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Comment by devtesla | Hacker News Reader

It's at a point where I don't see anything wrong with going either way.

I don't think IE9's abandonment of XP is going to slow the adoption of new web technology all that much, something that Mozilla seems to suggest. There is a lot of momentum behind them with mobile devices supporting them so well. Still, 40% of web users, even if those are among the lowest value web users, is worth developing around.

Mozilla isn't around to make a profit, so spending on XP users makes more sense. Abandoning them would have also made sense.

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Mozilla wants its cake and to eat it too. They'll whine that IE9 doesn't support XP, and then whine that IE9 isn't modern. If it's not modern then it really doesn't matter if it supports XP or not.

I personally can't stand XP as an OS. But I do understand Mozilla from a business perspective. Although I wish they weren't so sanctimonious about IE9 not supporting it since they really don't care and I think it just continues to make Mozilla look like whiners rather than doers, e.g., Google/Chrome.

Mozilla is trying to position FireFox a as superior alternative to IE9. Therefore, there's no cognitive dissonance at all with Mozilla saying that 1) IE 9 is worse than Firefox because it doesn't run on XP and 2) IE 9 isn't really modern while Firefox is.

Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to be modern, but more than that, it doesn't want users to think that IE 9 is modern. Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to have any compelling features whatsoever.

A negative marketing campaign will always backfire to some portion of your audience.

Mozilla do want IE9 to be "modern", that's entirely in line with their mission as a non-profit that promotes the open web. It's ironically Microsoft that's scared most of a truly modern IE9.

What Mozilla certainly don't want is marketing BS confusing users into thinking IE9 is modern, while it holds the web back and drags its feet about updates. Nor does it want any browser controlled by Microsoft to have dominant market share while Microsoft still sees the web as a threat that it can fight mostly by go-slow tactics like having IE6-8 hanging around preventing new web technologies hitting critical mass.

They don't even have spellchecking in their browser because the Word guys feel threatened.

They don't even have spellchecking in their browser because the Word guys feel threatened.

I suspect it may have more to do with the fact that some features are easy to do as addins. There are several spell checkers available for IE. Given that the IE team seems resource constrained, it seems more useful to work on things like perf, compliance, security, than features that are easy to add by 3rd parties. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to have, but given that IE9 still has HTML/CSS gaps, I'd much rather they work on those.

Why would the IE team be more resource constrained than the Firefox team, who managed to add a spellchecker years ago? I'll admit that I've not gone looking, but I've not ever heard of anyone using one of these third party IE spellcheckers - it's just been a feature which I expect a decent browser to have that IE clearly lacked. Surely that perception hurts them more than the cost of a few developer-months to take one of their existing spellcheckers and drop it into IE?

Why would the IE team be more resource constrained than the Firefox team

Because they have fewer people working on the product? I don't know. But presumably they have some constraints on resources that prevent them from doing everything -- hence having to prioritize.

Surely that perception hurts them more than the cost of a few developer-months to take one of their existing spellcheckers and drop it into IE?

So then what do you cut? Dev/test time doesn't just appear magically. Do you cut flexbox? Text shadow? History?

The IE team is resource constrained because it's not in Microsoft's interests to build a good browser. If it was in their business interests, like XBox, then they could throw tens of billions of dollars at it. But it's not, so no spellchecker and no WebGL and no IE9 for XP.

You do realize that the XBox team is also resource contrained. For example, you can't run any XBox or PC game on an XBox 360. Had to cut something. There's not even a web browser in the XBox 360.

Everything is about tradeoffs and constraints. You may not be familiar enough with the industry to know that they're there (ppl think that MS and Apple have enough money to simply do everything, but they don't), but trust me, these products have serious resource constraints across the board.

Strangely, you seem to think Xbox trying to conquer the living room without bothering to include a browser supports your case that Microsoft loves the web, but just consistently runs out of money across its various products before getting around to supporting it properly, whereas I would have had that right up there with the lack of spellchecking in IE as a clear example of Microsoft quietly hoping the web will go away if they ignore it long enough.

I'm not asking or expecting them to support everything and anything with their minuscule bank account and negligible market power. I'm just pointing out that the web is kryptonite to Microsoft and their PR to the contrary is laughable. If you want to believe it's simply mismanagement on a massive scale that leads them to fail at the web year after year then good for you, but I personally think it's just smart self-interest on their part.

Thank you for understanding what Mozilla is about!

Again, the position seems to not make sense. And it seems desperate. Is Chrome worse than IE mobile, because its not on WP7? Is Safari worse than Chrome because its not on Chome OS?

Again, I think its a fine business decision for Mozilla. But it seems odd to decry IE9's absence on XP when you already think it's not modern.

And the positioning against IE9 seems kind of dumb since IE9 isn't on XP. It's not going to beat IE9 on Win7 or Vista. But it can make huge inroads on XP. But not by taking IE9 share, but rather by taking IE6/Chrome share.

It just seems like Mozilla is so caught up at being anti-MS that that they still haven't understood that Google has already picked their wallet and has just started emptying their bank account.

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