Why I'm not happy about IE9

There are many things I dislike in this article.<p>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".<p>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!<p>Then, the article ends with the strange argument "IE9 should be cross platform". Should Microsoft port all their clients to other plaftorms? The goal with IE9 is to provide Windows with a as good as possible browser.<p>Yes Microsoft did play the embrace and extend game and we should thank them, because frankly, IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then. The world changed and I don't think such approach would make sense now.<p>The real thing to be angry about is when they decided to stop development on IE.

Who benefits from IE9 being available for other platforms?<p>Not users. What would the ability to run IE9 add to the Linux or Mac desktop? Another web browser? Do we really need one?<p>Not Microsoft, who would have to invest massive amounts of effort into porting it, and large parts of the Windows codebase too.<p>Honestly, I wonder if the author of this article was deliberately trying to think of something to criticise about IE9, and this was the best he could do.<p>For non-web developers who use non-Windows operating systems, IE9 is an irrelevance. For web developers who use any operating system, IE9 has to be a good thing, because it means more browsers out there that are closer to the standards.

Really silly article - I can't believe this made front page on HN. How many Linux users would use Internet Explorer? How many Mac users would use Internet Explorer 9? Probably not many, almost certainly not enough to justify the cost in time and dollars to Microsoft, and assuredly not the author of this post, who seems to just need to find something to pick on Microsoft about. I thought <i>those</i> types died out long ago. I'm neither an MS/Mac or Linux fanboy. As a web developer, I've used Windows &#38; Linux professionally, and developed sites to work on PC, Mac, and Linux browsers (as many of us have), and IMO, we don't need more OS/browser combinations to contend with; instead we need the browser/OS combinations that we do have to behave in a standards compliant manner across those OS/browser combinations. IE9 is a strong step in that direction for Microsoft.

IE for other platforms? No Please. There are at least a few niche mac/linux websites which you can build without worrying about cross-browser issues. You introduce IE and the whole echo-system lags behind.<p>Further, there may be reasons why IE is not so portable to other platforms. Considering the fact that IE9 is not currently (and probably will never be) available for even Windows XP, I don't think that a cross-platform version is a realistic expectation.<p>IIRC, IE is an integral part of the Windows OS (for whatever business/architectural reasons) and this means that producing a Linux/Mac version may be more work that you think it is.

The core argument is that IE9 is so good that it might make people like Windows and stop using Linux, and that's bad because obviously MS will abuse its new found web browsers market share.<p>By that argument, with IE9 making web developers lives happy, and much more importantly, making users' lives happy with a decent default browser on the most popular OS are bad things.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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?

I think the author is forgetting that IE used to run on Mac OS a long time ago. Before Safari came out, or was any good, on MacOS you had the choice of either Netscape, IE5, or Opera, and honestly, IE5 was the best of the bunch at the time.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory - make IE standards complaint -&#62; get the market share -&#62; introduce new nonstandard features.<p>PS Safari runs on linux only under Wine as far as I know.

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.

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