I think you're being very optimistic. But I like it.

Web sockets damnit, you forgot web sockets!

The only thing I'm interested in hearing from Microsoft is a plan to get users away from IE6 and to IE7/8 sooner. I'm all for pushing on towards IE9, but I suspect most people could do without 4 versions of IE to test with, especially when IE6 and IE7 have so many remaining legacy issues.

One of my personal rules when thinking about Microsoft is to simply assume that all its software is vaporware until it's actually been released; makes life SO much simpler.

Ben: if your goal is to get people migrating away from IE6, pushing Firefox seems to have the best results :)

Sorry to burst your bubble Ben Basson, but IE6 will be supported till 2012 as it ships with XP and XP support has been extended till 2012.

Dudes, don't you get that this guy's joking? MS' only philosophy is lock-in. How could they possibly act against themselves? They're not in the business of courting web developers; they may have lost browser share but they haven't shed the "bright" minds behind the philosophy. So rest assured.

The abandonment wasn't 2001 through 2006, it was mid-2001 through mid-2004 (from the external point of view). XP Service Pack 2 shipped in 2004. This included an updated IE6 which was, effectively, IE6.5 since about eight months of improvements went into it centered on security issues (which was the point of XP SP2 in many ways). Microsoft chose not to rev the version number but IE6SP2 and IE6 are very much not the same beasts.

Sorry, but I have to ask: Is this sarcasm or do you really mean it this way? Microsoft will never do such a huge leap forward in just one version; it would probably be at minimum 2012 or Windows 8 before we ever see support for full HTML5 features, even though they joined the workgroup. And even if that miracle should happen, it wouldn't be of any use for business websites/applications before Windows 7 extended life-time ends (because there always will be the default IEs that came with the original OS revision on companies; the larger the worse).

I highly doubt something like this is happening and even if it would it would be like no change at all.

Al, do you buy Stephen Sinofsky's claim at PDC today that IE 9 has only been under development for 3 weeks?

- A

For your information:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx

That's probably crap unless he's finessing semantics. Generally, as soon as the previous version of IE is baking for final release, the developers move on to the next project and start checking stuff into a fork of the code. It isn't like they pay the IE devs to sit idle for months between projects.

Al, my thoughts exactly. Presumably the IE team finished most of their work on IE 8 this time last year and unless MS is a lot richer than I imagined them to be, those people haven't been on paid vacation for the last 10 or 11 months.

- A

Microsoft now has more than 60 developers working on IE, and this doesn't even include those work on the internal text layout components it uses, and so forth.

As David said you are very optimistic. Even if IE implements all the mentioned features, Firefox and Chrome will stay one step ahead and bring the market share of IE below 50% in a year. [One reason for 60-70% of IE market share is some outdated websites (like government websites) which have IE specific code.]

As David said you are very optimistic. Even if IE implements all the mentioned features, Firefox and Chrome will stay one step ahead and bring the market share of IE below 50% in a year. [One reason for 60-70% of IE market share is some outdated websites (like government websites) which have IE specific code.]

Yay! Four supported versions of IE! Life doesn't get any better than that!

Just who the hell are they trying to peddle this shit to anyway? Seriously?
They couldn't/didn't get IE6 users to use 7, or 7 users to 8, or 6 to 8, now of course I knew that there would eventually be a 9, but for whom? Seriously? Who/what is their target? Their users don't care about what their using or why it is important to upgrade because MS has never made a good enough or any effort to educate them as to why they should and need to upgrade. Mozilla goes out of its way to do that. IE users are just freakin' status quo droids.
So again, who's the target? Who benefits? I don't understand. Web developers? Why, to have yet another browser to consider when writing a new site, page, or feature? Remove one or two of the other versions of IE and you'll really be doing me a favor.

