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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

No. That's stupid. IE6 was IE6 because for more than 5 years it was the last browser of its line.

The "IE8 is the new IE6" claims at least have some meat to them: IE8 is the last (edit: MS) browser running on Windows XP which means as long as Windows XP exists in significant numbers so does IE8, but this is nonsense: Firefox, Safari and Chrome are not going back into their hole, which means IE9 will not be an undisputed champion of anything which means IE9 will not be the last IE ever to run on Windows Vista and Windows 7 (unless microsoft decides to get out of the browser market entirely, but I don't see that happening).

Thus IE9 can not be the new IE6. It might not be the best browser ever, but IE10 will come next and improve it, and IE11 after it.

If you're grasping for parallels, IE9 is the IE5 of CSS3, not the IE6.

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To me, “IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3” means exactly what the article illustrates: “You will be unable to deploy cross-browser sites using exclusively CSS techniques like CSS gradients and text-shadows without fallbacks specially crafted for one browser.” IE9 will be holding CSS3 back from meaningful adoption and impact.

Others here are griping the author could have done more to approximate the Webkit rendering in IE9. This is true but is counter-productive to the point of the article: Using only new CSS3 tools is impossible thanks to, well, IE9 being the IE6 of CSS3!

> To me, “IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3” means exactly what the article illustrates: “You will be unable to deploy cross-browser sites using exclusively CSS techniques like CSS gradients and text-shadows without fallbacks specially crafted for one browser.”

It is already impossible right now, even ignoring IE9.

What I wish is that Microsoft would just give up on MSIE. For its time, IE6 was the shit. But they let it linger for what, 6 years? Meanwhile Firefox started being awesome, and now we also have Chrome which seems to be setting the standard these days.

As a web developer, MSIE has caused me nothing but hell. Versions 7 and 8 improved a lot, but they still have very annoying headaches that I am constantly dealing with.

One of my biggest fantasies is Microsoft one day realizing how much they HURT rather than HINDER the web, and just throwing in the towel. "We give up."

Developing their own browser does nothing for Microsoft anyways. It's not like using MSIE makes you special or makes your brand awareness of Microsoft any stronger. If they had any forethought for the future, they would just give up now. One can fantasize, anyways... :P

IE is worth a lot to Microsoft because of Bing. Google pays Mozilla for Google search being on the toolbar. Chrome is Google. IE is the only browser that would have Bing be the default search engine. That's worth a good amount of money to them - I can't seem them throwing up the white flag.

Is Bing really a big source of revenue for them though? I thought something like 90% of their profit was Windows and Office.

Either way, good point in terms of promoting their own search engine, but unless it's a significant source of profit then again I say, what is the point?

Bing will never be a significant source of revenue if it has no users. Like it or not, browser defaults drive market share.

Besides, what's wrong with a large company trying to diversify streams of income?

Nothing's wrong with that in itself.

However, it can have undesired negative side-effects.

They could easily release a WebKit-based browser with Bing search built in and call it MSIE, solving both your/Microsoft’s and schammy’s problems.

(Edit: This is obvious to industry observers and has been “requested” by frustrated devs for years. But Microsoft won’t do it. Pride, probably, is the biggest reason.)

And it would instantly break every single intranet built on MS technologies.

They could bake in Trident (IE’s rendering engine) and allow intranet administrators /IT to declare intranets render in IE7/8/9 mode. They already do something similar with their browsers, and IETab for Firefox essentially does this.

It's time to break them.

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