I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past. As such, they have a higher bar to jump over if they want me to acknowledge that they have created a "modern" browser. They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. And only then will I even consider giving them a ounce of recognition.<p>Not that Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) cares what I think, but that's the price I've set in order for MS to pay off the debt it's worked up over the years as I wasted weeks, possibly months of my life getting things to work in their turd of a.... a.... a looking-at-the-web-kind-of-application-thing. I wont even call it a browser.<p>Or better yet, I wish IE was thrown away and forgotten about, and like Voldemort, it's name would only ever be heard in hushed whispers lest it's evil spirit be awoken. It would become a ghost story web developers tell their web developing kids; "Be standards compliant, or IE6 will come and get yoooOOOOU!".<p>But then I'm old and cranky. The kids will probably love IE19b Custard Pro Home Edition and they'll rally behind it to get IE back to the number 1 slot because it's somehow retro and cool, and I'll laugh in their spotty faces when IE regains it supremacy and Microsoft turns around and shits in their stupid faces all over again, and the internet becomes a desolate wasteland where Bing is the only search engine and the top hit is always an Encarta entry.<p>Wow, I'm in a special kind of a bad mood today.
I was at CES last year, and the showing of the IE team was my favorite part of the trip. They were a bunch of younger guys who basically said "We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things in our name. We're changing that, and we're here to tell you about it." They seemed like really cool dudes.<p>I even went over to the mall to try a Surface when they came out. Then, I realized Windows 8 is still Windows and walked out empty handed. The stuff MS is doing with Metro and touch is really interesting (as were tablet PCs before that), but I feel like they're still building on three decades of crufty sands. It's time for their System 9 -> OS X transition.
"By finally removing the evidence of past mistakes..."<p>I think it's worth pointing out that these removed bits aren't evidence of past mistakes at all. They're left over from a time before the standards were defined by the W3C. At this point, and it is about time, they should rightly be removed, and the standard/common way should prevail. That doesn't mean a given feature was rooted in a mistake.<p>I think the biggest issue is you should only target a given browser when you <i>have</i> to. Once in a while you come across a bug that only presents itself in a specific browser and version. A good thing about frequent/forced updates is you have to support older browsers less and less. Unfortunately XP was locked out at IE8, and Vista at IE9... Vista won't go away for at least 4-5 more years. I think the biggest danger in the older versions of IE tied to windows is that those people don't upgrade. It's just in the past 2 years that IE6 & IE7 can safely be ignored.<p>I remember the IE4-6 days... back then, IE was better... Where they deserve the vitriol is when it comes to letting their browsers stagnate for close to 6 years. And finally, with IE10/11 are they even catching up. It really bugs me that they put so much attention into accelerated canvas support before they finished a lot of CSS features that are more likely to be used. Gradients for example, the old ie gradients + rounded corners is broken even IE9, not sure about IE10-11 as I've taken to using SVG gradients as they are more consistent everywhere.<p>It also sucks that running multiple versions of IE is pretty much impossible. ex: the scripting engine is always the newer version, so even using multiple IE's a live bug on the real version may not present itself.<p>I know how/why we are here, that said I still don't think that we should call decisions past that weren't thought of by anyone as mistakes at the time as such now. I remember the v4 browser days (IE4/NN4 not HTML4), it wasn't near as pleasant as now even with IE8-10.
If they change the UA, why didn't they take this opportunity to get rid of these ridiculously long UA's that mention competing browser brand names, and just make their UA string the following:<p>"Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0"
TL;DR<p>MS doesn't want isIE() javascript functions to return true for IE11. While feature detection is a better practice than browser detection, you can search for "Trident" in the user agent string instead of "MSIE" if you must.
That User-Agent isn't really valid.<p>It's the "like Gecko". If you only read the BNF, then okay, it's valid. But the various sections are supposed to have semantic meaning — they're supposed to be products with optional versions and comments. Like,<p><pre><code> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0)
</code></pre>
Means the product "Mozilla" with version "5.0", followed by a comment of "Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0". Thus their UA of…<p><pre><code> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) like Gecko
</code></pre>
…includes the products "Mozilla", "like" and "Gecko".<p>Like the article mentions, "like Gecko" has been done before:<p>> Safari was the first browser to add “like Gecko” so that anyone sniffing for “Gecko” in the user-agent string would allow the browser through.<p>And they put it in a comment, not as two separate products:<p>> AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko)<p>See <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt</a>.
I was impressed when I saw their well-crafted commercials explaining the new IE, but I was still a little skeptical. I wanted to see some real action on their part to compensate for all the development headaches IE has caused me.<p>With moves like this, it seems they're walking the talk.
The root of the problem is not IE specific behavior, but lack of auto-updating feature.<p>If MS doesn't remove a barrier between versions, nothing will change.
That's very good news. Microsoft often get a lot of criticism for their products, most on IE. But they are still able to make bold moves that go in the right directions. That's not the case for all companies their size.
this is good news. it will no longer stop IE users from visiting those sneaky sites who block users for using IE. it also makes it clear that Microsoft is finally serious about making a good browser that people WANT to use. now if they make their developer tools anywhere as good as firebug they'll have a winner. hiring some of the firebug team might be a good idea.
Really tired of all the different versions of IE. Why oh why can't it just be "Internet Explorer" without all these individual versions that pigeonhole themselves?
IE's "like Gecko" string is to more closely match WebKit's UA string (e.g. "... (KHTML, <i>like Gecko</i>) ..."), not Firefox's.
It's not a matter of the browser features anymore, but rather the company behind it. Say we all switch back to IE11 tomorrow... I am pretty sure Microsoft will abuse its power just like they did during IE6 era.
The problem with Internet Explorer is fragmentation and length of life for versions.<p>IE11 could be the greatest browser in the entire world, and it wouldn't matter until people are able to use it on Windows XP/7.
Correct me if I'm wrong. If a web developer is hell-bent on detecting ie, they could look for the presence of the activex API (like jQuery currently does in order to provide a uniform AJAX interface).
Well that's nice and all but removing any way to identify it's IE 11 sounds like a bad idea tome.
I don't quite thrust them to not make any more mistakes.