Why hasn't MS just pulled the trigger and created a browser that works with the Internet and not one that the Internet has to work with and for?
Back to adoption, we just might have had something to be concerned about had MS launched a marketing campaign for IE8 like the one for Win 7 or even Bing. Buying up all of the keywords for Firefox and browser that Google hadn't grabbed for Chrome was a stupid idea and obviously not effective enough but hey, it's just disposable income.

MS hasn't gotten their users to use their latest browser (ever) or create a browser that doesn't put a drag on the progression of the Web because they still just don't freakin' have to.
They're arrogant. And while it's undeniable that the work that they've been doing on improving their browser over the past 5 years is directly due to the presence of Firefox, I believe that they still don't feel the heat enough to get off of their asses and get with the times as far as browsers are concerned or else, come on, it's Microsoft, 90+% of the World uses Windows and who has more dough than them, we'd see a good, modern browser that people would want to use not just have to use and just one that came with their PC if MS made a real effort.

I've been a Windows user for 14 years (about 8 of those using IE) and Mozilla products user for 5 and Mozilla has done more for me and the Internet in just the first few months of me discovering Mozilla than MS has done in nearly a decade and a half. A public benefit nonprofit organization that has asked nothing of me other than supporting the fair and right way of doing things and Internet equality for all.

I just don't give a shit about MS any longer. My days with them are numbered.

All those talking about supporting a large number of IE-versions and how IE6-share is the one that should be lowered.

brace yourself: IE9 will only be available for Vista and 7 (and 2008+ on the server).

So, people with XP (most of the IE6 users, their are some Windows 2000, maybe even Windows 98/ME/whatever, really small in comparison) won't be upgrading to IE9. It doesn't matter how fantastic it is (for the user), it won't happen. XP browser share is now 75%.

:-((

What are Mozilla's plans to get Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.0 users to adopt Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3.6 ?

For example is their gonna be a notifier in the next Firefox 3.0 security update saying: come on in, the water is fine, all your current extensions (you need it actually check it first) are supported by Firefox 3.5 ?

What are Mozilla's plans to get Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.0 users to adopt Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3.6 ?

For example is their gonna be a notifier in the next Firefox 3.0 security update saying: come on in, the water is fine, all your current extensions (you need it actually check it first) are supported by Firefox 3.5 ?

Why I dont use IE? Because the crappy shit takes +20 minutes to install _and_ it require a reboot after installation. REBOOT! Chrome, which is 50 times faster, takes aprox 1 minute to download AND install! Gah..

All in all, IE6 and Windows ME will be Microsoft's two primary reasons they will loose against companies like Google within 3-4 years time (and most likely be acquired by Page and Brin within 5-10 years).

I can understand why Microsoft is only offering an upgrade option for two operating systems. They made the decision to bury the browser deep in the operating system, they pretty much asked application developers to use it. Now there are tons of applications that use IE and have only been tested with one particular version of it. This means that any change to IE comes with an incredible testing burden - not only do they have to verify that all supported operating systems continue to work correctly with the update, they also have to test every popular application using the IE engine. I guess that by making a cut at Vista they can kick a number of applications out of the testing matrix (particularly the ones that were never really updated to run on Vista). But still, it's not surprising that their progress is so horribly slow.

Hello Asa,

Microsoft is still very much disappointing and frustrating for users and for web developers.

Microsoft listens to judges in courts of law, to dept. of justice, to Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission, to MS share holders, to profitability projections ... and to browser market share stats. Microsoft does not necessarly listen (and often does not listen) to ordinary Windows users, to web developers, to web standards advocacy groups.

None of what Dean Hachamovitch announced recently wrt an IE9 build is truly great or remarkable achievement or worth mentioning:

- Microsoft IE Team improved the script engine performance in an IE9 build... but they still are last among modern browsers, even with that IE9 build

- Microsoft IE Team sped up graphics and text rendering with Direct2D and DirectWrite

- Microsoft IE Team claims standards progress but going from 20 to 32 in acid3 is very far from relevant progress in all of mature and relevant W3C web standards: a score of 32 in *that* test is even less than what the worst score (40 by Safari - v. 3.1 I believe) was among modern browsers when acid3 was released

- border-radius implementation: nice but a very cosmetic CSS3 property .. and every other modern browser have been supporting border-radius for months or years.

