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Why I'm not happy about IE9

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Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#11

Post by d4nt »

Why do Microsoft benefit from having a good browser? This article says the only reason is to protect Window's market share and that will inevitably lead to MS doing something evil with it's OS market share.

Two things occur to me: 1. Windows still has a dominant market share, if they were going to do evil I don't see what's stopping them 2. Having a good browser might protect their browser market share but I'm not convinced it protects their OS market share. Maybe if IE was way way better than anything else it would stop people going to Mac OS, but it isn't and there are plenty of other more significant barriers to changing your OS.

I think it's more plausible that their investing in browsers because they want to help their online services market share, and having that search box default to Bing on 50% of PCs is hugely valuable.

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#12

Post by fname »

stefanp wrote: post #7
forkqueue wrote: post #4

Who benefits from IE9 being available for other platforms? Not users. What would the ability to run IE9 add to the Linux or Mac desktop? Another web browser? Do we really need one? Not Microsoft, who would have to invest massive amounts of effort into porting it, and large parts of the Windows codebase too. Honestly, I wonder if the author of this article was deliberately trying to think of something to criticise abo…

Hey ! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. I'm sad that you think I was trying to come up with something - I just wrote about this strange (but honnest !) feeling I got, as people talking in nice terms about IE hasn't happenned in a while. In fact I don't think I'm criticizing IE itself at all. Perhaps I could re-phrase my point more simply: I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in th…

OK, but you still never really answered the question. What's the benefit of having IE available to other platforms? How does say, a Mac user, benefit from having IE9 available for download to them over Safari?

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#13

Post by notahacker »

d4nt wrote: post #11

Why do Microsoft benefit from having a good browser? This article says the only reason is to protect Window's market share and that will inevitably lead to MS doing something evil with it's OS market share. Two things occur to me: 1. Windows still has a dominant market share, if they were going to do evil I don't see what's stopping them 2. Having a good browser might protect their browser market share but I'm not co…

Agree with the above and add in (3) Being known for bad browsers is detrimental to sales of other products

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#14

Post by mjv »

I was under the impression that Microsoft is focusing on standards and web experience now because the last time it used a browser for strategic positioning with the operating systems market it got vilified or sued by basically every country with electricity?

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#15

Post by woogley »

shin_lao wrote: post #9

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…

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

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

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#16

Post by zmmmmm »

The reason to be unhappy about IE9 is that it won't run on XP. That means it is essentially meaningless for 90% of the web developers on the planet for all practical purposes.

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#17

Post by ecaradec »

woogley wrote: post #15
shin_lao wrote: post #9

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…

> ... 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.

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#18

Post by powrtoch »

shin_lao wrote: post #9

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…

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.

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#19

Post by kylechafin »

Back in IE6's day browsers were on the desktop, and that's about it. Now that browsers run on a whole host of devices, dominating the desktop browser market isn't the whole ballgame.

It feels unlikely that anyone will ever dominate the browser market like that again.

Re: Why I'm not happy about IE9

#20

Post by powrtoch »

fname wrote: post #12
stefanp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey ! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. I'm sad that you think I was trying to come up with something - I just wrote about this strange (but honnest !) feeling I got, as people talking in nice terms about IE hasn't happenned in a while. In fact I don't think I'm criticizing IE itself at all. Perhaps I could re-phrase my point more simply: I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in th…

OK, but you still never really answered the question. What's the benefit of having IE available to other platforms? How does say, a Mac user, benefit from having IE9 available for download to them over Safari?

Simple enough isn't it?

They don't benefit now from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.

However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because why bother?

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