Microsoft

Browser Wars – Rich Internet Applications and Consumers Benefit – Internet Explorer 10.0 Preview 2

Posted on by Louis Maresca

Level: Geek 2 {all readers with some techie facts}

One of the most profound social reactions in the world is the concept of “competition.”  Not only does it effect people, markets, and products, but also helps the world to evolve, especially in the world of technology and software.

Where there is competition, there is evolution. The need to supersede the competitor!

In the world of ‘The Internet’, and what technologists are calling Web 2.5, Web Browsers (The thing you use to surf the web) have been fighting it out to be the ‘next’ choice of consumers to run the next-generation web-based applications. Whether it is on their desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, browsers are quickly becoming the target for development of new cross-device, cross platform, applications that will make it easier for competitors to follow the old “Build it once” paradigm.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9.0 in March 2011 to competitively place themselves in the market as a next-gen web browser. Some of the major features to IE9.0 were the fact that the rendering of the html page (producing content on the page) was hardware accelerated and the Javascript engine was as well. (For geeks: IE9 compiles JavaScipt down to native code and handled by the hardware) IE9 also added quite a bit of support for the new HTML5 standards. Microsoft was quite judicious and conservative with what components of the HTML5 standard they added support for in IE9. I suspect that this is because there is still quite a bit of battling for portions of the standard which are not yet complete. Some of the components of the standard are still in planning phases.

Internet Explorer 10.0 Preview 2.0 has become the next evolution for Microsoft’s browser. Not only do they support quite a bit more of the HTML5 standards, they are also offering increased performance on the existing support.

IE9 vs IE10pv2

IE9 vs IE10pv2

One standard I was hoping they would add was around “Workers”. Web Workers are a standard that are compared to the desktop application concept of threads. Web Workers was added to the IE10 Preview 2. (IE still doesn’t support ‘shared workers’ like Chrome 13 Beta)

Another huge jump was in the User Interaction portion of the HTML5 standard support. Drag and drop Attributes and Event support was added which equals out the support to Google Chrome’s 13 beta. This will help with making it easier for touch devices to move things around the screen. I am looking forward to playing with this feature on multiple browsers.

In the subject of parsing, HTML 5 tokenizers, tree building, MathML in text/html had support added. In html Elements, IE still does’nt support the global “hidden” attribute. I suspect it has to do with how the rendering engine handles hidden objects.

In web Forms there has been a substantial jump in compatibility: Several Input Types added like search, tel, url, email, checkbox, image (even over Chrome 13 beta), datalist (over Chrome 13 beta), Field Validation, Association of controls and forms, CSS Selectors.

There was actually a downgrade from Internet Explorer 9.0 (IE9) to IE10.0 Preview 2. It lost the Web Applications capability of using custom search providers. This could be a mistake! Hopefully the team will catch this before the major release.

In the same section, Web Apps, still have no support for Application Cache, scheme handlers or content handlers, unlike Chrome’s beta.

Security was added to Iframe around sandboxing iframes bringing it neck-in-neck with the Chrome beta.

File interaction was added around FileReader API’s. My guess is FileWriter APIs are close behind it in the final release of 10.0. Chrome 13 beta doesn’t have FileWriter support yet as well. It

Chrome13Beta-vs-IE10Pv2

Chrome13Beta vs IE10Pv2

seems theW3C HTML5 standard for this is not yet locked down.

With talk about Windows 8, Browser Applications on IOS and OSX, and Android adding more support for HTML5 standards on the OS, Internet Explorer 10.0 is shaping up to be a true competitor in the market.

The idea behind competitor browsers adding more support for HTML5 and performance increases should not be about which company is better, it is all about making it easier for consumers to build applications that work everywhere across all platforms. (Offline and Online) Competition is driving this mandate and the evolution of these products, but the consumers and developers are the ones that benefit.

Competition will continue to be the driving force behind the need to evolve, and the actual evolution will help benefit the world with how we are socially connected and productive.

