IE9 Public Beta Release Today
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
The IE team has to embrace standards (HTML5/JS/CSS) as much as possible to be thought of as a serious competitor in the browser wars. (Since the browser is the new OS.)
The rest of MS has to push Silverlight as the way to build applications, or else Windows itself is endangered, if there's nothing Windows-specific about future app development. (Hoping the browser isn't the new OS.)
Seems like both Microsoft and Apple are trying to figure out where to go in the post-PC era. Apple's clearly betting on mobile (which is a good bet), but MS is tied to their Windows/Office/Exchange legacy, and falling behind horribly in mobile. (We'll see if Windows Phone 7 does anything for them.)
Someone please enlighten me (this is not sarcasm... I'm asking): what is the value of IE9 over everything else on the market?
It's probably better than IE8, and if you just use a standard Windows PC then Microsoft Update will perhaps give you IE9 automatically? (Sorry, I don't use Windows enough to know whether browser updates are automatic.) So the common non-computer savvy user will benefit.
As a web developer, it's my biggest gripe with Microsoft.
For FF/Chrome/Safari users this means that it becomes much more likely to see web-sites use html5 technologies and leave IE6-8 behind.
So if you create intranet web-sites, then a huge amount of pain is gone when the company upgrades its IE install base to IE9. Personally, I'm looking very much forward to this, and I'm able to tell my customer that this will save valuable time for me (i.e. money for them).
Sure some people will hang out with IE6 for another 5 years, but most sites can now be optimized for much more functionality.
Finally, for those people(companies) that will only use a Microsoft browser, they now have a really good HTML5 browser.
Needs Silverlight to watch. Kinda blows they didn't do it in HTML5, or even YouTube's live stream hip stuff.
I have numerous web-apps setup as dedicated applications using Fluid and find it much nicer than having them as tabs in the same browser, or in their own browser windows. It means I can launch them with Spotlight easily, they have their own icon in the dock and start up without the address-bar or any other chrome.
At any one time I'd say around 75% of the apps I'm running are Fluid.app instances.
It just becomes another reason for people to make the switch, and I doubt they will win them back when they finally do decide to upgrade to windows7.
But Microsoft has made it pretty clear that they do not thing you should be running XP. You're getting critical security updates only until 2014. And it's rather tricky to purchase a new copy of XP (you pay a premium and it typically involved buying a new OS first)
If you can't (or don't want to) upgrade past XP, but want modern browser capabilities, just use Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.
Although Mac support will probably come before Linux support, if ever. The Microsoft Office suite is available for Mac.
I just found out that IE used to have Mac support (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac).
Second of all, the fact that microsoft continues to decrease in market share while only releasing its browswer on one of the many operating systems available is no way to succeed. I know the linux community isn't large enough to draw much notice from microsoft, but is the coding that windows centric that it can only run on windows (no, since there will be a mac version... maybe).
I understand that not everyone enjoys this comment... Oh well.