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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

this is good news. it will no longer stop IE users from visiting those sneaky sites who block users for using IE. it also makes it clear that Microsoft is finally serious about making a good browser that people WANT to use. now if they make their developer tools anywhere as good as firebug they'll have a winner. hiring some of the firebug team might be a good idea.

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It seems they are in fact making some major upgrades to the developer tools, as described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/bg182632(v=vs.85)...

Some of it appears to be parity with existing dev tools for other browsers, but it looks like some very welcome improvements.

In all seriousness, I really do think that MSFT has an uphill battle when it comes to having non-enterprise web developers adopt IE as their primary platform for development. I'm sure that IE 11 is/will be a perfectly fine browser and comparable to Chrome/Firefox, but they still have the requirement that you must use Windows.

I have no problem targeting IE11 as an end-user platform for my apps, especially now since it appears that it's a very good , if not great, browser, but I have absolutely zero desire to use Windows as a day-to-day OS for development. A large portion of the tooling that I (and I suspect a vast majority of other engineers) require either doesn't exist on Windows, or if it does, it's crippled or hacky.

Essentially, moving to IE over Chrome/Firefox nets me little to no appreciable gain, and comes with a huge negative problem of drastically impacting my productivity.

call me crazy but I am a web developer not working for the enterprise and using windows 8 as main OS. If the dev tools of IE were superior to the competition be sure I'd be using it for development. I am sure I'm not a unique case.

Developing for IE10 kind of makes sense right now, if you're on a windows machine. IE10 is one of the most picky browsers about certain things, so you can catch potential problems early by doing that.

There will still be methods of determining whether the browser is IE or not; that's virtually impossible to hide. It will require a little more effort, but every browser is full of tell-tale bugs and other implementation nuances that can be used to uniquely identify it. It could even be as easy as detecting support for CSS vendor prefixes or similar.

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