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Comment by shin_lao | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

“but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways,”

Which is exactly what they’ve been doing the past two releases. IE7 was a sincere attempt at catching up in the CSS department and get with the program on web standards adherence/compliance. IE8 was a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with the JavaScript side of things. IE9 is a sincere attempt at getting up to speed with HTML5 and CSS3, and whilst they aren’t yet including some of the things we may personally wish to see most (e.g. CSS Transitions), claiming they have yet to “change their ways” is nothing more than an unhelpful attempt at putting Microsoft in the “evil“ corner.

Microsoft themselves have long been trying to get people to upgrade from IE6 and Windows XP. Sure, part of that is just for their own business purposes, but at the same time they honestly want to help the web forward—the current state of affairs hurts them more than us, these days. There is no chance they’ll ever go back to dominating the industry like they did in the late ’90s and early ’00s, because of the steady “re-mergence” of the Mac and the myriad mobile platforms we’re collectively shifting to. All they can do now is to provide a browser on the Windows platform that isn’t so far behind on things that it becomes a compelling reason for people to leave Windows itself behind. And to do that, they know they have to play along in the standards game, which has long taken over the industry.

>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.

> ... IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then.

Cannot agree more. People tend to forget things like AJAX came from IE.

But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently. If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.

> But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently.

Agreed.

> If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.

Huh?

If by "mistake", you mean trying to get a mail client to run well over the web ...

As someone who was using "AJAX" quite extensively using hidden IFRAMEs and then in 1999, XMLHttpRequest -- long before a Johnny-come-lately coined AJAX, I had to comment on this-

http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/How-I-Came-To-Despise-AJAX...

It was first added "to" Internet Explorer by the MSXML team (by a guy sneaking in some functionality for the Exchange Outlook Web Access team). It was actually a great example of the power of modular "ActiveX" (which in that case was abused to mean simply COM) scripting -- they didn't need to release a new browser to support it. Of course there are endless downsides to reusing a plug-in structure that had little controls or security, however it did have some merits.

> The goal with IE9 is to provide Windows with a as good as possible browser.

That doesn't ring true. We already have four other excellent web browsers on Windows, as mentioned by the article. All are relatively similar in terms of features and under active development by great teams. At best, Microsoft could only hope to very marginally improve on what already is available for free. So a nice standards-compliant IE9 will not make Windows any more or less attractive an OS than it already is.

Browsers are expensive and onerous to create. What could Microsoft's motivation possibly be to produce one for free, besides embrace-and-extend?

Browser is too strategic, you can't allow a third party to develop the one on your platform.

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