Firefox is ahead in some ways, too burneded by BS like a plugin ecosystem (focus on browsing damnit) and non-native UI skins, on the other.
Plugin systems are key to a good browsing experience; Chrome includes almost entirely the same feature set, so your argument is void; and, overall, there's no evidence that Firefox is particularly burdened by anything.
IE is catching up but limping.
IE caught up already, and I don't see any evidence that it's "limping"
Webkit is not updating that fast anymore.
Well, there are fewer contributors now. But it's kind of hard to draw any conclusions about how fast it's updating given how little time has passed since Blink forked.
Anybody holding their breaths for full ES6 support?
Yep, we're making good progress, and Firefox 29/Chrome 33 are doing better than ever. Still work to be done, but the ES6 spec isn't even finished yet, so that's to be expected.
In other words, chill out. Everything's looking pretty good, there are loads of excellent browsers available, and they're mostly getting better. It's not perfect, but what platform is?
> IE is catching up but limping.
IE caught up already, and I don't see any evidence that it's limping.
I actually kind of agree, and I'm surprising myself in saying that. Just from a consumers perspective, I found at least one place where IE offers something that I directly wanted to do that couldn't be done on any other browser.
I wanted to watch a HD Netflix on my laptop, but the Silverlight client had no hardware acceleration so it played terribly. Turns out, there is a hardware accelerated HTML5 version of Netflix that's only usable using IE since only IE has the necessary DRM.
I was quite surprised. Ignoring the potential ethical quagmire here, I thought it was interesting that there was something where IE gave me a better experience.
I wanted to watch a HD Netflix on my laptop, but the Silverlight client had no hardware acceleration so it played terribly. Turns out, there is a hardware accelerated HTML5 version of Netflix that's only usable using IE since only IE has the necessary DRM.
I was quite surprised. Ignoring the potential ethical quagmire here
Let's not. DRM on the open web is bad.
DRM on the open web is an open specification for how to close the open web.
If Netflix had decided to use a standard mechanism to deliver video, instead of relying on closed, proprietary DRM-plugins, everyone would be able to provide this good user-experience.
Not saying MSIE hasn't improved, but enabling DRM on the web is not in any way improving anything.
It's bad. All bad. Bad for the present, bad for the future. It needs to die.
Not quite - it's used on (some) Chromebooks, as in the HTML5 version of Netflix only runs on locked down hardware from Google partners. Unlock the hardware so you can run your own software on the Chromebook and the media decryption module refuses to decrypt anything.
The various content providers seem to have used the advent of HTML5 to insist on stricter DRM requirements, ones that can only be met through control over the entire hardware and software stack. I presume Microsoft's version uses the long-standing GPU support for hardware decryption and acceleration of DRMed video instead of whatever ChromeOS does. Apparently unlike the Google version it's possible for other browsers to freely support HTML5 EME that's compatible with Microsoft's DRM, but naturally only on Windows: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/dn46673...
>"competing engines would be good for the web"?
They will.
Citation needed. Because, to support my argument, we just saw a "competing engine" starting to divert from the others. And not only in this case -- just the other day the Google team announced they'd drop CSS Regions too.
Would it be as easy for Google to do so, if they were still sharing Webkit code with all the other Webkit partners?
>IE caught up already, and I don't see any evidence that it's "limping
Well, we still have to support IE10 (some also IE9). Everytime, every version gives something new, but holds something back that the latest other browser engines already have. E.g IE9 and WebGL.
>Webkit is not updating that fast anymore.
Well, there are fewer contributors now. But it's kind of hard to draw any conclusions about how fast it's updating given how little time has passed since Blink forked.
Nope, also before. Google had published commit stats in the time of the fork, and Apple had considerably slowed down commits for couple of years or so before that.
This is misdirection. The allegation is that Google is using it's market power to subvert the standards process and subvert the open web it once championed now that it is powerful enough to do so.
"competing engines would be good for the web"?
They will.
Firefox is ahead in some ways, too burneded by BS like a plugin ecosystem (focus on browsing damnit) and non-native UI skins, on the other.
Plugin systems are key to a good browsing experience; Chrome includes almost entirely the same feature set, so your argument is void; and, overall, there's no evidence that Firefox is particularly burdened by anything.
IE is catching up but limping.
IE caught up already, and I don't see any evidence that it's "limping"
Webkit is not updating that fast anymore.
Well, there are fewer contributors now. But it's kind of hard to draw any conclusions about how fast it's updating given how little time has passed since Blink forked.
Anybody holding their breaths for full ES6 support?
Yep, we're making good progress, and Firefox 29/Chrome 33 are doing better than ever. Still work to be done, but the ES6 spec isn't even finished yet, so that's to be expected.
In other words, chill out. Everything's looking pretty good, there are loads of excellent browsers available, and they're mostly getting better. It's not perfect, but what platform is?