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Comment by ericz | Hacker News Reader

IE has the opportunity to come out with a truly standards compliant product. If they can give it the speed/wow factor the Chrome release had, then they'll be back in the game.

Regardless, if they create a product that is rid of all of the burdens of previous version, ie. ActiveX and BHOs, then they're giving many consumers little reason to switch to a competitor if they're computer is shipped with IE9

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They need to yank out activex and bhos and focus on security above most other things. I don't know if they will though because of microsofts stance on backwards compatibility but it looks like they are trying to change at least.

MS will find all the possible ways to abuse a monopoly when they have one.

I don't think we need IE back in the game, we need to change the game to be as client agnostic and standards based as possible.

All they really need to get back in the game is to come within a lap of the lead browsers -- they don't need users to migrate back from Firefox and Chrome, they just need the "default" browser to be good enough that change isn't necessary.

Personally I can't see why they don't stick an IE badge on webkit and be done with it.

. . . or a Windows badge on Linux.

For the most part webapps will work under any OS with a browser, you can't really say the same thing about Windows/Linux software.

Windows NT was designed to have "multiple personalities". It has a Win32 personality most Windows programs see, a POSIX personality (that I think doesn't exist anymore) and an OS/2 personality (that I never saw). Each one could run binaries designed for the respective environment. Few Windows programs ever touch the NT kernel.

OSX is also modeled like this. There is a Mach kernel and a BSD-like personality on top of it.

Wine allows Win32 software to run on top of Unix without ever realizing they are running on top of a "fake" Win32 stack.

I think GNUStep could be used to build something similar that could allow OSX software to run on non-OSX hosts.

the posix personality still exists - it's called SUA; the Subsystem for UNIX Applications. the guys at interop systems have made a really nice ports-esque system for it so it's easy to get up and running with the usual pile of apps.

Do you have more details on this? I looked around for a while and ended up installing cygwin...

webkit has a fatal flaw: they didn't write it!

Actually I think that's pretty well addressed in the article - WebKit supports a bit too much. Contrary to Apple Microsoft targets the corporate market and weird internal applications. If they start implementing unstable features or using an engine that supports them they will just paint themselves into a corner once again.

I totally agree, I've many times pleaded the case that MS should just ditch Trident in favor of Webkit, and everyone would benefit.

I think it's like a turf war inside MS and the existing IE team managers wouldn't like to lose their position of strength and the no.of developers working under them.

Also the browser is taking up more of the OS capabilities, like threads, storage, GPU acceleration and so on. So MS would be reluctant to let the browser become too strong. But the horse has already bolted and there's always Linux, Android, Meego etc for the browser makers to cater for the netbook, tablet, smart phone markets.

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