Microsoft Complains That WebKit Breaks Web Standards

Billly Gates writes "In a bizarre, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using WebKit stagnates open standards and innovation on the Web. According to the call to action in its Windows Phone Developer Blog, Microsoft is especially concerned about the mobile market, where many mobile sites only work with Android or iOS with WebKit-specific extensions. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which is being written as -WebKit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market WebKit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliance and not use the proprietary (yet open source) WebKit."

This should come as no surprise

[Arancaytar]

Because if there is one company that really stands up for standards, it's Microsoft.

In fact, sometimes they pay millions to get them through the ISO.

Re:Microsoft is right

[Anonymous Coward]

They are supposed to drop the prefixed features once the features are a standard. Using them before they are a standard, is, as you say, fine (and even expected and by design). The real problem is, as it always is, the lazy web developers. Back when sites were "best viewed in Internet Explorer" this wasn't because Internet Explorer was better (far from it). It was because it was near ubiquitous and developers either had too small a budget or were too lazy to implement for other browsers. This is the same thing happening now. Webkit has 90% of the mobile market. Developers are only developing sites for Webkit. Exactly the same as what happened with IE long ago. It was bad then, and is still bad now. It isn't Webkit's fault that the HTML 5 standard has taken about a bazillion years and still isn't 100% done. As long as they implement the final standards without the prefix, they are on solid ground.

Re:MS is the GOP of software companies.

[the_B0fh]

Remember back in the high school days? You have a bunch of kids, a few are more athletic than others. Some are pretty darn good. But mostly, about the best you can say for them is "not too bad". A couple might get scouted and offered a college athletic scholarship.

Microsoft/GOP would be like the Olympic competitor in being hypocritical.

I still remember how Bill Gates lied in court.

Re:Microsoft is right

[mabhatter654]

We should just really be glad Apple and Google agree on SOMETHING!!! WebKit covers iOS and Android... What other browsers are relevant?

Microsoft has no market position (WP7 is dead. WP8 is not released in sufficient numbers) they should just pay Apple to implement Safari on WP8... That's how it was done in the early browsers???