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by agentultra 4567 days ago
It works really well and I'm glad to see more of this happening. Being able to share games over the web that run at near-native performance levels without plugins has a lot of potential both for end-users and creators. Really cool stuff.
1 comments

I just hope that it helps drive growth away from Internet Exploder ...
Unfortunately the "enterprise" seem set on it. Yesterday I was working with a new content management platform and I had to downgrade my Internet Explorer to 9 because it only works with IE 7,8 and 9. Then that still didn't work because of some MSXML problem I couldn't fix and I ended up having to use a VM with XP installed and IE 8.

Un-be-lievable. I don't know who these Enterprisey IT managers are who are making these decisions but they seem to have a lot of power which they are using irresponsibly. And they seem to love IE.

I thought things had gotten better.

A decade ago the large company I worked for switched to a web based timecard system. The only problem, ie only and the software team of 50+ all were using hpux or solaris workstations. No ie. Oh and they wanted timecards done daily.

The solution?

Set up 2 terminals in the lab with a unix backend and a windows NT virtual environment so we can use IE to do timecards.

How complicated can/should a timecard system be? Surely one of those 50+ software engineers could have rewritten a portable version in a few days and saved you a lot of bother.
Is that really a bad thing? You have a known working VM image to access one particular system. It will never stop working. At worst we'll just run an x86 emulator on our 10GHz 60-core ARM-based phones.
We go through a lot of the same crud. The latest is they cannot push out IE 10 / 11 to everyone because it would require server upgrades (which is true, but very lame). :/
No. Given that IE previews support WebGL and typed arrays, asm.js should run just fine on them. This is entirely the point of asm.js!
It gives a fraction of the performance that Firefox gives you.

quick google, this guy[0] got

IE10 = 11900,

chrome = 22500,

firefox = 40000

[0]http://www.beyondjava.net/blog/google-adds-asm-js-test-octan...

If IE is giving you half the performance of the nearest, free, easily downloaded competitor in your favourite online game, you might be tempted to switch. And this is for the few users that are on IE10!

"Runs best in Mozilla Firefox" ;)
Two years ago when the tables were turned and Google announced Dart, which has the same compatibility strategy as asm.js (fastest with explicit support, falls back to regular JS), Brendan Eich had these harsh words for Google's move (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982949):

    So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome"
    are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. We see
    more of this fragmentation every day. As a user of Chrome
    and Firefox (and Safari), I find it painful to experience,
    never mind the political bad taste.
But now "runs best in Mozilla Firefox" is cool?

I actually like asm.js and think it's a totally reasonable approach. I mention this only to highlight that maybe all of the bad-faith assumptions Google gets are not entirely deserved. Objectively these two are similar moves and I think they are both in good faith.

Obviously I'm not Brendan or Chris Peterson, but I see there being two meanings of "works best in Firefox/Chrome": one of which is "Chrome/Firefox has a faster implementation of the standards" (which is what all browsers strive for—for the Web to "work best" in their browser), and the other of which is "Firefox/Chrome has a faster nonstandard implementation of X and there is a worse, standards-based fallback for browsers that don't support this vendor-specific extension", which is what I read Brendan's frustration as relevant to.
People are downvoting all my comments on this story, which are saying "I think Google and Mozilla are both acting in good faith to move the web forward."

Stay classy, Mozilla fans. I'm trying to be one of you but you're not making it easy.