Five Things IE9 is (Actually) Doing Right | Hacker News Reader

Five Things IE9 is (Actually) Doing Right

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8 pointsaj6 comments

At this point, I don't even want IE to be improved. Microsoft has immense resources at its disposal, and I would prefer to see that effort devoted towards truly new problems in computing.

Simply put, we finally have a number of incredibly good web browsers, and most of them run on Windows. Microsoft should embrace one of these, and stop wasting time and money (both its own, and that of developers who continue to have to test IE). Even a great IE is still yet another IE, that must be supported or not, and this effect multiplies across all the web pages in the world. A new IE contributes nothing useful at this point, that wouldn't be achieved by having Windows Update auto-install a Firefox, a Chrome or a Safari.

If this is what should happen, then eventually will it not reduce competition? And if other browser developers thought this way too, it would ultimately stall the innovation in browser development.

I think they are going the right way with IE9:

* Sticking to standards (at least claimed as of now) * Not creating proprietary APIs (hopefully. I'm not sure about this) * Improving speed * Rapid iterations of the browser,

all this _while_ keeping an eye on security is a good thing for the industry as a whole since it keeps browsers competing with each other.

(NB. I'm not too trusting of MS but they seem to be behaving better than they used to)

That's a bit of an odd opinion. Microsoft is a company and companies have one goal: generate revenue for shareholders. I suspect IE generates significant revenue for Microsoft, if for no other reason than the default search being Bing. I wouldn't hold my breath that they're going to discontinue a product that still has 50% plus marketshare.

This is a poor example:

For example, they’ve publicly acknowledged on their blog that they will just support the industry standard codec, H.264, when there are still debates of what codec HTML5 video elements should use.

What’s so important about this particular example? It shows they’re being open about where they stand on an issue, instead of leaving us guessing and theorizing. Whether we like it or not, at least we get a chance to provide feedback before the product launches.

So on the issue of Canvas support, Microsoft leave us guessing and send mixed signals. But if they can torpedo their competitors, in this case Google, Firefox and Chrome, then they're incredibly forthcoming about final decisions.

Unfortunately, IE9 isn't shipping with Windows 7 Mobile so the 'media query module' won't be effective until they get IE9 on Win7mo.

I think one of the biggest issues with IE (and why we see so many old IE browsers) is that for a while, they weren't updating browsers regularly.

It looks like they may have turned a corner on this, as it seems IE8 & IE9 are coming out at a decent rate.

Though that could be because the technologies are changing so quickly and IE is just trying to keep up.

They've not turned the corner on this, they've announced that anyone stuck on XP is also stuck on IE8 (a.k.a the new IE6).

Instead of waiting until after the obvious problem occurs and then moaning about it creatively like the web developer community did with IE6 there should be a proactive campaign starting now.

Anyone who advocates users upgrade from IE6 should check if they're running XP and push heavily for any other browser than IE8 if so. It's not like IE8 even counts as a modern browser right now, but at least on Vista or 7 you could hope they'll be auto-updated to IE9.

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