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Comment by ghurlman | Hacker News Reader

Sooo... Microsoft links people to Microsoft's browser. This counts as controversy? Shady behavior? Please.

The issue is less that they link to their own browser, and more that the likely outcome is that it will push the adoption of another nearly obsolete browser.

Hey, I don't know if you've noticed the pattern over the past 15 years, but there's always another "obsolete" browser. You can't "win", it's just about the progress. There is no point in the past 15 years where you've been able to just code to the latest beta of your favorite browser and nothing else.

Not much progress going from one non-html5-compliant browser to another. It still means everyone's stuck having to support flash and other proprietary plugins. IE9 at least allows us to move forward with modern standards.

It is not just new stuff like HTML5. XHTML 1.0 is already 11 years old and is not supported in IE8, forcing it to be served using the HTML MIME type and parsed as HTML. Often XHTML served this way becomes invalid even if it was originally valid. I wrote an article on Reddit about this.

That's true, but on the other hand, as TFA points out, IE8 is the latest that a WinXP user can ever get from Microsoft, which is two-years old and practically outdated now. Linking IE6 users to IE8 is progress, sure, but useless given that they could be running Chrome or Firefox, which are actually modern browsers.

Yea, I think the real problem here is that IE9 is not available for XP, which is the newest version of Windows shipping with IE6, so they are stuck upgrading them to IE8.

Or that people are still running on an OS that came out a decade ago.

My company is B2B and we stopped supporting IE6 at all around the time I started working here. We just suggest clients either upgrade or deal with it.

And how old is Win XP?

Are you trying to say you think it's more effective to encourage users to buy Windows 7 (and most likely a new computer to support it) than to encourage them to install Firefox or Chrome for free?

I would rather encourage users to download an easy and newbie-friendly Linux distro and experiment with it.

Sure, XP is an obsolete OS. Modernizing the whole stack is a much better solution than adding a modern browser to an obsolete OS.

It doesn't matter. It's the most popular operating system in the world, no matter how old it is.

> Hey, I don't know if you've noticed the pattern over the past 15 years, but there's always another "obsolete" browser.

He's saying that they'd get a more modern browser by going to something other than IE, given that their OS can't possibly support the latest version of IE. We know there's nothing you can do to be up-to-date forever.

> We know there's nothing you can do to be up-to-date forever.

Except install Chrome.

Except for the fact that when IE6 got mass adoption it wasn't obsolete, it was modern.

I didn't say it was shady or even controversial, just that it isn't as good a deal as it seems. I had a whole "jumping from the fire back into the frying pan" analogy lined up, but couldn't make a snappy title out of it.

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