The two Program (co-program) Manager for the Microsoft Internet Explorer team recently released a pretty substantial blog posting on some of the compatibility challenges facing modern browsers today. Pairing their posting with the release of Windows Phone 8.1 Update and the subsequent inclusion of IE 11 they mentioned some of deep technical challenges facing most web developers including;
Here are two examples
The first image represents a desktop experience while on the right is the mobile view as expressed by IE 11 on Windows Phone 8.1 Update.
In addition this issue, the IE group indicated that one of the larger browser compatibility issues is touch enabled devices. The new method of using Pointer Events offer significant performance and functional advantages for multi-funtion sites that use mice, pens touch and other pointer inputs. This is compared with the legacy Touch Events which the IE11 team have endeavoured to support as well. Following from these significant challenges, Microsoft has decided not to support all of the web-kit and vendor pre-fixed API’s and looks pretty committed to helping developers migrate their existing web code bases through their community outreach program and collaborating with the Mozilla webcompat.com effort.
Microsoft believes that the Web should just work for everyone, but there still looks like a lot work is required by everyone to achieve that goal.
References:
The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web-should-just-work-for-everyone.aspx
- Faulty browser detection not recognising IE as a mobile browser and giving the desktop experience
- Using only old webkit-prefixed features that have been replaced by standards
- Using proprietary webkit-prefixed features for which there is no standard
- Using features that IE does not support with no graceful fall-back
- Running into interoperability bugs and implementation differences in IE
Here are two examples
In addition this issue, the IE group indicated that one of the larger browser compatibility issues is touch enabled devices. The new method of using Pointer Events offer significant performance and functional advantages for multi-funtion sites that use mice, pens touch and other pointer inputs. This is compared with the legacy Touch Events which the IE11 team have endeavoured to support as well. Following from these significant challenges, Microsoft has decided not to support all of the web-kit and vendor pre-fixed API’s and looks pretty committed to helping developers migrate their existing web code bases through their community outreach program and collaborating with the Mozilla webcompat.com effort.
Microsoft believes that the Web should just work for everyone, but there still looks like a lot work is required by everyone to achieve that goal.
References:
The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web-should-just-work-for-everyone.aspx
