So much of front-end development is done on Macs these days, and Firefox and Chrome are so fluidly cross-platform...
If IE wanted to be taken seriously as a modern browser, as a platform, then they almost need to come out with a blazing-fast OSX version of it, which is obviously never going to happen.
You mean something as "good" as Safari on windows?
> Snow Leopard and Windows users are not supported by the Safari 6 release at this time,[67] while there are over 121 vulnerabilities left unpatched on those platforms.[68]
If they are content with Safari-quality usage numbers, then they could probably settle for Safari-quality cross platform-ness.
Years ago I found it painful to have a full web dev stack on windows and switched to OSX. The company I'm working for also has linux desktops as basic setup, and macs for app developpers. It's anecdotical but I use Windows only for testing, and from a VM (I used fulls VMs for each IE versions before, now it's only the test VMs that microsoft provides)
But I usually work with unix/linux production servers, and that's the configuration I'd expect for most projects. So the pain points mostly come from reproducing a LAMP like environment on windows, with all the specific configurations and modules when needed.
There are little things, like small changes in the config files to adjust for windows, and there are the "why am I doing this" things like trying to compile additional/specific PHP modules on cygwin, with the dependency matching games and all the cygwin idiosyncrasies and limitations to learn first.
It's easier on OSX as compiling OSS projects requires minimal adjustments, the file system mostly behaves the same as other unixes/linux (except for case sensitiveness...), and all the unix tooling is available (no extra learning curve is a bonus). A separate linux/unix VM closely matching the prod environment would still be the best option, but most of the time OSX is good enough to not bother.
1. With WebGL support and the other new features in IE11, they are close to finally being comparable to Chrome and Firefox in terms of being a modern browser. Yes, bridges were burnt, but IE11 and things like TypeScript are making Microsoft cool in the web space again.
2. Previews appear to show IE11 is also competitive in terms of speed with other modern browsers. (IE was already fast at 2D canvas, but not much else.)
3. The tech community was disturbed by the NSA spying scandals (that involve most major browser vendors), which led to some movement to switch to alternative browsers and search engines. Even if people don't switch entirely away, they might choose to put less eggs in one basket, so prefer to not do Chrome+google.com or IE+bing. Of the other combinations of those options (there are others of course, but just considering those), IE+google.com seems more likely than Chrome+bing, so IE might gain a little there.
Inertia means IE needs to be significantly better than the alternatives to catch up. It takes time and energy to switch, so the payoff has to make it worth one's while.
When Firefox came out, it offered substantial improvements over IE6. When Chrome came out, it offered substantial improvements over Firefox.
IE11 continues the "hey, we're almost caught up!" tradition that has seen IE's market spiral downward for years. Until a version of IE comes out that earns the reaction "whoa, this is much better than Chrome or Firefox!", the downward spiral will continue.
Note that on Akamai[0] (who have many of the world‘s largest sites as their customers) IE’s share is relatively static. On NetMarketShare[1], IE’s share is increasing. It seems any such downward spirals has already halted. At least on two of the major analytics sites that release public data.
[0] http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_dataset.html#stat=browser&t... [1] http://www.netmarketshare.com
And before you say certificate pinning, you know as well as I do that the NSA aren't known to have created fake Google or Microsoft keys through CAs for the purposes of spying.
Believe it or not but most browsers allow you to change the search provider, IE in particular makes this trivially easy (and is frankly a lot better at it than Chrome).
Honestly anyone who switched their browser/email client/word processor because of the "NSA spying scandal" really doesn't understand enough about technology to call themselves part of that community.