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IE9 team responds to Reddit questions: reddit tl;dr version

267 points by dochtman 16y ago

lenni 16y ago
I read the original thread on reddit and this pretty much sums up what I silently thought to myself. It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, but they completely sidestepped hard questions. It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.
- niyazpk 16y ago
  That last sentence does not belong here. EDIT: "...completely sidestepped hard questions" is a perfectly understandable sentence that does not require an analogy to explain its meaning. The last sentence does not add any value. Taking it out will only increase the quality of the comment.
  - benreesman 16y ago
    care to elaborate? nothing is sacred to a hacker.
    - riffraff 16y ago
      why not? Anyway, I guess the point was that by adding wording that may be offensive to some readers you are not improving the quality of the message, unless you want _that_ to be the message, which is in fact the (wanted or not) result of the OP. (nonetheless a decent analogy)
    - DrJokepu 16y ago
      Because unnecessarily offending people is not the best way to win friends.
      - bambax 16y ago
        Is commenting about making friends? Isn't finding the truth more important? Strong analogies are a way (not the only way, but a way) to do that.
        DrJokepu 16y ago
        I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking. And I also don't think that analogies are a very good way to discover truth as they often oversimplify a situation and take things out of context, hence implying the wrong conclusions.
        alextgordon 16y ago
        Analogies help understanding. There's a reason math textbooks have worked examples, instead of merely a list of definitions and proofs. Understanding is considerably more difficult in a vacuum.
        points 16y ago
        > "I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking." Reminds me of an old boss of mine. He was hiring for the team, and when asked what the main skillset needed was for the new positions, he answered "They must get on well with the team". So, lo and behold, few months later we had a few new employees who were nice people, good fun even, but absolutely incompetent at their jobs.
      - swombat 16y ago
        I don't think he was trying to win friends.
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
    - dingle_thunk 16y ago
      "nothing is sacred to a hacker." Except, apparently, recursion.
  - Torn 16y ago
    It's a little heavy-handed, but a pretty good analogy.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >he doesn't answer the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible So you're saying: child abuse - IE9 has less instances of $problem than in the general browser population homosexuality - IE9 doesn't allow $action and thinks it shouldn't be allowed elsewhere bloodshed - IE9 is a browser and it's code has errors too ridiculous things - I don't like IE9 so IMO MS is full of BS
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - latortuga 16y ago
    They tell me not to feed the trolls but here goes anyway. You have constructed a straw man. He is not saying that one IE9 problem corresponds to one problem with the catholic church - in fact you made that up! Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. This is made evident by the tl;dr version but is just as obvious if you read the original thread. It is impolite to put words (and other ridiculous things) in other people's mouths.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      Ha, and here's me thinking it was I that was feeding the trolls, perhaps we're into trollish recursion here. He trolled me, I trolled him back, you're trolling me now. Touché? In fact what he was trying to do was pass off as truth several controversial and highly volatile statements without proper [on-topic] opportunity for retort wrapped up as an argument against Microsoft's effort to troll Reddit. >Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. The Catholic church certainly has much to blame with how they've handled the revelation of child abuse amongst it's followers. However, the current situation can not faithfully be described as ignorant. If the head of the IE9 dev team were meeting people in person who'd had been "victim" to the beta, then perhaps there's some comparison. Maybe if it were a metaphor for their past behaviour - but this is the rub, there are huge [unsupported] assumptions required to leap to the point at which this metaphor is even valid. That then isn't addressing whether it's useful. My post was intended to be inflammatory in interpreting his statements in a way that would clearly (to me) conflict with his views without giving him a genuine avenue for reply. Trollish, perhaps, but there ya go I'd assume that the thread would be downvoted and ignored generally on the basis of the OC content but instead it was being heavily voted up. Perhaps reddit is down?
- patio11 16y ago
  Take it to Reddit, please.
  - alecco 16y ago
    I like your comments, in general. But this one comes too aggressive against the whole reddit community and it's a disproportionate response. I'd rather say: Could you please take that kind of topic to the proper forum, perhaps r/atheism, please? HN focus on startups, business and technology only. Think of it as r/technology + r/programming + r/business. Thank you for understanding.
    - patio11 16y ago
      We could talk about what the proportionate response is to being lumped in with child rapists, but we intentionally avoid that on HN because there is no way that conversation ends well. So. Take it to Reddit.
      - Herring 16y ago
        Ironic, because this is the same pc attitude that prompted that marketer to write the pages of bullshit that reddit saw through. Didn't your pg write an article on this? When a group wants its superstitions given preference over the truth, I'll gladly be the first to leave.
  - flatline 16y ago
    While I may agree with you, this type of meta conversation is getting really old, it seems to be happening more recently on HN. I would honestly rather see the comment stand alone or see a decent rebuttal than half a page of useless chatter about it. If people upvote it, you are free to ignore it. You can take this to Reddit, too.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  > It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible. Weird, I just read one about an Atheist -> Catholic conversion, and he side-stepped those issues as well. (And I say 'as well', I mean 'also', because he didn't do as good of a job as the Microsoft rep did.)
