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Comment by abraham | Hacker News Reader

Two important notes: current stable version of Chrome 7 so beta of IE9 should be compared with Chrome 8. Say it takes 6 months for IE9 to go gold, in that time Chrome stable will have had two more releases bringing it up to 9 which will probably contain a number of enhancements to close the gape if not over take IE9.

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Yea every time I look at MS's site, they compare apples to rotting discarded oranges. "Look, our apples are quite superior!"

The charts are showing only the tests IE9 excel at, which is a fraction of the picture.

The tests also compare IE9 vs current stable releases. I want to see that comparison against beta releases.

Oh wait lets also write down what operating systems IE9 is compatible with:

Google Chrome: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Linux

Firefox: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OSX, *nix

Opera: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Linux

IE9: Windows Vista, Windows 7

Oh look IE9 runs on only the latest MS operating system. They don't even support their own older OSes.

Lets not even get into the security aspects.

OS support is a little more nuanced than that.

The latest version of Firefox for OS X requires at least version 10.4 (released 2005). Ditto for Opera.

Google Chrome requires at least 10.5 (released 2007), and doesn't support PPC (the transition to Intel was `completed' in 2007).

Windows Vista went to retail in 2007.

Firefox, Opera and Chrome all still work on Windows XP though.

What fraction of the market is underserved by Firefox not working on OSX 10.3 and earlier?

Meanwhile what fraction is underserved by IE9 not working on Windows XP?

I have no objection to your numbers as long as we also compare apples to apples and quantify the impact.

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