Why I'm not happy about IE9 | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm not happy about IE9

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22 pointsstefanp32 comments

There are many things I dislike in this article.

The first thing is this primal "everything microsoft does is evil" reaction. The author tries to rationalize, but in the end it's just "well IE9 is bad because it can be good for Microsoft".

The use of fallacies such as "most of them are probably Microsoft fan boys" is also quite irritating. People disagree with you? Fanboys! Blinds! Fools! Heretics!

Then, the article ends with the strange argument "IE9 should be cross platform". Should Microsoft port all their clients to other plaftorms? The goal with IE9 is to provide Windows with a as good as possible browser.

Yes Microsoft did play the embrace and extend game and we should thank them, because frankly, IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then. The world changed and I don't think such approach would make sense now.

The real thing to be angry about is when they decided to stop development on IE.

> ... IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then.

Cannot agree more. People tend to forget things like AJAX came from IE.

But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently. If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.

> But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently.

Agreed.

> If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.

Huh?

If by "mistake", you mean trying to get a mail client to run well over the web ...

As someone who was using "AJAX" quite extensively using hidden IFRAMEs and then in 1999, XMLHttpRequest -- long before a Johnny-come-lately coined AJAX, I had to comment on this-

http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/How-I-Came-To-Despise-AJAX...

It was first added "to" Internet Explorer by the MSXML team (by a guy sneaking in some functionality for the Exchange Outlook Web Access team). It was actually a great example of the power of modular "ActiveX" (which in that case was abused to mean simply COM) scripting -- they didn't need to release a new browser to support it. Of course there are endless downsides to reusing a plug-in structure that had little controls or security, however it did have some merits.

I would fully expect a higher percentage of "fanboys" in the population of IE9 users, given simply that IE9 is just a beta. The crowd is basically limited to technophiles running Windows. Not that this is the same as "fanboy", but I would expect a significant correlation.

And you don't have to believe MS is evil to know that they are still pulling these Windows power-grabs. Windows promised Mac compatibility with Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC support in v 2.0 just a year later (leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).

I don't think MS is any more "evil" than any other tech company (just worse at PR maybe), but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways, you can't blame people for expecting them to still be up to their old games.

“but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways,”

Which is exactly what they’ve been doing the past two releases. IE7 was a sincere attempt at catching up in the CSS department and get with the program on web standards adherence/compliance. IE8 was a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with the JavaScript side of things. IE9 is a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with HTML5 and CSS3, and whilst they aren’t yet including some of the things we may personally wish to see most (e.g. CSS Transitions), claiming they have yet to “change their ways” is nothing more than an unhelpful attempt at putting Microsoft in the “evil“ corner.

Microsoft themselves have long been trying to get people to upgrade from IE6 and Windows XP. Sure, part of that is just for their own business purposes, but at the same time they honestly want to help the web forward—the current state of affairs hurts them more than us, these days. There is no chance they’ll ever go back to dominating the industry like they did in the late ’90s and early ’00s, because of the steady “re-mergence” of the Mac and the myriad mobile platforms we’re collectively shifting to. All they can do now is to provide a browser on the Windows platform that isn’t so far behind on things that it becomes a compelling reason for people to leave Windows itself behind. And to do that, they know they have to play along in the standards game, which has long taken over the industry.

>Windows promised Mac compatibility with Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC support in v 2.0 just a year later (leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).

The writing was on the wall.

Apple stopped supporting PowerPC six months later.

> The goal with IE9 is to provide Windows with a as good as possible browser.

That doesn't ring true. We already have four other excellent web browsers on Windows, as mentioned by the article. All are relatively similar in terms of features and under active development by great teams. At best, Microsoft could only hope to very marginally improve on what already is available for free. So a nice standards-compliant IE9 will not make Windows any more or less attractive an OS than it already is.

Browsers are expensive and onerous to create. What could Microsoft's motivation possibly be to produce one for free, besides embrace-and-extend?

Browser is too strategic, you can't allow a third party to develop the one on your platform.

Who benefits from IE9 being available for other platforms?

Not users. What would the ability to run IE9 add to the Linux or Mac desktop? Another web browser? Do we really need one?

Not Microsoft, who would have to invest massive amounts of effort into porting it, and large parts of the Windows codebase too.

Honestly, I wonder if the author of this article was deliberately trying to think of something to criticise about IE9, and this was the best he could do.

For non-web developers who use non-Windows operating systems, IE9 is an irrelevance. For web developers who use any operating system, IE9 has to be a good thing, because it means more browsers out there that are closer to the standards.

Hey ! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.

I'm sad that you think I was trying to come up with something - I just wrote about this strange (but honnest !) feeling I got, as people talking in nice terms about IE hasn't happenned in a while.

In fact I don't think I'm criticizing IE itself at all.

Perhaps I could re-phrase my point more simply: I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in the long run, since IE is still tied to Windows for strategic reasons.

You're of course right that it's a good thing for web devs right now, though.

OK, but you still never really answered the question. What's the benefit of having IE available to other platforms? How does say, a Mac user, benefit from having IE9 available for download to them over Safari?