  - assemble 16y ago
    I can't blame them for side-stepping those issues--I would do the same thing. Anytime someone mentions that they're Catholic on reddit, people automatically assume that (1)you are fully versed in everything about the situation, (2)you agree with how the Church handled it all, (3)you must be contributing to it by staying in the Church, etc. We're all generally angry about this problem. I don't know a single person who approves of the practice of just moving people around, but there are so many complexities to the issue. I can't even begin to discuss the finer points without someone piping up with their random, pointless garbage that taints the conversation. The Catholic Church has done a lot to fix the problems with the child abuse stuff. We've stopped with the Crusades (and apologized for them!). And the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality and things of that nature are much more nuanced than people realize. Honestly, most of us are just tired of talking about these things. (Except the crazies who get all the press. The news people don't like talking to sensible people--that doesn't make for good TV.) Really, most of the stuff on reddit about Catholics is vitriol and hate, and there's really no point to answer obvious flame bait questions when there are other perfectly good questions to answer.
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      What's complicated about moving priests around? It seems to be entirely cynical and self-serving. Had they handled the issues differently, you wouldn't see the vitriol. I'm sorry, but you can't claim to be a member and defender of an organization that has institutionalized child rape and yet take umbrage at those who suggest your membership in said organization offers monetary and moral support to those practices. If the practice of shuffling priests and shielding them from the law is a complex one, then by all means describe how that's so. It certainly doesn't look complex to the rest of us. It looks evil.
- tiles 16y ago
  [Responding critically because this comment was posted critically.] I had to re-read the Catholic comment before I found you weren't being intentionally offensive. The analogy would have been better stated if it were a Catholic priest doing an AMA. Asking a Catholic would be like asking an IE user why a Microsoft employee was arrested for embezzling, why Microsoft doesn't support Open Source, or why they arbitrarily refuse to make their browser more cross-platform. An IE user is justified in dodging the question since they don't really control those things, they just use the product.
  - lenni 16y ago
    You said it better than I did. A Catholic priest, who has credible authority talking in detail, would have been better. If you go in front of a crowd who is outraged by the actions of the organisation you're representing, do expect difficult questions.
  - saulhoward 16y ago
    It's interesting that you see the relationship between a Catholic and his/her church as analogous to that between a corporation and their "users". While believers in 'ethical consumption' would say that the moral principles of producers certainly should be a concern for consumers, not everybody agrees. But when choosing a religious creed, the behaviour of the founders and keepers of the faith is surely of paramount importance. Can you really say that issues of child abuse are not interesting to Catholic followers, because they "just use the product"?
- tptacek 16y ago
  I saw this comment yesterday and didn't take the bait, because I figured, hey, this HN, it'll find the faint grey bottom of the thread soon enough. I'm embarrased by what happened instead.
niyazpk 16y ago
Mark my words, the decision of not to making IE9 compatible with XP will lead to thousands of hours of developer time and millions of dollars wasted in fixing browser compatibility issues. This will just be another reincarnation of the IE6 effect. BTW the tl;dr version is an excellent summary. It is a warning to all the marketing people out there that the internet will make a bare truth tl;dr version of any sugarcoated market-speak you publish.
- cubicle67 16y ago
  [disclosure: I've just spent the last few hours getting some new stuff working in IE7 and 8. at the moment my level of contempt for all things IE is pretty high :) ] I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP. It's 10 years old, and if they've decided to make use of features of Vista and 7 not available in XP, then good for them. Seriously. I'm also inclined to think that any non-enterprise user still running XP and IE isn't going to manually upgrade to IE9 without being forced to. Those that would are also able to install any of the alternatives that do run on XP
  - pilif 16y ago
    in the corporate environment it's much easier to tell them "hey! Please upgrade your IE6 to the latest version" than it is telling them "hey! Please install $alternative_browser for which no means of administering it with group policies exists"
    - eitally 16y ago
      You can administer both Firefox and Chrome with group policies. I know because we do, having supplanted IE6 as the corporate standard with Firefox 3.x last year (and testing Chrome 6 right now). It was far easier to install an alternative browser than it was to ensure an IE upgrade wouldn't break some legacy systems no one could support. <edit> This will be more helpful: http://store.frontmotion.com/FirefoxPackager/ http://store.frontmotion.com/FirefoxPackager/ http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?msi=true http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?msi=true
    - 16y ago
cubicle67 16y ago
in response to a question about websockets and friends: Our approach when deciding what technologies to support starts with data. There are three things we consider: What are developers actually doing on the web today? What do developers want to do in the future? <snip> We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. Isn't this arse about? Isn't it kind of hard to use new tech if it isn't supported. I'd love to be able to use some of the new HTML5 things, but IE is holding us back XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience. WTF sort of a response is that? There's some good answers in there, but this sort of spin-driven markety rhubarb works so hard to hide it. Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.
