
Five Things IE9 is (Actually) Doing Right - aj
http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/five-things-ie9-is-actually-doing-right/
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makecheck
At this point, I don't even want IE to be improved. Microsoft has immense
resources at its disposal, and I would prefer to see that effort devoted
towards truly new problems in computing.

Simply put, we finally have a number of incredibly good web browsers, and most
of them run on Windows. Microsoft should embrace one of these, and stop
wasting time and money (both its own, and that of developers who continue to
have to test IE). Even a great IE is still yet another IE, that must be
supported or not, and this effect multiplies across all the web pages in the
world. A new IE contributes nothing useful at this point, that wouldn't be
achieved by having Windows Update auto-install a Firefox, a Chrome or a
Safari.

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aj
If this is what should happen, then eventually will it not reduce competition?
And if other browser developers thought this way too, it would ultimately
stall the innovation in browser development.

I think they are going the right way with IE9:

* Sticking to standards (at least claimed as of now) * Not creating proprietary APIs (hopefully. I'm not sure about this) * Improving speed * Rapid iterations of the browser,

all this _while_ keeping an eye on security is a good thing for the industry
as a whole since it keeps browsers competing with each other.

(NB. I'm not too trusting of MS but they seem to be behaving better than they
used to)

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ZeroGravitas
This is a poor example:

 _For example, they’ve publicly acknowledged on their blog that they will just
support the industry standard codec, H.264, when there are still debates of
what codec HTML5 video elements should use.

What’s so important about this particular example? It shows they’re being open
about where they stand on an issue, instead of leaving us guessing and
theorizing. Whether we like it or not, at least we get a chance to provide
feedback before the product launches._

So on the issue of Canvas support, Microsoft leave us guessing and send mixed
signals. But if they can torpedo their competitors, in this case Google,
Firefox and Chrome, then they're incredibly forthcoming about final decisions.

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pedalpete
Unfortunately, IE9 isn't shipping with Windows 7 Mobile so the 'media query
module' won't be effective until they get IE9 on Win7mo.

I think one of the biggest issues with IE (and why we see so many old IE
browsers) is that for a while, they weren't updating browsers regularly.

It looks like they may have turned a corner on this, as it seems IE8 & IE9 are
coming out at a decent rate.

Though that could be because the technologies are changing so quickly and IE
is just trying to keep up.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
They've not turned the corner on this, they've announced that anyone stuck on
XP is also stuck on IE8 (a.k.a the new IE6).

Instead of waiting until after the obvious problem occurs and then moaning
about it creatively like the web developer community did with IE6 there should
be a proactive campaign starting now.

Anyone who advocates users upgrade from IE6 should check if they're running XP
and push heavily for any other browser than IE8 if so. It's not like IE8 even
counts as a modern browser right now, but at least on Vista or 7 you could
hope they'll be auto-updated to IE9.

