If you were one of the early smartphone users and were subjected to Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile, then you're probably also one of Today's smartphone users who appreciate their modern mobile web experience the most. IE mobile is actually a good representation of how Microsoft approached the mobile operating system all wrong. They didn't really change anything, they just took a desktop OS, made it fit on a small screen and expected the devices to ship with a stylus. Mobile IE had scrollbars and the first few versions didn't scale the pages down. Later versions may have done a better job, but I gave up on it somewhere after WM6 started shipping.
Microsoft is now trying to catch up with Windows Phone 7. That's great (really!). The competition is healthy for everyone except the competing companies. I really do hope that WP7 does well and can become a relevant competitor against Apple, RIM and Google. What I hope for even more is that they learned a lesson or two from their previous experience with mobile computing.
Windows Phone 7 will ship with a mobile version of Internet Explorer, as anyone would have guessed. Recent evaluations appear to be failing at getting anyone excited. So competition is good, right? But do we really need another rendering engine? Politics aside, why not adopt WebKit like everyone else? When it comes to browsers, users just want the websites to look and behave exactly how the author intended and have some browser features that enrich the user experience. Please compete on the latter, but stay away from the former. Competing (read: different) rendering engines only make web development painful and inevitably frustrates users when websites break in the particular browser that they are using. Instead, why not build on an existing and popular framework and then contribute to it to make it even better instead of working in silos to reinvent the wheel?
Inconsistent page rendering is not the only thing making me uneasy about the re-emergence of mobile Internet Explorer. Early reports are stating that it will not support HTML5. Instead, Microsoft is working closely with Adobe to try to get the Flash player to run on WP7 devices. The duo is more or less bringing the Flash vs. HTML5 debate to the mobile world. Now, again, competition is good, right? Is it? I would say yes if, as a consumer, you had the choice between the two which is independent of the device that you like. For web developers, the worst part of all of this is that it's like writing JavaScript in 1997 all over again. Do you double your effort to support both platforms, or give up and put a notice on your site stating "This website is best experienced with Netscape Navigator"?
I can't find a single web developer who is happy about having Internet Explorer 6 with us almost a whole decade later and even less that it will be around for a few more years. No one can even guess at the type of economical impact this browser has had over the web industry throughout those years. With all of this baggage, why bring that over to the mobile web?
One issue with adopting WebKit is that this way MS gives away any possibility to add real innovation in the browser space. IE6 is old and broken by todays standards, but for his time was a really good browser. MS didn't innovate almost at all in the browser game lately, but they have the force to do it again...as painful as it is to develop for different rendering engines, there is value in having competition...
ReplyDeleteIE6 did bring in innovation and it obviously wasn't the first time. They just did it the wrong way. It's one thing to pioneer AJAX by introducing XHR, but they should in the least render the page according to standards and maybe pay a little attention to how their browsers score on ACID3 tests. (wikipedia can show how well the main WebKit browsers did). As soon as people started to see the potential behind the XHR call, it didn't take long for other browsers to catch up (if they hadn't already). But for something like page rendering, you won't get the same kind of following. If they need to extend WebKit to implement their super awesome feature, then they can, it's open source. Then they can release that back to the community. That's the kind of collaboration I'd like to see and that was really my point. But as I hinted at in the post, there are obviously the politics...
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