to the point web site authors cannot predict the final rendering of their data seems to me, sorry to say, crazy.

I have the gut feeling that what does IE8 here is wrong because it does not help the web author. I have mailed Microsoft about it and got a reply from them. I urged them to reconsider their implementation and implement the current "spec", without copying hslice styles to the webslice's body, in next IE8 beta. Stay tuned.

I read carefully the last posts about IE8 new features on the IE blog. And the least I can say is that IE8 copies everything from Firefox... But warning, it smells like Firefox, but it's not Firefox. IE's extensibility is still zilch compared to Mozilla's, its security is still low compared to Mozilla's. Its speed is... well, read last Firefox 3.1 JavaScript announcements... Even on the innovative features, Microsoft is behind Mozilla : they invented the Activities and Webslices metaphors but almost nobody uses them ; in the same domain, Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity became in just one day the #1 keyword on twitter ! On CSS, WebKit is making giant progress on innovative stuff while Mozilla moves at the speed of light on already standardized features. Same thing for HTML 5 and other specs-to-be.

I guess BenB has an excellent summary about IE8:

<mconnor> is there anything IE8 didn't add?
<BenB> mconnor: about:mozilla ?

Désespérant...

According to the IE blog, if you run XP and IE8beta1 and want to install XP SP3, you'd better revert to IE7 before and reinstall IE8b1 afterwards, but wait the same article says if you run XP and IE7 you'd better revert to IE6 before and reinstally IE7 afterwards... Very nice...

Je voudrais revenir deux secondes sur le dernier billet de l'ami au tutu rose... Je crois surtout que Vista est un produit raté parce que des gens comme moi, énormes utilisateurs de bécanes, ont pesté pendant des années contres les successives versions de Windows avant d'arriver un jour à dire "non, vraiment, il y a eu d'énormes progrès avec Windows XP, le système ne plante presque plus jamais, c'est plus stable et plus rapide". Certes, Windows reste Windows. C'est-à-dire un OS dont l'interface utilisateur n'a pas de consistance, est parfois franchement pénible, dont les bugs sont corrigés lentement voire pas du tout, j'en passe et des meilleures. Mais l'adoption par l'industrie de XP, même pour les jeux, a bien montré que Microsoft avait fait un TRES grand pas avec XP.

Donc entendre des gens comme moi, toujours à l'affût du mieux et du plus moderne, dire "berk, je reviens à XP", c'est un échec monumental en terme de marque. Je ne parle même pas de la réplique entendue de la bouche d'un gamin de quatorze ans récemment : "je ne comprends pas, ma machine est une vraie bombe, avec un processeur rapide, plein de mémoire et une carte graphique qui arrache. Sous XP, ça déchire. Sous Vista, ça rame et ma carte graphique merde une fois sur deux"... Tout est dit je crois. En terme de stratégie technologie, les retards et erreurs de Vista ont fortement mis à mal la structure interne de Microsoft. Des projets entiers ont été mis en hibernation pour que les équipes techniques viennent aider Vista à sortir de l'impasse. Des montagnes de pognon ont été nécessaires pour sortir finalement ce que le monde entier considère comme un échec patent.

N'oublions jamais que Microsoft, c'est aussi la boîte qui un matin a décidé de radicalement changer l'interface d'Office et d'Internet Explorer, au point que les utilisateurs étaient perdus. Au point que des tutoriaux de réinstallation de l'ancienne UI sont disponibles tellement les usagers de Word perdaient du temps à trouver leur chemin dans l'application. Au point que la barre de menus perdue dans IE7 est de retour dans IE8.

Vista est un produit raté essentiellement parce que le pire ennemi de Microsoft, c'est Microsoft.

Apparently, it's not that easy to add webslices to eBay

Update: that's why some testers of my extensions experienced white popups when they clicked on a toolbar entry. Not my fault, blame eBay, the server does not even answer an error code.