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Updated GNU Framework Tries To Push "Free JavaScript"

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  • #21
    Originally posted by AJenbo View Post
    Sounds very much like what I am working width in the wild.

    IE10 is available for Vista so in theory we could axe IE9- as soon as XP dies in april. In reality tough I still see about 1,5% of the visitors using IE8 on Win7 (the one it shipped with).
    Yeah, there's probably 30% of our user-base which is still using IE8 (mostly on XP), and I'm really, really hoping that the EOL of XP also causes most of them to jump to Win7 with SP1 and an updated IE. I know it's probably wishful thinking, but every engineer we've got here is ready to head to the pub the moment that we officially decide to retire IE8 support (and the first round is on me).

    I honestly don't mind supporting IE10+, and IE9 is acceptable. The compatibility and JS performance of IE8, however, is only decent if you compare it to IE7... it's like asking someone if they'd rather catch the bubonic plague or a flesh-eating virus... bad either way.

    I could see some IT departments in the industry limiting upgrades from XP to running Windows 7 with IE8 to reduce the number of moving parts in their acceptance testing, but I do reserve the right to shake my head at them and look disapproving. Especially the shops that mandate that users MUST run IE, and that no other browsers are allowed to be installed.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by Veerappan View Post
      Yeah, there's probably 30% of our user-base which is still using IE8 (mostly on XP), and I'm really, really hoping that the EOL of XP also causes most of them to jump to Win7 with SP1 and an updated IE. I know it's probably wishful thinking, but every engineer we've got here is ready to head to the pub the moment that we officially decide to retire IE8 support (and the first round is on me).
      Locally I'm only deeling with 3.5% (55% of that is XP). I'm totally with you on the celebration

      Originally posted by Veerappan View Post
      I honestly don't mind supporting IE10+, and IE9 is acceptable.
      I think the only thing i really do to support IE9 is load PIE.htc to render gradients, so yeah it's very tolerable.

      I could see some IT departments in the industry limiting upgrades from XP to running Windows 7 with IE8 to reduce the number of moving parts in their acceptance testing, but I do reserve the right to shake my head at them and look disapproving. Especially the shops that mandate that users MUST run IE, and that no other browsers are allowed to be installed.[/QUOTE]

      I know of a company that enforces Chrome as the browser internally because it saves them a lot on development costs, so there are some good guys out there

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      • #23
        Originally posted by AJenbo View Post
        I know of a company that enforces Chrome as the browser internally because it saves them a lot on development costs, so there are some good guys out there
        Bless them... I wish I was in the same boat. I'm mostly interacting with healthcare and academic treatment research IT crowds, and they're not really known for jumping on new technology quickly.

        Some of our customers do stay on top of new browsers and versions, but some of the customers have corporate/university policies that mandate a single-browser policy which centers on IE for windows.

        But either way, there's no way I'll ever use this ease.js library. Sorry, but I'm not about to allow the GPL to force my entire company's code into the open (and me out of a job). We use plenty of JS and Java libraries all over the place, but none of it is GPL for that reason. That being said, we contribute bug reports and patches back upstream anytime we find issues and functionality gaps in the 3rd party libraries that we do use. The improvements DO NOT disappear into a corporate black hole. We just make a point of using Apache/MIT/BSD licensed stuff instead of GPL.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by curaga View Post
          Perhaps I'm not thinking Free enough, but to me JS has bigger problems than non-free code: bloated libraries and clueless JS devs.
          Site needs one small function, that transplanted would take 200 bytes, yet they include several megabytes of JS libs.
          Site overuses JS, making it extremely laggy.
          The quality of those frameworks in general is questionable: jquery for example drops browser support way too soon.
          Well, free would actually help in this case.
          Currently, you just have to put up with whatever the clueless JS dev decided to throw at you.
          You don't have much legal option, and very often, you don't have any practical options neither (as mentionned in RMS' rant about JavaScript, is that very ofter, what you get is not the original Javascript source code(*), but "minifed/obfuscated" scripts, with all comments and whitespace stripped out, and with all method and variables 1 single letter long.
          (For the obvious purpose of saving server bandwidth, and the underhanded purpose of making it harder to reverse engineer the code).

          In a "perfect freesoftware world", you should be provided with all the necessary tools to be able to change this: both legal rights (through a copyleft license like LGPL, GPL, etc.) and technical possibility by getting the actual source code. Then you (or actually someone else) could provide a fix.
          And either overload a fix while browsing, or even submitting a patch with a nice detailed explanation to the clueless JS dev, making that one a bit less clueless.

          Originally posted by toyotabedzrock View Post
          The old Opera actually had userscript commands that would allow you to intercept any script and replace it.
          And so do several FireFox extensions.
          A nice exemple is NoScript, which is used to only allow whitelisted JS to run. But some broken websites are so broken that even the NON-JS part won't correctly show because of some NON-critical JS part (that JS part, doesn't directly show the content, but some weird race condition arise, and the content doesn't show up, even if you've whitelisted the part which actually handle the display - some of the google statistic are usual offenders). For that the provide "surrogate script": NoScript blocsk the non-whitelisted javascript, and instead provide a own light-weight re-implementation, just barely enough to get broken websites running.

          Userscripts also exist on Firefox (and indeed, sometime ago, there where quite a few popular which injected custom code into Facebook to make a bit better. Saddly, they can't pick upquickly enough, given that Facebook seems to do complete rewrtie of their interface on an almost-weekly basis).

          So the solutions do exist. We simply aren't currently living in a culture where this is considered usual.
          Mixing and remixing whatever is on the web doesn't seem natural.
          Instead, we're used to have to put up with all the shit that popular website throw at us.


          (*): if that thing even exists. Now, with newer technology like EmScripten and ASM.js, there could actually never have been a Javascript source in the first place. The source could have been C/C++ compiled into ASM.js.

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