IE8 Both a Step Forward, Backward
Beta 1 of Internet Explorer 8 is out, and everyone is talking about it. Web developers are excited that its new rendering engine passes the Acid 2 test, and how that’s good for the web as a medium, and it would be great if everyone earlier versions would upgrade, etc. But none of them are talking about the new browsers downside: new proprietary features.
“Innovation” Done Wrong
IE8 looks potentially to be the most innovative browser of all time—even moreso than IE4 was for its time. And that might actually be a bad thing.
Web Slices is a potentially interesting idea. It allows users to subscribe to a “slice” of a web page, like a weather page, for example, and view that slice by clicking on that slice’s button on the bookmarks toolbar.
Nevermind that I hate the bookmarks toolbar in the first place. Search “bookmark” on my site and see what I think about it.
Click Here To Download Internet Explorer!!!
What bothers me most about this feature is that you end up displaying something on your website that says: “Hey! We’ve got something nifty for you, but only if you use IE8!”
Most major web innovations in the past few years have been browser-agnostic. They’ve worked for users of all major browsers, right out of the box. I’m not ready to go back to the days of: “This feature requires browser X!”
Open Standards, and the Difference Between Building An Application And A Platform
It’s true that this feature is implemented using open standards. So it might not be impossible for this feature to also be implemented in other browsers. But, unless this feature really, really takes off, I doubt it will be implemented in stock browsers. Users would have to download an extension.
Your web page would have to explain: “You can subscribe to this web slice with IE8! Or with Firefox if you have the FoxySlice extension! Or Safari if you have the SafariSlice tool!” The instructions on how to subscribe to the web slice would take up more screen real estate than the slice itself, and that’s just stupid.
When you boil it down, the problem here is that IE should be a platform. The difference between an application and a platform is that an application is a specific implementation of certain functionality, and a platform is an environment in which a specific implementation can be created.
Web slices is the kind of thing someone other than Microsoft should build, using the same open standards that Microsoft used to build this feature. As a user, if I like that application, I will install it myself, and use it. The web browser itself, however, should do one thing after a default install: display websites.
Learning From History
When IE4 came out, a little over a decade ago, I was thrilled. It offered superior CSS support over Netscape Navigator, and its approach to online channels – a ‘90s web-fad that never caught on – was far more elegant than Netscape Communicator’s implementation. I was so naive.
I’m not sure why CDF never caught on. For those who don’t remember, CDF was, in many ways, identical to what many geeks now know and love as RSS. A website published an XML file, the client parsed it, using it to pre-cache web-based content.
RSS didn’t catch on until CDF had been defunct for several years. If RSS is all the rage now, why didn’t CDF catch on? I’m going to go ahead and guess it’s because it made IE4 an application rather than a platform. In a sense, I feel Microsoft needed to learn from a lesson from history here, and instead, is doomed to repeat it.