Until next time…

Software: Gripe about Skype

Posted on by Louis Maresca

Level: Geek 0 {all readers, little to no techie speak}

In today’s world of social networking and in-your-face type telecommunications, Skype™ has become a staple in many households. What also has become a staple is an everyday ‘Gripe about Skype.’ (I just had to reuse my snappy title somewhere.)  Trust me, I feel your pain. This entire post is going to be ‘me’ picking-a-bone with Skype™.

Skype™, oh my dear Skype™, why must you crash-on-thee?!

Skype Version 1.0
Skype Version 1.0

Let me begin by giving a very quick and condensed, historical, overview of the cool voice-over-ip application we call Skype™. Skype™ was developed as a side project years before its initial release in 2003. Developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn, also the creators of the peer-to-peer application, we all grew to know and love, Kazaa (remember those days of free movies and song at the click of a button?). They created their “Sky peer-to-peer” application in their spare time. If finally became “Skype™”, as we know it today, before their initial release in 2003. The unique thing about Skype is that is not a traditional Client (user’s

Skype Version 2.0
Skype Version 2.0

machine) to Server type application like AOL Instant Messenger, messenger clones, and some of the other VOIP services. It uses Peer-to-Peer methods of moving a lot of the processing and crunching of data to your, and others, machines. Why not, right?! Easy start-up costs for a business, because they don’t have to buy large processing server farms to deploy their app, plus it makes for a more direct, and more secure, communication style. The concept of “using the power of the masses, or the many” is not a new concept in the world of computing.Even so, the first versions of Skype™ were written in an old-school programming language called Pascal. Years later it moved to many of the other modern languages of our day. Version 2.0 was revolutionary for the application. Not only did it have a good app design, but also added Video calling!

My first question to the masses is, “What happened to Skype™?” It used to be a clean and stable program that you could trust for your free global communications!

For me, this question was first asked with versions 3.8 to 4.0 of Skype™. This is when it débuted brand new versions for Windows and Mac introducing new video compression algorithms and other enhancements.The user interface however was a step-up for me.The new user interface was clean, concise, to the point and without nasty ads and pop-ups.

Could Skype be a victim of a hostile takeover from a large software company that feels the need to change everything in order to give it more appeal? I think so! (e.g. eBay purchasing it in 2005, to a consortium of Index Ventures and Silver Lake Partners years later) I have seen it before! The old ‘Big business buys small business, after gaining a loyal and happy customer/user base, and tries to “bring it to the masses.”’  That’s business, right?! WRONG! What is wrong with keeping the “Original version of Skype” and creating “New Enhanced versions of Skype?” I betcha-bottom-dollar that people would use “The Original” more than the “Enhanced” version! People want simple and clean, where all the complexity is abstracted away from them. Google+, a new social networking system, like Facebook, constructed their interface design to be very clean and straight to the point with the center of navigation being search. People want fast, easy, and without clutter and enhancements.

This brings us to Version 5.5 now in Beta. Not only does it have problems connecting to the previous version of Skype™ but it also gets itself into an infinite loop of redialing your fellow patrons. You have to kill the process to get it to stop. It’s a lot of “fun” I will tell you that! Version 5.0, just released, has changed the user interface (UI) for the worse. People are lost and don’t know where to click. Ad’s, pop-ups, and dialog windows show-up where they didn’t before. It is an all-around thumbs down on the upgrade.

Over my many years of developing software and running businesses I have learned several things about products and how customers perceive your products. During that time, one of the software products I worked on had many years behind it already. When I started on it the team wanted to breathe new life into it, but didn’t want to lose any functionality or its robustness. The first step they took was not only the right one, but it also helped me to gain amazing respect for the architects of the engineering plan. They decided to walk through the entire code base and reorganize into base/required platform code and separate added features. The features became the second-hand citizens. It was the same code, just organized differently. This allowed them to test the base platform and ensure its stability, and it also allowed them to add features to it without causing issues with the base functionality. I am going to take a wild guess and say Skype™ didn’t do this with their new versions.

Someday software companies will learn the staples of product. A good stable base makes for easy innovation and simple, clean, and fast user interfaces makes for happy customers. Let’s hope they learn before it is too late.

Will Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype bring it back to its roots, or will it find itself shoved into their version of a horrible voip instant messenger Lync (Communicator) in order to “Bring it to the masses”? I bet you can guess!

Until next time!