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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really interested in live streams of events like these (I'll just read the summaries, thanks) but the scant details I'm seeing about Windows 8 really do look pretty good.

I've played around with Windows Phone, and I intend my next phone to be running it- if you haven't, you owe it to yourself to try out the UI, it's really something else. Integration with the Zune Pass is a killer feature for me, too.

The unanswered question is fitting Windows 8 into tablet form and keeping it running at a good speed. That remains to be seen.

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Unfortunately it's browser is unusable, in my opinion. Until someone ports webkit or gecko to WP7, I'm staying away. And then only if it allows you to change the browser default.

IE10 really isn't a bad browser at all.

But as a web dev, I agree that there's something deep set within me that makes me uncomfortable about using IE for day to day browsing. I'm not even sure what MS can do about that.

I was referring to the mobile version, which as I understand it is based on IE8, which is archaic compared to every other mobile browser on the market.

Win Phone 7 Mango (should be released later this month, can get it now if you know where to look) has an IE9 based browser that supports html 5 etc

Have you used IE9 Mobile ?

The initial version of (pre Mango) of mobile internet explorer was pretty poor (though I wouldn't call it unusable) but the Mango update comes with IE9 and it is quite good.

Edit: Still can't set any other browser as default however.

Yes, I was referring to the version that is out in the market, not the upcoming version which I haven't tried. The IE8 version doesn't even support @media queries which makes it unusable in my book; you cannot see mobile optimized sites unless the dev uses a user-agent hack (which is bad practice).

It has by far the worst html5 compatibility of any mobile browser: http://mobilehtml5.org/

I think WP7 is pretty slick, but the browser is the most important app on a phone and IE is a deal-breaker to me.

the browser that shipped with WP7 initially is based on IE7 and doesnt have any HTML5 features. the one with mango is based on IE9 with a lot more HTML5 support.

There's a new version in the Mango release.

What part of the browser did you find unusable? I am running mango developer build and it runs damn fast. As good as safari on my iphone.

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