- noibl 16y ago
  > Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP. Even better, why not take a leaf out of the books of the four major cross-platform browsers and make opportunistic use of OS features.
  - bvi 16y ago
    You're talking about how IE9 itself could have been improved; cubicle67 was speaking about how the IE9 team's response could have been better. In this case, while IE9 is still a terrible product, the team's response is so stuffed with fluff it appears this whole Q&A session might have backfired. Everyone is just looking for a direct, no-bullshit response. We don't want anything that sounds "hip" or loaded with marketing speak.
    - noibl 16y ago
      > You're talking about how IE9 itself could have been improved No, I'm talking about how deeply in the product dubious marketing ideas (such as creating up-sell opportunities) have been embedded. The problem is that 'IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7' is not a justification and is therefore just as bullshit-ridden. There are some ugly truths in this tl;dr that push the burden of explanation away from the dev team and onto marketing. When IE8 came out, Chris Wilson answered similar questions, and a lot of his answers amounted to 'shrug Guys I'm on your side here but we had to limit our ambitions because this is Microsoft and there are strategic decisions that we had no control over.' At least this way we get a sense of what those decisions are rather than get a good cop/bad cop act. (Not to say that Wilson isn't a natural good cop.)
deleted 16y ago
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jasonkester 16y ago
The actual responses are here: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/ http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te... The comment linked summarizes the IE team's responses in the voice of a M$ strawman, ready to be attacked by Reddit. As a result, it makes for a more entertaining read if you like to hate Microsoft, but it doesn't tell you what they're actually thinking. I preferred the long version.
- cubicle67 16y ago
  the long version doesn't tell you what they were thinking either [edited to add the following] Yes, there's a few cases where the longer version contains a bit more detail, but in general the tl;dr version is a pretty concise summary. For example, compare this answer XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience. We have a great browser for XP users (IE8) but as the web continues to advance you need a modern operating environment that can take advantage of the underlying hardware through the OS. IE9 requires Direct 2D support which is available in Vista (with SP2) and Windows 7. to this Because Microsoft neither wants to backport new APIs to XP, nor do they want to release a version of IE9 that doesn't require the new APIs.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    Especially with the answer about visualisation, the summary was spot on. Seriously, what the fuck, Microsoft? Your browser is so precious that you can't release it as a standalone product so the entire world can move on?
- lenni 16y ago
  I didn't notice any misrepresentation of MS comments. What the commenter has done was to shorten and strip out the BS.
  - fauigerzigerk 16y ago
    Compare these answers to the "why not build on webkit" question: Reinterpreted answer: "Our marketing team tells us the best way to get cross-browser compatibility is to reinvent the wheel." Original answer: "Unfortunately, there are no short cuts to getting to a web with same markup (i.e. write once and renders consistently across browsers). For one perspective around the challenges with various Webkit implementations see this article that recently ran. The way to achieve same markup across various browsers and various implementations of rendering engines is through the W3C with comprehensive standards test. We have a robust engine and platform with IE9 that coupled with our work towards same markup and participation with the W3C is focused on making the life of developers a lot easier." Sorry, but that's not stripping out the BS. That's inventing BS claiming it was Microsoft's when it's in fact a BS reply of some trolling reddit user to another trolling reddit user's question.
points 16y ago
Just to clarify for those that haven't read the answers, this doesn't look anything like the "IE9 team" responding. It looks like a marketing team responding. That's why you get BS answers like "XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience."
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - riffraff 16y ago
    but d2d is not available on xp, so they are not actually telling lies, the tl;dr version is correct, they simply don't want to port new apis to old boxes.
    - robin_reala 16y ago
      Firefox 4 worked around the same problem by accelerating using Direct3D on XP boxes: there’s a small shim that decides which API to use. Seems like the IE team were unwilling to go down this route.
      - sid0 16y ago
        The best part is that Firefox 4 is going to ship with four backends for its layers API: Direct3D 9 for XP, Direct3D 10 for Vista/7, OpenGL for Mac/Linux, and software as a fallback.
  - sid0 16y ago
    That quote is out of context. Yes, GDI on XP is faster than GDI on Vista or 7, but that is irrelevant to any discussion of IE9. Direct2D is a much more expressive API than GDI (think Cairo vs XRender on Linux), so obviously it's going to be a lot faster.
    - heresy 16y ago
      Cheers, not sure why I thought Direct2D was supported on XP. Deleted my comment for being factually incorrect.
jan_g 16y ago
I think that tying IE to operating system is a bad decision. If they can make whole MS Office package available on OSX, then why is browser that special ? Of course I know many of the reasons why _not_ port IE to other oper. systems, but it would make my life easier if I could have all browsers on my machine for development testing.
- gmac 16y ago
  If they can make whole MS Office package available on OSX... Unfortunately that remains a big if: in reality, they can't, or choose not to. Office for Mac lacks major features (VBScript/macros being the biggest) and, in my experience, is even crashier than the Windows version.
  - jan_g 16y ago
