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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

Let's not miss the point here. IE11 will be massively easier to support than IE8 or 9. Old versions are disappearing relatively more quickly. There are fewer random impossible-to-debug quirks. Flexbox is becoming a viable option.

Microsoft is moving in line with the rest of the browsing world and we get to complain about things like favicons and event.detail bugs. In a few years, you might not even have to write IE-specific styles at all.

So sure, get upset about idiosyncrasies. But at the end of the day, doing good development is getting much easier.

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Just to be clear, the rest of the browser world offers modern browsers across a wide array of operating systems. Microsoft can't even be bothered to offer a modern browser across more than two of their own Operating Systems.

Chrome spans at least 7(And that's a conservative estimate) Operating Systems. Firefox the same. And both update in a sane manner.

It's nice that Microsoft offers a good solution to the 5% of users on the cutting edge, but they are still ludicrously behind the curve.

>Just to be clear, the rest of the browser world offers modern browsers across a wide array of operating systems. Microsoft can't even be bothered to offer a modern browser across more than two of their own Operating Systems.

Keep in mind the rest of the two browsers aren't tightly integrated with any OS, thus can enjoy the flexibility what IE can't.

Maybe IE shouldn't be so tightly integrated with the OS.

As my father used to say: "'Doc, it hurts when I do this.' 'Well, don't do that!'"

Why can't IE be released in a form that is not so tied to the OS, and leave the old IE bits where they lie? In XP, for example, they could leave the rotting old IE8 guts in, and release a standalone IE11 that opens instead of IE8.

Of course, I would much rather they just exit the browser market entirely. They keep embarrassing themselves over and over again. While new releases are (finally) somewhat modern, there are still incredibly frustrating new bugs with every release that take years to get fixed, holding the web back again and again.

And we're not even mentioning Safari, I guess.

The Safari picture is a bit more... complicated. The latest version of Safari only supports Mavericks(I believe?), but 93% of all online Macs are eligible for the free upgrade to Mavericks.

Even with IE11, I still have four VMs I have to run to effectively support IE.

Flexbox is still pretty far from a viable option, unless you don't care about multiline (in which case, go for it).

Yes, I'm hoping this brings the <IE9 market down to negligible.

I'm afraid it won't. If anything it's just one more browser to have to worry about.

All the installations of IE7 and IE8 in enterprise/healthcare aren't going to budge just because a shiny new IE is out. I don't know what it's going to take for that segment to truly go to zero.

In my market (healthcare, mostly in the US):

  IE7 throughput: 1x;
  IE8: 4x;
  IE9: 0.6x;
  IE10: 0.5x;
  IE11: doesn't register.

IE8 is the most widely used browser, followed closely behind by Safari 7 on iPhone. After that comes Chrome 30 on Windows.

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