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Comment by TheSisb2 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like they are. To those people down voting this comment because it comes off as a snark, it has some merit. Web developers need a new machine just to test the new IE. We already have to use multiple VMs or some other solution to test IE6-11 since you can't have more than one IE installed at a time. This just makes web development that much more difficult since now if a bug is reported in the new IE the engineer who is assigned that ticket needs access to that environment. I really hope the Microsoft team gets the hint and has one IE that is universal, across all OSs, with continued updates (Like Firefox or Chrome). It's very rare that you actually need to dive into Firefox versions or Chrome versions, but every IE issue needs the version listed specifically.

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There's three points I'd like to address about your comment:

1. I'm not sure what you mean by saying Microsoft should be "universal, across all OSs" about them releasing their new browser with their new OS. It's completely reasonable for MS to make the break with their bad browser design to occur at an OS boundary, since what was made their design exceptionally bad was largely coupling of components in to the OS.

2. You're just being completely unfair talking about the versions. The answer is just that Microsoft uses different version schemes than Google and Mozilla with regards to browsers. Your comparison about the gaps in IE compatibility would be like saying Chrome 30 isn't the same as Chrome 20. In your comment, you're comparing different sized steps, based on the assumption that an integer is a reasonable unit to compare the numbers based on. Shame that version numbers aren't numbers in that sense that that tactic doesn't work.

3. Continual updates pushed to the browser already happens under Microsoft's suggested running of Windows -- both minor upgrades (which are the equivalent of the Chrome and FF upgrades you reference), and the suggestion for major upgrades. It just doesn't happen across the board right away because of IT policies in place. This is a concession to major corporate clients who don't want tens of thousands of copies of their software across the globe randomly changing at the behest of some other company, and prefer to manage their own upgrades.

It's because the logic is backward from the "bad thing" that MS was doing. Microsoft was trying IE in with Windows in a way that was perceived as unfair because of the dominance of the operating system. This turned out to be unwarranted anyway, because it just turned out the only thing preventing other browsers from "winning" was being better. Also that browsers aren't really worth as monetarily as everyone thought they would be at the time.

This is the opposite. Edge requires windows 10. Complaining about new software having a dependency on something, is a bit odd. But this isn't even that. It's software built for a target platform. When you design software you pick hardware and OSes to support. Sometimes older versions are cut, just like older versions of Android don't get all the latest updates to Chrome.

Additionally, it turns out that most commercial OSes are going to be tied in with the OS, and consumers seem select OSes/devices that package the basics like this.

With modern.ie, you get free testing VMs and screenshots of any website rendered in IE across many devices. To test Safari on Windows, Apple provides you with many less options (certainly no free browser testing OSX VMs!).

They're going above and beyond to make up for past mistakes, for that I'm grateful.

OSX VMs... Now there's an idea.

I'd be more than willing to pay a large premium for an officially supported version of OSX that runs in VMware/Virtualbox/Hyper-V/etc. But I suppose it probably isn't in Apple's best interests to offer one.

It exists now, you just need to run it on an OS X machine running OS X + Fusion to be legal.

I have vagrant vm's for OS X back to 10.7. You might be able to run esx on a mac then use vm's that way but I have no idea. In either case what you want has existed for some time.

I should have been more specific. I was hoping for an OS X VM that runs on host OSes other than OS X.

Technically possible but against the licensing.

I didn't really see the original comment as "hateful". It's a legitimate point.

You're right, I've removed the line from my post.

> Web developers need a new machine just to test the new IE

False.

http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/

A Virtual Machine is the machine I meant, sorry.

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