    Yes, you are correct. But the newest version, Office 2010, is much better and also supports VBA. My coworker that uses the beta version is positively surprised at the quality of the product. EDIT: It's actually named 'Microsoft Office for Mac 2011' and not 2010 and will be released at the end of October.
- cubicle67 16y ago
  I'm probably telling you stuff you already know, but from what I can see Office for Mac isn't simply a port but a completely separate codebase developed in parallel (for low values of parallel) It (Mac Office) also generates a significant amount of income for MS
  - jan_g 16y ago
    No, I didn't know that, because it's completely counter-intuitive approach to creating software. You have to abstract most of the stuff and then port just OS-specific stuff. It's beyond me why a company of the great software development tradition like Microsoft would go and maintain two completely separate codebases.
    - 16y ago
nl 16y ago
Can we kill the IE-should-be-built-on-webkit meme? One of the web's strengths is the wide range of independent and compatible implementations. Yes, the differences suck when you are dealing with CSS incompatibility problems, but when you look at the big picture it remains vitally important.
- pornel 16y ago
  While we're at this, please kill IE9-on-non-Windows too. End users who chose not to use Microsoft OS are unlikely to choose Microsoft browser, especially when they have better, native browsers available out of the box. Porting IE9 to other platforms is a lot of work for a "nice to have" feature for web developers. Such effort is better spent on making IE suck less on its only platform.
  - swombat 16y ago
    One meme I don't want to kill is, God damn it, Microsoft... release an app that allows web developers to test in IE6-9 on the same machine, without needing lots of VMs. Spoon.net goes some of the way, but IE9 won't work on my XP box. So I'll need to reinstall Windows 7. Which means Synergy will stop working again. Blah.
    - ghurlman 16y ago
      Expression Web. Superpreview. Works as advertised through IE8 anyway, including testing via Safari on OSX remotely (in beta).
  - jan_g 16y ago
    While I agree with grandparent's take on webkit meme, I don't agree with your take on multi-platform meme. IE-on-other-platforms meme will never die, because this is an important issue for many people. For major releases, like IE9, they could have taken another approach. Like, for example, abstracted many components (css/html engine, js engine, plugins framework, etc.) from the underlying OS and then port just the bridge between those components and underlying OS. It's not easy and there're always many quirks, but we're talking about Microsoft, after all.
jerome_etienne 16y ago
im surprised how honnest they are. sure they control what they say, but it is far from the usual "ie9 is better than all other browsers" diagrams they usual give us
greyman 16y ago
I wonder if we also could have something like "HN questions" here?
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  My searchyc foo is weak, but I think this was done a few weeks ago. And also, this is directly part of Microsoft advertising on Reddit. Since HN doesn't have ads... Not saying they wouldn't ever do it, just that's how it got on Reddit in the first place.
bl4k 16y ago
Standards plays are political and market based, nothing to do with IE being slow or them being stupid. Innovations we can thank IE for that were never 'standard': * innerHTML * css applied to chrome * XMLHttpRequest * i18n DNS * double-byte char support (since 96) * embed (or was it object? one of the two - the first one) * first video embed (IE2 on Mac) * hasLayout * iframe * marquee (for the lolz) * contenteditable * opacity/filter * favicons * first implementations of CSS, tables, 128-bit ssl, xml (5) and xstl (5) It works better when coders who build browsers decide new features, not some guys sitting around a table trying to agree on what an image display should look like. Exactly what Andreessen did, he just added stuff to Netscape and let the loonies complain about it not being 'proper'. We criticize Microsoft for the same thing. People don't complain about Intel and AMD with instruction set standards, but they complain about web standards because it is easy to.
- points 16y ago
  You're quite wrong. HTML5 is innovating. IE is way behind when it comes to innovative features. And please don't hold up 'innerHTML' as an example of a good thing.
  - bl4k 16y ago
    That is my entire point. They are far behind now because we criticized the for so long and they threw in the towel after IE6. Microsoft did almost zero browser innovation after 6 and until now, whereas previously they innovated. And now they can't win either way. It just shows that the sentiment the entire time was anti-msft
    - points 16y ago
      I disagree. They stopped innovating after they killed all of the competition. They didn't need to any more. MS certainly don't have a vested interest in the internet - it goes against their core business.
      - bl4k 16y ago
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DevX101 16y ago
I love reddit, but I place some of the blame in this fiasco on the reddit admins -- raldi & company. They came out a few weeks ago and mentioned explicitly that they were MANAGING the ad campaign for IE9. Now, the reddit admins are abosulutely excellent at connecting with their audience. When the site goes down for a bit, they put out technical no-BS posts that get upvoted close to 1000 times, and all is forgiven. The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'. Reddit is at an important inflection now, and the admins need to step up and become the Don Draper for their world of tech users. If this campaign had succeeded, I could absolutely see many other companies coming to them and paying big bucks for similar campaigns. There's still an AMA coming up today, so there's a chance to recover, so we'll see how that goes.
- alphabeat 16y ago
  Do you have a link to where they mentioned they'd manage it? If they did, your points speak volumes.
  - DevX101 16y ago
    Here's the link announcing they will be managing the campaign: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_word_from_our_sponsor_because_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_wo... Quote from the link: "See, Microsoft is getting ready to release Internet Explorer 9, and they reached out to us because they genuinely want to start a dialog with the reddit community. In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign."
