

Why I'm not happy about IE9 - stefanp
http://stefanp.tumblr.com/post/1131008920/not-happy-about-ie9

======
shin_lao
There are many things I dislike in this article.

The first thing is this primal "everything microsoft does is evil" reaction.
The author tries to rationalize, but in the end it's just "well IE9 is bad
because it can be good for Microsoft".

The use of fallacies such as "most of them are probably Microsoft fan boys" is
also quite irritating. People disagree with you? Fanboys! Blinds! Fools!
Heretics!

Then, the article ends with the strange argument "IE9 should be cross
platform". Should Microsoft port all their clients to other plaftorms? The
goal with IE9 is to provide Windows with a as good as possible browser.

Yes Microsoft did play the embrace and extend game and we should thank them,
because frankly, IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then. The world
changed and I don't think such approach would make sense now.

The real thing to be angry about is when they decided to stop development on
IE.

~~~
powrtoch
I would fully expect a higher percentage of "fanboys" in the population of IE9
users, given simply that IE9 is just a beta. The crowd is basically limited to
technophiles running Windows. Not that this is the same as "fanboy", but I
would expect a significant correlation.

And you don't have to believe MS is evil to know that they are still pulling
these Windows power-grabs. Windows promised Mac compatibility with
Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC support in v 2.0 just a year later
(leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).

I don't think MS is any more "evil" than any other tech company (just worse at
PR maybe), but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways, you can't
blame people for expecting them to still be up to their old games.

~~~
brudgers
>Windows promised Mac compatibility with Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC
support in v 2.0 just a year later (leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).

The writing was on the wall.

Apple stopped supporting PowerPC six months later.

------
forkqueue
Who benefits from IE9 being available for other platforms?

Not users. What would the ability to run IE9 add to the Linux or Mac desktop?
Another web browser? Do we really need one?

Not Microsoft, who would have to invest massive amounts of effort into porting
it, and large parts of the Windows codebase too.

Honestly, I wonder if the author of this article was deliberately trying to
think of something to criticise about IE9, and this was the best he could do.

For non-web developers who use non-Windows operating systems, IE9 is an
irrelevance. For web developers who use any operating system, IE9 has to be a
good thing, because it means more browsers out there that are closer to the
standards.

~~~
stefanp
Hey ! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.

I'm sad that you think I was trying to come up with something - I just wrote
about this strange (but honnest !) feeling I got, as people talking in nice
terms about IE hasn't happenned in a while.

In fact I don't think I'm criticizing IE itself at all.

Perhaps I could re-phrase my point more simply: I don't think IE 9's standards
support means "the web wins" in the long run, since IE is still tied to
Windows for strategic reasons.

You're of course right that it's a good thing for web devs right now, though.

~~~
fname
OK, but you still never really answered the question. What's the benefit of
having IE available to other platforms? How does say, a Mac user, benefit from
having IE9 available for download to them over Safari?

~~~
powrtoch
Simple enough isn't it?

They don't benefit _now_ from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just
as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more
Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a
useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.

However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do
this. Not because they're evil, but just because _why bother_?

------
hash550
Really silly article - I can't believe this made front page on HN. How many
Linux users would use Internet Explorer? How many Mac users would use Internet
Explorer 9? Probably not many, almost certainly not enough to justify the cost
in time and dollars to Microsoft, and assuredly not the author of this post,
who seems to just need to find something to pick on Microsoft about. I thought
_those_ types died out long ago. I'm neither an MS/Mac or Linux fanboy. As a
web developer, I've used Windows & Linux professionally, and developed sites
to work on PC, Mac, and Linux browsers (as many of us have), and IMO, we don't
need more OS/browser combinations to contend with; instead we need the
browser/OS combinations that we do have to behave in a standards compliant
manner across those OS/browser combinations. IE9 is a strong step in that
direction for Microsoft.

~~~
TheBranca18
I know for me not having to boot up VirtualBox to test that everything works
fine in IE would be a boon not a problem. But yeah I'm not seeing where it
really benefits MS here at all.

------
niyazpk
IE for other platforms? No Please. There are at least a few niche mac/linux
websites which you can build without worrying about cross-browser issues. You
introduce IE and the whole echo-system lags behind.

Further, there may be reasons why IE is not so portable to other platforms.
Considering the fact that IE9 is not currently (and probably will never be)
available for even Windows XP, I don't think that a cross-platform version is
a realistic expectation.

IIRC, IE is an integral part of the Windows OS (for whatever
business/architectural reasons) and this means that producing a Linux/Mac
version may be more work that you think it is.

------
pierrefar
The core argument is that IE9 is so good that it might make people like
Windows and stop using Linux, and that's bad because obviously MS will abuse
its new found web browsers market share.

By that argument, with IE9 making web developers lives happy, and much more
importantly, making users' lives happy with a decent default browser on the
most popular OS are bad things.

------
d4nt
Why do Microsoft benefit from having a good browser? This article says the
only reason is to protect Window's market share and that will inevitably lead
to MS doing something evil with it's OS market share.

Two things occur to me: 1\. Windows still has a dominant market share, if they
were going to do evil I don't see what's stopping them 2\. Having a good
browser might protect their browser market share but I'm not convinced it
protects their OS market share. Maybe if IE was way way better than anything
else it would stop people going to Mac OS, but it isn't and there are plenty
of other more significant barriers to changing your OS.

I think it's more plausible that their investing in browsers because they want
to help their online services market share, and having that search box default
to Bing on 50% of PCs is hugely valuable.

~~~
notahacker
Agree with the above and add in (3) Being known for bad browsers is
detrimental to sales of other products

------
mjv
I was under the impression that Microsoft is focusing on standards and web
experience now because the last time it used a browser for strategic
positioning with the operating systems market it got vilified or sued by
basically every country with electricity?

------
CountHackulus
I think the author is forgetting that IE used to run on Mac OS a long time
ago. Before Safari came out, or was any good, on MacOS you had the choice of
either Netscape, IE5, or Opera, and honestly, IE5 was the best of the bunch at
the time.

------
kia
It sounds like a conspiracy theory - make IE standards complaint -> get the
market share -> introduce new nonstandard features.

PS Safari runs on linux only under Wine as far as I know.

~~~
stefanp
Hmm conspiracy theory... Nope, Microsoft is a for-profit company with a huge
platform that might be slipping into irrelevance.

They're playing the cards they have at any given time - when it means
supporting standards, they do that. And when they're totally dominant, they
tend to set the standards.

I'm not even suggesting it might be intentional - the IE team and the MS top
management don't necessarily have the same long-term goals is all.

Maybe the IE team would even love to go cross platform and compete _as a
browser_ and not as a part of a larger platform.

------
zmmmmm
The reason to be unhappy about IE9 is that it won't run on XP. That means it
is essentially meaningless for 90% of the web developers on the planet for all
practical purposes.

~~~
powrtoch
Just because it's meaningless the day it hits the shelves doesn't mean it will
be meaningless forever. As the XP users are slowly forced to upgrade, the
market will lose IE6/7 users and gain IE9+ users. It's not a license to ignore
IE7 right away, but it's still _progress_.

------
kylechafin
Back in IE6's day browsers were on the desktop, and that's about it. Now that
browsers run on a whole host of devices, dominating the desktop browser market
isn't the whole ballgame.

It feels unlikely that anyone will ever dominate the browser market like that
again.

