Hacker News Reader

Comment by superdavid | Hacker News Reader

At least their own new apps (Sharepoint 2010, online versions of Office) won't run in IE6, so that's pushing people towards newer versions.

The problem is, even if we get rid of IE6 today, IE7 will be the problem tomorrow, then IE8 the next day. It's not hard to foresee a time when we're all moaning about how terrible IE9 is (if we're not already).

View on HN

Have you looked into IE 9? Everything I've seen leads me to believe that Microsoft has finally started listening. All that loss of market share has finally had the right effect.

Except they've neglected to support XP, so anyone stuck on XP is stuck on IE8 unless they switch to an alternate browser.

They say that in a year or so, whenever they get around to actually releasing IE9, then people won't be using XP as much because they'll have upgraded to their much better offerings.

But that's what they said about IE6 too, and it's upgrades were free and didn't require complete re-installs. Basically, you're relying on the physical machine upgrade cycle to kill old IE browsers.

Also: canvas support?

Even if IE9 catches up 100%, it will still be frozen in time at its point of release until IE10 is released several years later, where other browsers will be regularly releasing new versions every few weeks/months (with almost 90% take-up).

IE6 was everything IE9 is, 10 years ago. IE9 will be everything IE6 is, 10 years from now.

It's orders of magnitude easier to develop something that works cross-browser today than it was ten years ago, even for quite advanced stuff. Back then, you basically had to develop two parallel sites (one for IE and one for NS) if you wanted it to do anything moderately fancy.

You still could easily find you need to, even with IE 8.

Sure, simple box positioning is easier and most of the stock jQuery UI library works fine, but it's precisely when you try to do anything moderately fancy that IE can quickly because a major hassle.

Aren't you a bit nervous about how they're talking about supporting HTML 5 but they appear to be strategically neglecting section 4.8.11 of the spec?

Canvas, for those who don't know and don't want to search for it.

The problem with canvas, as correctly identified on the IE blog, is that no-one has yet worked out what to do with it from an accessibility perspective. Other browsers just report it to screen-readers (and other similar technologies) as a graphical block, whereas it obviously contains a lot more crucial information than that, and there's no standard for how that should be represented.

This has always been Microsoft's excuse: there aren't clear standards, and it's definitely partially true.

But they seem to be the only one of all the other substantial browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera) that just isn't even close. Why don't they just try what Firefox does? Make all our lives a little easier for once...

Maybe ... but they are very serious about accessibility, going back to at least when they did the NT rollout in San Francisco where they made sure to put in everyone's hands a short paper on the subject.

If someone could point out where they've clearly used accessibility as an excuse vs. being truly serious about it I'd be interested.

Probably because Mozilla and Opera aren't easy targets for lawsuits from disability groups and governments in the same way that Microsoft has a bullseye painted on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com