  - deleted 16y ago
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- ZachPruckowski 16y ago
  >The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'. How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice. Regardless, I blame Microsoft for not understanding marketing. The whole point of doing this sort of Q&A thing is to give a community exclusive access to build rapport. That's just basic. And they promised exclusive access and instead delivered marketing tripe where people were expecting exclusive developer commentary.
Tomek_ 16y ago
Not the best moment in MS' history but some of those questions are kinda "low" too: people seriously expecting that there will be IE9 for Linux? Come on, get real!
- cryptoz 16y ago
  IE is the only (common, useful) browser that doesn't run on Linux. It's not that absurd to hope that future versions might be cross-platform.
  - Tomek_ 16y ago
    IE on Linux would only be used by webdesigners (all 17 of them that actually use Linux) to test if a webpage works good in it, a "normal" Linux user would never use it as his default browser, if only because: a) it's not open-source b) it's from that "evil" Microsoft So there's no sense for MS to invest money into that sort of adventure.
    - cryptoz 16y ago
      Microsoft makes gobs of money from ads on Bing searches, just as Google does from Google searches. In the consumer market, Windows share is falling. Google is releasing an OS later this year, Apple's products are obscenely popular. Android is more and more popular every day. People don't care what OS or browser they're running half the time. The thing is that IE is not an option; it can't be bundled on the most popular smartphones, or the most popular tablets because MS won't let it be. I'm not suggesting that Gentoo nerds who write web software are going to care; I am suggesting that MS is losing out badly because of their Windows-only attitude. The future is NOT Windows-only software: the future is cross-platform software. Microsoft is making a big mistake by not allowing anyone to use IE unless they also use Windows.
      - Tomek_ 16y ago
        At no point I wrote that I'm for IE being Windows only. Sure, Mac version would make sense. But a Linux one? Not really.
marknutter 16y ago
Lack of Websockets support so disheartening it almost makes me want to cry.
- lukifer 16y ago
  This one drives me crazy too. At least it can be emulated via Flash or Socket.io to support the same features on IE.
Griever 16y ago
The refusal of including auto-update is pretty infuriating to me. "Will you force users to keep IE up to date so developers don't have to support legacy browsers. Corporations don't want to have the latest version of a browser." Alright, I understand that auto-updating could be an issue for IT at large corporations, but why not just make it a feature that is enabled by default? I'm sure IT guys who DO want their users using the latest stable release would be quite happy, and those who don't could easily disable it.
- deleted 16y ago
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mirkules 16y ago
Just read the original, and while I do disagree with Microsoft's approach to answering these questions, I think the reddit community did a disservice to themselves (and possibly the entire hacker community) by transparently disguising attacks in the form of asking a question. For example: "When will they be releasing a Mac OSX version? I couldn't find the download link on their site. I must be an idiot. But I submitted a question so I'm sure they'll get back to me and tell me where the download link is. I've also got a Linux machine at home. Perhaps I could use that? Has anyone tried the Linux version yet? Does it work OK? I couldn't see the Linux link either, but I wasn't really looking very hard. Some companies don't support Linux, so perhaps it's understandable if they haven't got a Linux version yet. I'm sure it'll be coming along soon. But I can't imagine anyone would release a new browser these days and not have a version that runs on Macs. So it must just be me. Right?:-/" I'm not saying tough questions shouldn't be asked -- they should, and were -- but this particular kind of question is immature and should have just been ignored. I'm not at all surprised MS decided to respond in PR speak (although I still don't condone it). Personally, I'd love to see Microsoft reach out to a more mature audience and actually have their engineers answer questions this time.
- niels_olson 16y ago
  Perhaps we should invite them to an HN ama?
nphase 16y ago
Making a browser gives us more power to control web technologies. This makes me truly sad. It's clear they've learned nothing from their own browser history and have a terrible attitude towards the progress of the modern web.
- dbrannan 16y ago
  It seems they are still fighting for control through the web browser, and its a strategy ingrained into their very core. I would think they would do everything possible to protect their cash cows (office + os) and limiting browser functionality to the least common denominator (IE) is the easier way.
deleted 16y ago
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Locke1689 16y ago
I saw this and at first I was hopeful that something good would happen. Then I saw the comments and remembered that, for every smart Reddit user there are about 99 blithering idiots. Most of the comments were troll responses and a circlejerk of Microsoft hate. Very disappointing.
gbrindisi 16y ago
I hate when i read a lot of "Because Marketing told us so...". I know this is how the world is going, but damn it's harsh.
Groxx 16y ago
>As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety. I doubt I'm the only one, but... I'd be willing to bet the delays in adopting updated browsers is a far worse security hole. I can't count the number of times I've heard of a company getting a virus into the network through some specific version of IE, and which only works on some specific version of XP. Businesses which don't update are a script kiddie's wet dream, because they're such an easy mark to cause trouble to. And, to the writer of the tl;dr version: wow. That's a billion times more readable than the official responses, and remarkably accurate for the ones I was able to stomach reading. Excellent job.
deleted 16y ago
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267 points by dochtman 16y ago

