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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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