Simple enough isn't it?

They don't benefit now from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.

However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because why bother?

That's what standards support is, it means that you can use IE9 on Windows and Opera on Linux and sites will still work and look the same. It makes no sense at all to say "IE9 is Windows-only so Microsoft can lock users in" when IE9 is standards compliant and any site built for IE9 will work the exact same way on Linux.

I don't think your argument makes any sense, sorry. If you were talking about IE6, I'd agree, but standards compliance means never having to use the exact same browser for anything.

"I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in the long run, since IE is still tied to Windows for strategic reasons."

So what? How is the Web threatened or at risk or even _impacted at all_ by IE9 being Windows-only? With IE9 supporting standards so thoroughly, it very directly means that IE9 being Windows-only doesn't make a lick of difference anymore.

The game for the Web is standards. With all major browsers supporting standards, browser and platform themselves are irrelevant factors for the Web to prosper as a platform and a medium.

Really silly article - I can't believe this made front page on HN. How many Linux users would use Internet Explorer? How many Mac users would use Internet Explorer 9? Probably not many, almost certainly not enough to justify the cost in time and dollars to Microsoft, and assuredly not the author of this post, who seems to just need to find something to pick on Microsoft about. I thought those types died out long ago. I'm neither an MS/Mac or Linux fanboy. As a web developer, I've used Windows & Linux professionally, and developed sites to work on PC, Mac, and Linux browsers (as many of us have), and IMO, we don't need more OS/browser combinations to contend with; instead we need the browser/OS combinations that we do have to behave in a standards compliant manner across those OS/browser combinations. IE9 is a strong step in that direction for Microsoft.

I know for me not having to boot up VirtualBox to test that everything works fine in IE would be a boon not a problem. But yeah I'm not seeing where it really benefits MS here at all.

IE for other platforms? No Please. There are at least a few niche mac/linux websites which you can build without worrying about cross-browser issues. You introduce IE and the whole echo-system lags behind.

Further, there may be reasons why IE is not so portable to other platforms. Considering the fact that IE9 is not currently (and probably will never be) available for even Windows XP, I don't think that a cross-platform version is a realistic expectation.

IIRC, IE is an integral part of the Windows OS (for whatever business/architectural reasons) and this means that producing a Linux/Mac version may be more work that you think it is.

The core argument is that IE9 is so good that it might make people like Windows and stop using Linux, and that's bad because obviously MS will abuse its new found web browsers market share.

By that argument, with IE9 making web developers lives happy, and much more importantly, making users' lives happy with a decent default browser on the most popular OS are bad things.

Why do Microsoft benefit from having a good browser? This article says the only reason is to protect Window's market share and that will inevitably lead to MS doing something evil with it's OS market share.

Two things occur to me: 1. Windows still has a dominant market share, if they were going to do evil I don't see what's stopping them 2. Having a good browser might protect their browser market share but I'm not convinced it protects their OS market share. Maybe if IE was way way better than anything else it would stop people going to Mac OS, but it isn't and there are plenty of other more significant barriers to changing your OS.

I think it's more plausible that their investing in browsers because they want to help their online services market share, and having that search box default to Bing on 50% of PCs is hugely valuable.

Agree with the above and add in (3) Being known for bad browsers is detrimental to sales of other products

I was under the impression that Microsoft is focusing on standards and web experience now because the last time it used a browser for strategic positioning with the operating systems market it got vilified or sued by basically every country with electricity?

I think the author is forgetting that IE used to run on Mac OS a long time ago. Before Safari came out, or was any good, on MacOS you had the choice of either Netscape, IE5, or Opera, and honestly, IE5 was the best of the bunch at the time.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory - make IE standards complaint -> get the market share -> introduce new nonstandard features.

PS Safari runs on linux only under Wine as far as I know.

Hmm conspiracy theory... Nope, Microsoft is a for-profit company with a huge platform that might be slipping into irrelevance.

They're playing the cards they have at any given time - when it means supporting standards, they do that. And when they're totally dominant, they tend to set the standards.

I'm not even suggesting it might be intentional - the IE team and the MS top management don't necessarily have the same long-term goals is all.

Maybe the IE team would even love to go cross platform and compete as a browser and not as a part of a larger platform.

It's not a conspiracy theory, it's exactly what happened with IE6.

You can debate whether IE6 was a good or bad thing in this regard, but it still happened.

Unfortunately it's a bit more than a theory. In a real, documented sense, it has been Microsoft's modus operandi with regard to internet technology for over 15 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

The reason to be unhappy about IE9 is that it won't run on XP. That means it is essentially meaningless for 90% of the web developers on the planet for all practical purposes.

Just because it's meaningless the day it hits the shelves doesn't mean it will be meaningless forever. As the XP users are slowly forced to upgrade, the market will lose IE6/7 users and gain IE9+ users. It's not a license to ignore IE7 right away, but it's still progress.

Back in IE6's day browsers were on the desktop, and that's about it. Now that browsers run on a whole host of devices, dominating the desktop browser market isn't the whole ballgame.

It feels unlikely that anyone will ever dominate the browser market like that again.

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