lenni 16y ago

I read the original thread on reddit and this pretty much sums up what I silently thought to myself. It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, but they completely sidestepped hard questions. It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.

niyazpk 16y ago
That last sentence does not belong here. EDIT: "...completely sidestepped hard questions" is a perfectly understandable sentence that does not require an analogy to explain its meaning. The last sentence does not add any value. Taking it out will only increase the quality of the comment.
- benreesman 16y ago
  care to elaborate? nothing is sacred to a hacker.
  - riffraff 16y ago
    why not? Anyway, I guess the point was that by adding wording that may be offensive to some readers you are not improving the quality of the message, unless you want _that_ to be the message, which is in fact the (wanted or not) result of the OP. (nonetheless a decent analogy)
  - DrJokepu 16y ago
    Because unnecessarily offending people is not the best way to win friends.
    - bambax 16y ago
      Is commenting about making friends? Isn't finding the truth more important? Strong analogies are a way (not the only way, but a way) to do that.
      - DrJokepu 16y ago
        I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking. And I also don't think that analogies are a very good way to discover truth as they often oversimplify a situation and take things out of context, hence implying the wrong conclusions.
        alextgordon 16y ago
        Analogies help understanding. There's a reason math textbooks have worked examples, instead of merely a list of definitions and proofs. Understanding is considerably more difficult in a vacuum.
        points 16y ago
        > "I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking." Reminds me of an old boss of mine. He was hiring for the team, and when asked what the main skillset needed was for the new positions, he answered "They must get on well with the team". So, lo and behold, few months later we had a few new employees who were nice people, good fun even, but absolutely incompetent at their jobs.
    - swombat 16y ago
      I don't think he was trying to win friends.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
  - dingle_thunk 16y ago
    "nothing is sacred to a hacker." Except, apparently, recursion.
- Torn 16y ago
  It's a little heavy-handed, but a pretty good analogy.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>he doesn't answer the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible So you're saying: child abuse - IE9 has less instances of $problem than in the general browser population homosexuality - IE9 doesn't allow $action and thinks it shouldn't be allowed elsewhere bloodshed - IE9 is a browser and it's code has errors too ridiculous things - I don't like IE9 so IMO MS is full of BS
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- latortuga 16y ago
  They tell me not to feed the trolls but here goes anyway. You have constructed a straw man. He is not saying that one IE9 problem corresponds to one problem with the catholic church - in fact you made that up! Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. This is made evident by the tl;dr version but is just as obvious if you read the original thread. It is impolite to put words (and other ridiculous things) in other people's mouths.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    Ha, and here's me thinking it was I that was feeding the trolls, perhaps we're into trollish recursion here. He trolled me, I trolled him back, you're trolling me now. Touché? In fact what he was trying to do was pass off as truth several controversial and highly volatile statements without proper [on-topic] opportunity for retort wrapped up as an argument against Microsoft's effort to troll Reddit. >Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. The Catholic church certainly has much to blame with how they've handled the revelation of child abuse amongst it's followers. However, the current situation can not faithfully be described as ignorant. If the head of the IE9 dev team were meeting people in person who'd had been "victim" to the beta, then perhaps there's some comparison. Maybe if it were a metaphor for their past behaviour - but this is the rub, there are huge [unsupported] assumptions required to leap to the point at which this metaphor is even valid. That then isn't addressing whether it's useful. My post was intended to be inflammatory in interpreting his statements in a way that would clearly (to me) conflict with his views without giving him a genuine avenue for reply. Trollish, perhaps, but there ya go I'd assume that the thread would be downvoted and ignored generally on the basis of the OC content but instead it was being heavily voted up. Perhaps reddit is down?
patio11 16y ago
Take it to Reddit, please.
- alecco 16y ago
  I like your comments, in general. But this one comes too aggressive against the whole reddit community and it's a disproportionate response. I'd rather say: Could you please take that kind of topic to the proper forum, perhaps r/atheism, please? HN focus on startups, business and technology only. Think of it as r/technology + r/programming + r/business. Thank you for understanding.
  - patio11 16y ago
    We could talk about what the proportionate response is to being lumped in with child rapists, but we intentionally avoid that on HN because there is no way that conversation ends well. So. Take it to Reddit.
    - Herring 16y ago
      Ironic, because this is the same pc attitude that prompted that marketer to write the pages of bullshit that reddit saw through. Didn't your pg write an article on this? When a group wants its superstitions given preference over the truth, I'll gladly be the first to leave.
- flatline 16y ago
  While I may agree with you, this type of meta conversation is getting really old, it seems to be happening more recently on HN. I would honestly rather see the comment stand alone or see a decent rebuttal than half a page of useless chatter about it. If people upvote it, you are free to ignore it. You can take this to Reddit, too.
pavel_lishin 16y ago
> It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible. Weird, I just read one about an Atheist -> Catholic conversion, and he side-stepped those issues as well. (And I say 'as well', I mean 'also', because he didn't do as good of a job as the Microsoft rep did.)
- assemble 16y ago
  I can't blame them for side-stepping those issues--I would do the same thing. Anytime someone mentions that they're Catholic on reddit, people automatically assume that (1)you are fully versed in everything about the situation, (2)you agree with how the Church handled it all, (3)you must be contributing to it by staying in the Church, etc. We're all generally angry about this problem. I don't know a single person who approves of the practice of just moving people around, but there are so many complexities to the issue. I can't even begin to discuss the finer points without someone piping up with their random, pointless garbage that taints the conversation. The Catholic Church has done a lot to fix the problems with the child abuse stuff. We've stopped with the Crusades (and apologized for them!). And the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality and things of that nature are much more nuanced than people realize. Honestly, most of us are just tired of talking about these things. (Except the crazies who get all the press. The news people don't like talking to sensible people--that doesn't make for good TV.) Really, most of the stuff on reddit about Catholics is vitriol and hate, and there's really no point to answer obvious flame bait questions when there are other perfectly good questions to answer.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    What's complicated about moving priests around? It seems to be entirely cynical and self-serving. Had they handled the issues differently, you wouldn't see the vitriol. I'm sorry, but you can't claim to be a member and defender of an organization that has institutionalized child rape and yet take umbrage at those who suggest your membership in said organization offers monetary and moral support to those practices. If the practice of shuffling priests and shielding them from the law is a complex one, then by all means describe how that's so. It certainly doesn't look complex to the rest of us. It looks evil.
tiles 16y ago
[Responding critically because this comment was posted critically.] I had to re-read the Catholic comment before I found you weren't being intentionally offensive. The analogy would have been better stated if it were a Catholic priest doing an AMA. Asking a Catholic would be like asking an IE user why a Microsoft employee was arrested for embezzling, why Microsoft doesn't support Open Source, or why they arbitrarily refuse to make their browser more cross-platform. An IE user is justified in dodging the question since they don't really control those things, they just use the product.
- lenni 16y ago
  You said it better than I did. A Catholic priest, who has credible authority talking in detail, would have been better. If you go in front of a crowd who is outraged by the actions of the organisation you're representing, do expect difficult questions.
- saulhoward 16y ago
  It's interesting that you see the relationship between a Catholic and his/her church as analogous to that between a corporation and their "users". While believers in 'ethical consumption' would say that the moral principles of producers certainly should be a concern for consumers, not everybody agrees. But when choosing a religious creed, the behaviour of the founders and keepers of the faith is surely of paramount importance. Can you really say that issues of child abuse are not interesting to Catholic followers, because they "just use the product"?
tptacek 16y ago
I saw this comment yesterday and didn't take the bait, because I figured, hey, this HN, it'll find the faint grey bottom of the thread soon enough. I'm embarrased by what happened instead.

