Now it just needs a semi-decent debugger.
I don't think it needs a debugger to be a success – among regular users.
Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
11–20 of 78 posts
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#12It's useless unless they stop supporting older IE versions...
They do, when the versions of Windows that shipped with those versions of IE lapse out of their support period. That doesn't stop people from running them. They're our computers, nobody, including Microsoft, gets to decide what we run on them. They can only strongly encourage us to upgrade.
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#13Now it just needs a semi-decent debugger.
The dev tools in IE8 are pretty darn good. I still use Firebug as my primary, but when I'm chasing an IE specific bug, the dev tools are pretty solid. I even prefer them to Chrome's.
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#14It's useless unless they stop supporting older IE versions...
Can we please stop bashing MS for the continued usage of IE6? For it's time IE6 was a fine browser (honest), and what exactly is so bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete?
If you're tired of supporting IE6 on your site, then stop. Foisting off the cost of transitioning everyone off IE6 onto a big company like MS is comforting but ultimately unrealistic and selfish.
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#15While I am happy too that the new version of IE is coming soon and it supports the latest standards, let us not forget that we all were saying the exact same thing when IE7 and IE8 came out:
This new release will help developers very much by supporting the latest standards.
The problems is not with supporting a subset of the latest standards. The problem is that the latest standards change over time and IE stays the same for 2-4 years.
In the long run, as a web developer I feel that IE7 or IE8 did not help me much in reducing the work I have to do to fix the compatibility issues. Now instead of just IE6, I have to fix issues with IE7 and IE8. (I have had issues where I could fix the problem using some extreme hacks in IE7 while there was no way to fix the issue in IE8. Later I was forced to use the EmulateIE7 meta-tag for the website, which was BTW developed this year. For the curious, the problem was similar to this: http://stackoverflow.com/q/1156985/184 )
Until unless some version of IE ships with an auto-update mechanism, I will just refrain myself from going gaga over the new CSS/HTML standards support of IE. The most important thing they have to fix is their release cycle (+ auto-update) and they seem to ignore this part for a long time. Now every time a new version of IE comes out, I don't know whether to smile or to cry.
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#16[deleted]
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#17Better standards support in IE is a boon for everyone; JS shivs and CSS resets only go so far in alleviating development pain. Still, I don't know that I would go so far as to say "back in the game" but, rather, "no longer so shockingly backward;" if only because IE is still chained to Windows. While it _is_ 90% of the desktop market, mobile platforms are making great strides into ubiquity and, at least anecdotally,…
"...folks tend to prefer homogeneity of their program set across devices." You must know different folks than I do. Most of the people I know that aren't developers wonder why the icon for "internet" has a big E on it. I can guarantee you that the grand majority of people don't realize that the web browser on their mobile device isn't the same as the web browser on their desktop. And if they do, they're unlikely to b…
Yes, it's very likely that I know different folks. That's why I hedged my comment by noting that it was purely anecdotal: I tend to associate with computer scientists, mathematicians and medievalists. The first and last groups tend to be most interested in homogeneity, in my experience.
Besides, if we're to say that IE is "back in the game" then surely we should count only those who make a conscious decision to use IE; otherwise we're using vastly different terms.
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#18Someone has drawn a lot of inspiration from Chrome. But seriously, I love the minimalistic interface of chrome and IE9 being surprisingly similar to it is a very good reason for me switch back.
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#19Now it needs a decent js engine (js/html5 canvas is sort of slow right now) and more space for tabs (lemme put them into the titlebar or below the address bar forchrissake).
Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game
#20While I am happy too that the new version of IE is coming soon and it supports the latest standards, let us not forget that we all were saying the exact same thing when IE7 and IE8 came out: This new release will help developers very much by supporting the latest standards. The problems is not with supporting a subset of the latest standards. The problem is that the latest standards change over time and IE stays the…
They have auto-update. Usually disabled, because people somehow hate windows update, and corporate clients don't really want weird-application-breaking updates unless THEY decide they want it. So, whatever auto-update mechanism MS puts in place, people will break it.