Some of Microsoft's own decisions have huge impact on web developers.

1- because of Vista's fiasco, the XP version lifecycle support has been extended. This means IE 6 will be supported for until 2012. And many so far said that it will be crazy/nonsensical having to support 4 distinct IE versions with each of them having its singular batch of bugs, flaws, shortcomings, etc.

2- the <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"> tag and all of its logics, settings, interface, broken-webpage-switch-to-compatibility button, updatable (compatibility) lists, functionalities is not necessarly easy to figure out, to understand, to use. It's still a complex, sophisticated "crutch" for IE-related people: for web authors who must support IE6 and/or IE7 visitors (who can not or do not want to upgrade their browser or switch to a non-IE browser) in their website or for those who do not and/or can not upgrade a website to become fully web standards compliant. This adds a layer of complexity over the doctype declaration trigger switch and conditional comment... which were originally both created and implemented by Microsoft in order to parse and render web-standards-compliant coded webpages accordingly

3- the whole MSDN documentation for web development is, in my opinion, not reliable, not trustworthy and not recommendable. There's just too many mistakes and bad (non-interoperable and badly coded) examples. It's definitely not a valid, recommendable resource for web authors looking to upgrade their sites to use W3C web standards. So, web developers have been offered - during 10 years and it's still going on - faulty web development documentation or a very IE-centric, IE-specific web development documentation.

4- connect's IE beta feedback must be at least 5 years behind bugzilla in terms of versatility, completeness, usability, features; it took Microsoft more than 18 months to remove very annoying features in their IE beta feedback webpages that a lot of people were rightfully complaining about in IE blog

No word (progress done, comments, feedback, status update) from Microsoft IE team or Dean Hachamovitch regarding unfixed but valid and confirmed bugs - and I mean here all kinds of bugs, including CSS 2.1 bugs, reproducible application crash, reproducible hang bugs, etc.

No commitment, no decision from Microsoft IE team or Dean Hachamovitch regarding support for XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml

No commitment, no decision from Microsoft IE team or Dean Hachamovitch regarding support for SVG (1.1 or basic or whatever).

No word on progress achieved so far to implement accurately and correctly all of DOM 1 Core, DOM 2 Core, DOM 2 HTML.

No word on progress regarding implementing DOM 2 Events, <canvas>, mature/stable HTML5 parts, etc..

No word (commitment, agenda, radar, compass, roadmap) on accessibility in IE, UAAG compliance in IE, ATAG progress for IE users and web developers.

No public VPAT on IE 8. None announced for IE 9.

Just silence.

Gérard Talbot

Maybe IE9 is not the best choose for the developer as we saw,but at least it
is the product we must admit

IE is a piece of junk!

I USE MOZILLA FIRE FOX MY INTER FILE INTERNAL EXPLORES 6 AND ABOVE VERSION IS NOT INSTALL THIS VERSION WHENEVER FILE TRY TO BE OPENED THE DI LOX BOX APPEAR THAT YOU HAVE REQUIRE 6 AND ABOVE IE VERSION TO ACCESS THIS FILE MAY PLEASE BE ON LINE CAN DOWN LOAD THIS VERSION OR NOT AND HOW MUCH AMOUNT TO BE PAID PLEASE TO BE GIVEN SOME DETAIL TO MY E-MAIL ADDRESS WHICH IS GIVEN AS ABOVE. ( I OPERATED NOVA PC WITH BSNL BROADBAND CONNECTION THERE IS NO INSIDE HARD DISK THE PC IS OPERATED THOROUGH MOZILLA FIRE FOX )

I still use IE6. Ha-ha. Not by choice, of course. ;-)

Developing code for 4 generations of MS browsers? Just say "no". Serve them generic code, or text only, with links to standards-compliant browsers.