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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

Three requirements for me to consider IE again:

0. Fix the font rendering. Enough of this WPF/Metro blurry style crap.

1. Give me an addon/extension system so I can get vim bindings and blocking systems.

2. Fix the ugly, unfinished blocky UI around the tabs and address bar, and stop wasting so much space on the top window border. I know this sounds superficial, and it is, but IE just looks so ugly, or like an unfinished dev preview, and for some reason that bothers me.

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WPF font rendering was fixed in .NET 4 back in 2010.

IE10+ on Windows 8+, Office 2013+ on Windows 8+ and the Modern/Metro/Immersive environment on Windows 8+, on the other hand, are doomed to have poor font rendering thanks to their use of the Direct Manipulation APIs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/01/29/10589...

I doubt this will be fixed - the world is slowly moving towards high DPI screens where subpixel font smoothing isn't as important. For existing hardware, though, it stinks.

I don't notice it much in Office because the font sizes in use tend to be a bit larger. Whereas small fonts are much more common on the web, and the bad rendering is really noticeable.

What's the PPI of the display you're using? I don't have access to anything >200PPI to test on and I'm curious to know how much better it looks under those conditions. It would be nice to have a Cleartype toggle since the vast majority of current Windows consumers won't have a display that will make the "blurry" fonts look good.

I'm using normal screens with whatever the default DPI setting is. 1080 on a 12-20" depending on laptop or desktop.

Microsoft has been going on about high-dpi displays since 2003 (Longhorn PDC) and they aren't really around yet on Windows machines. So they absolutely should have this toggle, and set it to properly render unless the user has high-dpi.

This is just a stubborn thing they're doing. Similar to the ALL CAPS phase or the Win8 junk they went through. Or similar to how WPF had messed up font rendering until Visual Studio started using it.

I run 150 DPI on my desktop, 220 DPI on my laptop. High resolution screens are definitely around for Windows machines if you can pay the extra few hundred dollars for them. I'm not going back to low res displays, though I do much prefer OS X font smoothing for those screens.

Well it's 2015, and the only real X series ThinkPad maxes out at 1080p. So, yeah, I could go HiDPI and lose all the screen real-estate, but that seems like a poor tradeoff. I'd have to get a larger, more limited, device like the X1 (really, the only other option) to enjoy HiDPI without having a small desktop.

And, all things considered, I don't think hidpi is ready yet. ThinkPads already overheat and have shitty battery life. Having to handle 4x the pixels seems like it'll only hurt things. Though I must admit, I am always blown away when looking at the Macbook Retina screen.

Plenty of ultra books have HiDPI displays these days. It really is a better experience, even just for coding. I can't wait for 4X to become the standard so we don't have to ship duplicate bitmaps with everything.

Any recommendations on something as good as the old X series? Ultrabooks tend to have crap keyboards and no-button, Maclike clickpads. And many are considerably larger than 12", even when they do strange things to get "thin".

No, frankly I can't stand anything other than a Macbook. I heard the new XPS 13 is supposed to be really good, but I haven't been able to try one yet.

I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just include a WebKit or even Chromium fork right in the OS.

They could have > 90% browser market share again.

Because of legacy. Spartan based on the old Trident engine, but refactored and without "compatibility" modes and quirks (as they promise). They need Trident to render old sites. Just imagine how huge is amount of old IE-only sites in corp. segment.

Completely true. But is it so hard to imagine a fallback instead of a rewrite / refactor? I mean, aren't you tired to develop for X renderers? Couldn't Microsoft adopt something like the Khronos group for once and stop fucking around with proprietary bullshit?

Competition is good, it brings invocation. A monotone world would be very boring.

This is not a universal law of the world. There are times when using a common technology is better.

In this specific case why is "competition good" and who cares about boring when it comes to developer's productivity. Being able to code against one browser and being certain that it works properly in all browsers would be a tremendously wonderful thing for everyone.

To sacrifice that ideal vision so that things aren't "boring" doesn't seem worth it to put it kindly.

We had developer productivity with IE5. But it's also good to get innovation on browser platforms. Maybe it's possible that a single browser, today, would get all the love and continued development. But it seems more likely that without pressure to improve (even if it means improving runtime perf/memory usage) we could easily see stagnation.

Then you get no one trying different js engines, or trying different approaches rendering.

IE6 was pretty much a monopoly, how well did that go?

Webkit does not include the JS engine. And the different approaches to rendering is also incorrect. Google has Blink which is - for all intents and purposes - Webkit.

IE6 was closed source, and under control of one company. Webkit is open source with contributions from many major organizations.

A) That would probably be politically unpalatable within MS

B) That would definitely be a bad move for consumers. Monoculture is bad, and even though a fork would allow them to go their own way to some degree their existing codebase is probably more pliable to what they have in mind.

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