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IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

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Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#111

Post by ElliotH »

sjs wrote: post #68
maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Do geeks always need something to bitch about? Microsoft is at least making an effort to do as most people wish, getting users to upgrade from IE6.

Your HN profile says you love technology and the Internet but your comment doesn't support that claim at all. We don't just want people off IE6, we want people on modern browsers. Everyone needs something to bitch about. You bitching about how geeks need something to bitch about is a prime example, not to mention all of us bitching about you bitching about our bitching.

Your HN profile says that you have a high karma and a high average comment score. This implies you know the culture of the site quite well. It would be really nice if you tried to uphold the quality of conversation by avoiding personal attacks.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#112

Post by SwellJoe »

Pahalial wrote: post #98
middus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is: I don't care if you run XP or Win7 (or Mac OS X or Ubuntu for that matter) because my software does not run on top of the OS but on top of a modern browsers. So the IE8/9 difference matters to me, the OS difference does not. Don't forget that most (or at least a lot of) people here on HN develop or run web apps.

Within the scope of this discussion, that's somewhat facetious. The main reason cited for wanting people to move off IE6 is security concerns rather than HTML5 support, and for good reason - I don't care whether people can use the latest-greatest version of gmail, I care whether they're unduly liable to become part of a botnet that can bring down gmail for everyone.

That's not my reason, and I've never once mentioned it. I don't care a bit about other people's security. It's an important issue, but life is short, and I've got other stuff to worry about.

My applications have to run in people's browsers...if there are a significant number of people using crappy old browsers (of which IE8 is one), it affects my life and my use of time.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#113

Post by [deleted] »

coderdude wrote: post #50
SwellJoe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow the Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera teams manage to provide a modern browser on Windows XP. This isn't about "finding something to complain about". I want a modern web, and I want Microsoft to get out of the way of that happening.

I think you're being a bit unreasonable here. IE9 relies on parts of Windows that just don't exist in XP. Windows XP is ancient by software standards. Sure, Chrome et al. work in all operating systems, but you're upset at Microsoft because they don't want to support an operating system that they want people off of already. It's their decision and I'm glad they want people to upgrade. People got mad because users didn…

[deleted]

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#114

Post by astrodust »

coderdude wrote: post #50
SwellJoe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow the Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera teams manage to provide a modern browser on Windows XP. This isn't about "finding something to complain about". I want a modern web, and I want Microsoft to get out of the way of that happening.

I think you're being a bit unreasonable here. IE9 relies on parts of Windows that just don't exist in XP. Windows XP is ancient by software standards. Sure, Chrome et al. work in all operating systems, but you're upset at Microsoft because they don't want to support an operating system that they want people off of already. It's their decision and I'm glad they want people to upgrade. People got mad because users didn…

For a company that makes billions of dollars every quarter, more cash than many small countries, thousands of times more than the Mozilla Foundation and Opera combined, it strikes me as pitiful that IE9 is still "coming".

Somehow Microsoft can make a word processor as extravagant as Word, but they can't make a standards compliant browser as good as Chrome? Either they're idiots or they're not taking it seriously. Priorities are wrong.

Microsoft is dead in the water and everyone knows it. The Ballmer dog and pony show is a disaster. I truly hope that Microsoft can have their post-Andy Grove Intel moment where they refocus on products that make sense instead of expensive, fruitless pursuits.

Intel went from making the ferociously hot, high-power Pentium 4 and the useless Itanium and nearly having their asses handed to them by AMD into being a world-class competitor with such incredible products like the i7 chip.

Get it together Microsoft.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#116

Post by Lennie »

coderdude wrote: post #51
rbanffy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IE8 is leaps and bounds better than IE6 A brick is leaps and bounds better than IE6 I learned not to attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence, but, sadly, incompetence alone cannot explain a company the size of Microsoft being unable to offer a modern standards-compliant browser.

>A brick is leaps and bounds better than IE6 That's why it's great news that Microsoft wants users to upgrade to at least IE8. They will have IE9 once they upgrade their ancient OS as well. We all know how you feel about Microsoft. Your comment being down-voted into oblivion at the bottom of this page is a good show of how you're approaching my comment. Microsoft is making good progress here.

With a bunch of webdevelopers we tried to give IE9 some complicated stuff and I have to tell you, it is really buggy.

It is just an other buggy browser in the series and it is way behind on the standards side of things. They are doing things other browsersmakers did in their release more then a year ago.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#117

Post by astrodust »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #14
rbanffy wrote: post #5

This is why I registered microsoftcountdown.com. It's not the browser the only thing we need to dump - we need to get rid of the whole company.

And replace it with what? Companies that will charge 30% of all the money for content that goes through their devices?

What's their take on XBox 360 games? Oh, yeah, about that.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#118

Post by patrickaljord »

coderdude wrote: post #40
SwellJoe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want them to upgrade to a modern browser. IE8 aint one.

IE8 is leaps and bounds better than IE6. In IE8 you barely even need to tweak sites to get them to look right. I'd be tickled pink if IE8 was all I had to worry about. IE9 is going to be much better than IE8 -- by leaps and bounds -- but it's still in beta. At least the release candidate is out. Some people are never satisfied and always need something to complain about. I'm sure you'll find something else once IE9 i…

> In IE8 you barely even need to tweak sites to get them to look right.

You're kidding, right?

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#119

Post by bzbarsky »

texel wrote: post #60
coderdude wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being a bit unreasonable here. IE9 relies on parts of Windows that just don't exist in XP. Windows XP is ancient by software standards. Sure, Chrome et al. work in all operating systems, but you're upset at Microsoft because they don't want to support an operating system that they want people off of already. It's their decision and I'm glad they want people to upgrade. People got mad because users didn…

That's exactly the point- since they're holding off on upgrading their OS, potentially for a much longer time, they won't even have the option of updating their web browser. An OS upgrade is a much more monumental decision than a browser upgrade, and the inertia is much greater. At any rate, the fact that IE9 can't backport parts of its OS dependencies is kind of an implementation detail. We're saying Webkit has no p…

Webkit has no problems providing an experience that the IE team thinks is subpar (in particular, lacks full 2d graphics acceleration).

Similar for Gecko: it's doing compositing acceleration on WinXP, but not 2d acceleration.

Now maybe the argument is that IE9 should support such a mode of operation. But by the same argument, Firefox should still have a supported PPC version of Firefox 4 (even though it's JIT can't generate PPC code, so JS would be interpreted and hence very slow). Some people _are_ making that argument, by the way, but the general consensus is that this sort of decision about what sort of quality they're willing to put their name on is up to the Mozilla project. Why does the IE team not get the same courtesy?

I realize that you may disagree with their quality metrics (e.g. you may think that a modern JS JIT is a must-have requirement for a modern web browser but 2d graphics acceleration is not). But it's not clear to me that this is obvious, or that this will even be true in a year.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#120

Post by bzbarsky »

alanh wrote: post #110
ryanwatkins wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you missed the articles here about about Microsoft's massive commitment to backward compatibility and why they do it? From just the other day : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281045 and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html Ditching the current rendering engine would break a ton of apps.

Those “web” apps are then already broken, by definition.

They are broken from the _user's_ perspective, yes.

They are not necessarily broken from the app developer's perspective.

Changing IE so as to break them would cause MS a good bit of grief (and depending on the contracts they have with people might cost them money directly).

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