What Would You Ask the IE9 Team if you had the Chance? | Hacker News Reader

What Would You Ask the IE9 Team if you had the Chance?

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I would ask: Why don't you embed WebKit or Gecko and save us all a ton of time?

They probably wouldn't, but if they do, go WebKit please.

I think the answer is pretty simple: Back compatibility!

Why not an open source engine for modern pages and the old engine for Compatibility Mode?

Infinite loop detected.

Or how about, Have you experimented with WebKit?

You'd be surprised how often this gets brought up internally (I'm a Microsoft employee), but unfortunately I can't say much more other than I've heard Ballmer directly speak about reasons for and against it.

It's on everyone's mind from the top down.

Why bother anymore? The browser is a legacy of trash. It's been broken for so long and to point where developers have come to rely on its brokenness. Fixing it will inflict so much more pain on developers that we are in a situation where a legitimate debate could be had over whether it's even the right thing to do. They have some of the best programming minds in the world over there, but when they're at such a severe disadvantage with that minefield of an application how can they be expected to deliver anything more than the embarrassment that IE has been over the past several years? Has there been any substantial discussion about starting over?

I was just going to post Why?, and this sums up the meaning of that word in context pretty well.

Thanks for the reply. Before joining MS in March, I was building web apps just like most of the commenters here and I'd like to try to get feedback to the IE team if I can to make that app development easier.

The IE9 Platform Preview 2 has gotten positive reviews and it seems like the team is listening so I think it makes sense to keep talking and asking.

Are you going to support websockets, canvas, SVG, audio and video tags, local storage, css3 shadows, transitions, etc, etc, etc, etc?

All of them in less than a year?

No questions asked? No catchs? No booby traps?

If not, don't waste my time, I've had enough broken promises from you already.

What browser do you use at home?

Why won't you give us spell checking?

That used to be my favorite example of how Microsoft was scared of the web and how that directly hurt their customers. I'd lost track years ago and I can't believe this still isn't fixed.

For reference, it was 2003 when this feature was added to Mozilla.

Do people really use that? That's the first thing I disable in a fresh Firefox install :)

English is not my native language, and I use the spell-checker all the time.

It would be absolutely lovely if you would force-install IE9 alongside lower versions, and use IE9's rendering engine from lower versions if a special meta tag would be present in the webpage. That way you get all the backwards compatibility anybody will ever want, and we can finally forget about IE6&7(&8). Cheers!

Why can't you make IE9 run on XP when it seems quite easy for every other browser to manage that?

If you're not going to adopt webkit or make trident open source, can you at least make it easy to run it on mac and linux without downloading insane amounts data of VMs.

I already do have the chance. They have a blog and everything: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/

Why don't you release a version of IE6 for those businesses with internal apps and way behind website, and release a new browser that has new branding and be as compliant as you can be? This all-things-to-all-people approach seems a waste.

Will you comply with section 4.8.11 of the HTML5 spec?

Will you support WAI-ARIA?

Does it hurt when I punch you?

(Sorry, they're good guys I'm sure, couldn't resist.)

Can you bring back Clippy?

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