niyazpk 16y ago

Mark my words, the decision of not to making IE9 compatible with XP will lead to thousands of hours of developer time and millions of dollars wasted in fixing browser compatibility issues. This will just be another reincarnation of the IE6 effect. BTW the tl;dr version is an excellent summary. It is a warning to all the marketing people out there that the internet will make a bare truth tl;dr version of any sugarcoated market-speak you publish.

cubicle67 16y ago
[disclosure: I've just spent the last few hours getting some new stuff working in IE7 and 8. at the moment my level of contempt for all things IE is pretty high :) ] I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP. It's 10 years old, and if they've decided to make use of features of Vista and 7 not available in XP, then good for them. Seriously. I'm also inclined to think that any non-enterprise user still running XP and IE isn't going to manually upgrade to IE9 without being forced to. Those that would are also able to install any of the alternatives that do run on XP
- pilif 16y ago
  in the corporate environment it's much easier to tell them "hey! Please upgrade your IE6 to the latest version" than it is telling them "hey! Please install $alternative_browser for which no means of administering it with group policies exists"
  - eitally 16y ago
    You can administer both Firefox and Chrome with group policies. I know because we do, having supplanted IE6 as the corporate standard with Firefox 3.x last year (and testing Chrome 6 right now). It was far easier to install an alternative browser than it was to ensure an IE upgrade wouldn't break some legacy systems no one could support. <edit> This will be more helpful: http://store.frontmotion.com/FirefoxPackager/ http://store.frontmotion.com/FirefoxPackager/ http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?msi=true http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?msi=true
  - 16y ago

cubicle67 16y ago

in response to a question about websockets and friends: Our approach when deciding what technologies to support starts with data. There are three things we consider: What are developers actually doing on the web today? What do developers want to do in the future? <snip> We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. Isn't this arse about? Isn't it kind of hard to use new tech if it isn't supported. I'd love to be able to use some of the new HTML5 things, but IE is holding us back XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience. WTF sort of a response is that? There's some good answers in there, but this sort of spin-driven markety rhubarb works so hard to hide it. Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.

noibl 16y ago
> Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP. Even better, why not take a leaf out of the books of the four major cross-platform browsers and make opportunistic use of OS features.
- bvi 16y ago
  You're talking about how IE9 itself could have been improved; cubicle67 was speaking about how the IE9 team's response could have been better. In this case, while IE9 is still a terrible product, the team's response is so stuffed with fluff it appears this whole Q&A session might have backfired. Everyone is just looking for a direct, no-bullshit response. We don't want anything that sounds "hip" or loaded with marketing speak.
  - noibl 16y ago
    > You're talking about how IE9 itself could have been improved No, I'm talking about how deeply in the product dubious marketing ideas (such as creating up-sell opportunities) have been embedded. The problem is that 'IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7' is not a justification and is therefore just as bullshit-ridden. There are some ugly truths in this tl;dr that push the burden of explanation away from the dev team and onto marketing. When IE8 came out, Chris Wilson answered similar questions, and a lot of his answers amounted to 'shrug Guys I'm on your side here but we had to limit our ambitions because this is Microsoft and there are strategic decisions that we had no control over.' At least this way we get a sense of what those decisions are rather than get a good cop/bad cop act. (Not to say that Wilson isn't a natural good cop.)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jasonkester 16y ago

The actual responses are here: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/ http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te... The comment linked summarizes the IE team's responses in the voice of a M$ strawman, ready to be attacked by Reddit. As a result, it makes for a more entertaining read if you like to hate Microsoft, but it doesn't tell you what they're actually thinking. I preferred the long version.

