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Comment by cschep | Hacker News Reader

I love this. If everyone did this, then Microsoft would lose the power to do whatever it wanted. Standards compliance would not be optional for them anymore. I hope this is a trend that continues.

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I agree and think this is especially relevant for sites and apps that target tech-savvy users - as a group they will most likely already be using a browser other than IE and even if they do will be more likely to understand the reason for lack of total cross browser compatibility. If this became a trend it would begin to do one of two things - either cause Microsoft to consider adopting web standards compliance or cause users to adopt alternate browsers. Both options should be equally as welcome in the web development field and help to reduce the time wasted on needless hacks and workarounds to accommodate one product.

Unfortunately a lot of users are already adopting alternate browsers, but it doesn't reduce the pain of web development until IE6 becomes a negligible part of the market. What could help more than anything is if Microsoft took a stronger stance on forcing users to upgrade from IE6 to IE7. Once IE6 drops below perhaps 5-10% of the market it becomes ignorable. But for IE as a whole to become negligible - I wish I could but I don't see that day any time soon.

It's not quite so black and white, but yes, if you look at IE8, IE8 is more standards compliant because Microsoft has less leverage over the browser market any more.

Nevertheless, it has been blindsided by the sudden appearance of much faster Javascript in chrome and other browsers. It's too late in the dev cycle for IE8 to get that. It will have to wait for IE9 or 8.1 or whatever.

67.44% use IE http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...

But not on his site.

Using statistic based on all internet users to determine which browsers are most important for a given site is not a good idea.

I think the key point is that he was only potentially alienating < 4% of his audience.

While I agree it was awesome it's only appropriate if you don't lobby Microsoft by shafting your users.

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