Reliable Systems

Hi. My name is Kendall Miller, and I’ve been an Internet Explorer user for 12 years.

I know it’s very uncool to admit – IE is only available on Windows, isn’t the most standards compliant, it has a bad reputation for security and there aren’t 1000 cool addins for it. And oh yeah, it’s from Microsoft – aren’t they evil?

But here’s the thing: From day one, it was the practical choice. Not because it was distributed with Windows, but because it worked. Worked as in it was easy to keep upgraded (thank Windows Update for that) it could do anything we needed it to (and yes, that used ActiveX) and it supported integrated authentication – so users could just point their web browser at our company sites and not get any login prompts, just get access to all the resources they needed.

Not only that, but IE was really forgiving. The thing that many people miss is that at the end of the day it isn’t about being standards compliant per se, it’s about the web browser just working. Put another way, while you want to develop using something really strict, when it comes time to hand it over to your users do what I meant, not what I said is best. Frankly, I was amazed at how tolerant IE was of HTML errors. In the end, do you think that users would say Thank you for not doing what I meant because it would have meant breaking the rule that you can’t wrap a div with an href? Most users I know would just rather it displayed the page.

Is the pace of IE development slower than Firefox or other browsers? Well, yes – but again, so what: businesses really don’t like change, change costs money. Change means retesting applications, and for what? It has to give them something to justify that cost. It isn’t like IE won’t remain a viable tool for browsing the Internet for some time. Remember, these are the same companies that are still (justifiably) writing applications in VB6, an environment that its creator has been trying hard to kill for 8 years.

So it makes a lot of sense that when it came to IE 8, Microsoft focused on what IE users really wanted. It isn’t standards compliance for its own sake, it was:

1. Make it as fast as possible for how people browse the web today.
2. Fix as many of the quirks in standards interpretation as feasible that make it easy to develop good sites for IE.
3. Do what you can to make it hard to have a rash of new security problems.
4. Don’t break any site that works today.

If you want a good feel for just how hard this problem is, Joel Spolsky did a great (but long) writeup.

So I’m writing this in IE 8 – and it is just what Microsoft promised, it hits all of the points above and is certainly a solid improvement over IE 7. Microsoft made a great call in focusing not on Javascript performance but looking at the totality of what affects the apparent browsing performance for users and addressing that. It feels nice and fast, and I haven’t encountered anything that’s broken.

But it’s no longer my default browser. While I’ve been trying to love it, I just can’t get there. I switched over to Chrome when it went into release and haven’t looked back. On the surface of it, this is a bit crazy:

• Many sites don’t work quite right with Chrome. I’ve gotten halfway through a shopping cart with Chrome and had the buttons not work to go next. Things don’t align right… Virtually every web app we use at eSymmetrix had to be patched to work with Chrome. Even WordPress seems to work better with IE than Chrome in some ways.
• Google is getting evil. They’re doing things Microsoft never could get away with. For example, every Google thing installs its own Google Updater service. It doesn’t ask if it can, I can’t find any way to get rid of them through uninstall.. they’re just there. I have no idea if they’ve ever updated Chrome because they’ve never asked. You can be sure that if Microsoft this they’d be in court faster than you can say Slashdot.
• It’s not really stable. About every other day I get the admittedly cute Aw Snap! page where Chrome just isn’t quite happy.

But it doesn’t matter, I still dramatically prefer it to the other three browsers on my computer. Why?

• It’s fast.
• I love the automatic 9 recent site dashboard with preview. I love how it handles browsing history.
• The document inspector is great for web development, so I use it all the time when developing web pages and style sheets.
• It’s the future.

It’s the last point that’s really got my interest. It’s the future. Why? Because while it really doesn’t matter right now, the approach Chrome uses for Javascript is going to rewrite the face of the web.

That’s just Crazy Talk

Right now Chrome has around 1.5% of the total browser market share. That’s nothing – about what Opera and Netscape have put together, much less than Safari at 8%. On the other hand, IE 6 and IE 7 each have the market share of all the rest put together (more or less). So statistically, Chrome is completely irrelevant – and it’s had a lot of time to get to that point in market share. IE 8 cot to that point of market share pretty much as soon as it was released.

So what justifies it being the future? Because the V8 Javascript compiler is a game changer. Not on its own, it’s a piece of the puzzle. Four things have to come together:

1. Universal high bandwidth: Enough to move say 3mb in 5 seconds reliably.
2. A compiler that converts Javascript into machine code within 50% of the performance of compiled Java or .NET.
3. A standard Javascript library that can function as a GUI Toolkit on par with .NET WinForms or Cocoa.
4. A visual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that can bring it all together with a good debugger for browser and server.

We already have the first one. It takes about 6 mbps throughput – cable modem speed – to move 3MB of data in 5 seconds. Chrome brings in the second one (and actually bests that by some margin). Now we need the third and fourth.

Up until now the third item has been held back by the general problem that Javascript was slow enough that the overhead of having a common API (full of things you didn’t need for any single situation) was infeasible. Writing something broadly reusable is about an order of magnitude harder than writing it to handle a specific scenario, and ends up doing a number of things you don’t need to do because someone might need it. That overhead isn’t acceptable with the historical performance of Javascript, but if it’s compiled down to native code then it becomes a small, inconsequential optimization.

So now that there’s an environment that can run it, we need a general UI toolkit and the IDE to develop with so we’re putting our time and attention into creating features for our users, not how to make a menu that dynamically expands and highlights. The IDE needs to provide an end user experience like developing for WinForms or WPF in Visual Studio – clean, easy, visual, without surprises.

Microsoft was right – today it isn’t about Javascript performance. But if we’re lucky, tomorrow will be – and we’ll be able to develop much better, stronger applications for the web without resorting to Flash, Silverlight, or very expensive development and testing cycles.