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Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

The difference between IIS of today and IIS of 2020 could be very much like the difference between IE 6 and IE 11

As a Microsoft developer with two MCSD certifications and an MCDBA certification, I actually laughed at this. IE11 is certainly better than IE6, but I find it unusable comparable to its modern day competition.

Abysmal plugin support, none of the nice usability features of Chrome (ex: Paste and Go on address bar, right-click Search Google for highlighted text, etc) and more leads me to believe Microsoft should give up with IE and start over with an IE branded version of Webkit or heck even Chromium. They could continue their Xbox marketing and call it Internet Explorer One and actually dominate the browser wars again. Leave the old IE classic on there for the small percentage of people that need ActiveX support (blech).

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Web apps developer here, in terms of standards/proposed standards support, the situation is much, much, much better than it was with IE7/8/9/to a lesser extent 10. We develop primarily against chrome, and IE11-specific behavior (measured by # of defects) is less common than firefox-specific behavior, which is less common than IE10 specific behavior.

The plugin support may suck, the dev tools may suck, but in terms of the browser itself, it is much more capable than what they've had in the past.

Hmm, as a touch user my view is very different. Chrome's support for touchscreens is almost non-existant, while IE's touch version works even better than mobile safari on the ipad. I guess it's in the eye of the beholder. To be fair, I do use chrome on my non-touch laptops.

In terms of developers, that's a tiny change. Our users are using IE11 whether we want them to or not, but the massive effort they've put into bringing up the engine to speed with gecko, webkit/blink, is absolutely necessary to demonstrate on their other products before I would ever considering using it as a development platform.

Microsoft has definitely been putting its money where its mouth is w/r/t developers recently, and that's what they SHOULD be focusing on.

All of your complaints seem to be UI features. Swapping out the rendering engine for Webkit wouldn't fix any of them.

Developer tools in IE11 are much better than Chromes. Chromes have always been confusing and tedious, inherited from Safari. Apple has never really known how to build good developer tools.

And so you know, ActiveX is already in Chrome, but they call it native client. Supposedly it makes a world of difference in the Google Kool-aid camp.

Does IE11 even support ActiveX? I didn't think that it did.

I tend to use IE11 because it is lighter on memory usage than Firefox or IE and my machine has only 4GB of RAM. Also, it has a lot of those features. By default, I have right click and search with Bing and there are many accelerators that do the same thing. Plus, I don't see how so-called limitations in the shell should lead to an underlying engine change. I think Trident works well, although the main frustrating thing is that it doesn't work with a lot of IE only sites ironically (my company's old version of Outlook webmail, my credit union, etc.).

As someone who has to use IE11 on a daily basis, I would have to concur. I absolutely LOATHE using it and I'm most certainly NOT a Microsoft basher. About the only plugins that I can find that are worth anything (read as: works) on IE11 are Lastpass and Fiddler. So the OPs comparison is not a very good one.

Using IE 11 out of the box on a newly purchased windows 8 machine crashed on me. Continuously. It was the first application I had to start for windows authentication. I had to download the full chrome installer to get through the registration process that the vendor of the os and their browser couldn't. IE 11 is pretty bad.

>none of the nice usability features of Chrome (ex: Paste and Go on address bar, right-click Search Google for highlighted text, etc)

FYI IE has search X for highlighted text via accelerators, first introduced in IE8, though I'm not sure a search accelerator existed back then. It certainly exists now.

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