cubicle67 16y ago
the long version doesn't tell you what they were thinking either [edited to add the following] Yes, there's a few cases where the longer version contains a bit more detail, but in general the tl;dr version is a pretty concise summary. For example, compare this answer XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience. We have a great browser for XP users (IE8) but as the web continues to advance you need a modern operating environment that can take advantage of the underlying hardware through the OS. IE9 requires Direct 2D support which is available in Vista (with SP2) and Windows 7. to this Because Microsoft neither wants to backport new APIs to XP, nor do they want to release a version of IE9 that doesn't require the new APIs.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Especially with the answer about visualisation, the summary was spot on. Seriously, what the fuck, Microsoft? Your browser is so precious that you can't release it as a standalone product so the entire world can move on?
lenni 16y ago
I didn't notice any misrepresentation of MS comments. What the commenter has done was to shorten and strip out the BS.
- fauigerzigerk 16y ago
  Compare these answers to the "why not build on webkit" question: Reinterpreted answer: "Our marketing team tells us the best way to get cross-browser compatibility is to reinvent the wheel." Original answer: "Unfortunately, there are no short cuts to getting to a web with same markup (i.e. write once and renders consistently across browsers). For one perspective around the challenges with various Webkit implementations see this article that recently ran. The way to achieve same markup across various browsers and various implementations of rendering engines is through the W3C with comprehensive standards test. We have a robust engine and platform with IE9 that coupled with our work towards same markup and participation with the W3C is focused on making the life of developers a lot easier." Sorry, but that's not stripping out the BS. That's inventing BS claiming it was Microsoft's when it's in fact a BS reply of some trolling reddit user to another trolling reddit user's question.

points 16y ago

Just to clarify for those that haven't read the answers, this doesn't look anything like the "IE9 team" responding. It looks like a marketing team responding. That's why you get BS answers like "XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience."

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- riffraff 16y ago
  but d2d is not available on xp, so they are not actually telling lies, the tl;dr version is correct, they simply don't want to port new apis to old boxes.
  - robin_reala 16y ago
    Firefox 4 worked around the same problem by accelerating using Direct3D on XP boxes: there’s a small shim that decides which API to use. Seems like the IE team were unwilling to go down this route.
    - sid0 16y ago
      The best part is that Firefox 4 is going to ship with four backends for its layers API: Direct3D 9 for XP, Direct3D 10 for Vista/7, OpenGL for Mac/Linux, and software as a fallback.
- sid0 16y ago
  That quote is out of context. Yes, GDI on XP is faster than GDI on Vista or 7, but that is irrelevant to any discussion of IE9. Direct2D is a much more expressive API than GDI (think Cairo vs XRender on Linux), so obviously it's going to be a lot faster.
  - heresy 16y ago
    Cheers, not sure why I thought Direct2D was supported on XP. Deleted my comment for being factually incorrect.

jan_g 16y ago

I think that tying IE to operating system is a bad decision. If they can make whole MS Office package available on OSX, then why is browser that special ? Of course I know many of the reasons why _not_ port IE to other oper. systems, but it would make my life easier if I could have all browsers on my machine for development testing.

gmac 16y ago
If they can make whole MS Office package available on OSX... Unfortunately that remains a big if: in reality, they can't, or choose not to. Office for Mac lacks major features (VBScript/macros being the biggest) and, in my experience, is even crashier than the Windows version.
- jan_g 16y ago
  Yes, you are correct. But the newest version, Office 2010, is much better and also supports VBA. My coworker that uses the beta version is positively surprised at the quality of the product. EDIT: It's actually named 'Microsoft Office for Mac 2011' and not 2010 and will be released at the end of October.
cubicle67 16y ago
I'm probably telling you stuff you already know, but from what I can see Office for Mac isn't simply a port but a completely separate codebase developed in parallel (for low values of parallel) It (Mac Office) also generates a significant amount of income for MS
- jan_g 16y ago
  No, I didn't know that, because it's completely counter-intuitive approach to creating software. You have to abstract most of the stuff and then port just OS-specific stuff. It's beyond me why a company of the great software development tradition like Microsoft would go and maintain two completely separate codebases.
  - 16y ago

nl 16y ago

Can we kill the IE-should-be-built-on-webkit meme? One of the web's strengths is the wide range of independent and compatible implementations. Yes, the differences suck when you are dealing with CSS incompatibility problems, but when you look at the big picture it remains vitally important.

pornel 16y ago
While we're at this, please kill IE9-on-non-Windows too. End users who chose not to use Microsoft OS are unlikely to choose Microsoft browser, especially when they have better, native browsers available out of the box. Porting IE9 to other platforms is a lot of work for a "nice to have" feature for web developers. Such effort is better spent on making IE suck less on its only platform.
- swombat 16y ago
  One meme I don't want to kill is, God damn it, Microsoft... release an app that allows web developers to test in IE6-9 on the same machine, without needing lots of VMs. Spoon.net goes some of the way, but IE9 won't work on my XP box. So I'll need to reinstall Windows 7. Which means Synergy will stop working again. Blah.
  - ghurlman 16y ago
    Expression Web. Superpreview. Works as advertised through IE8 anyway, including testing via Safari on OSX remotely (in beta).
- jan_g 16y ago
  While I agree with grandparent's take on webkit meme, I don't agree with your take on multi-platform meme. IE-on-other-platforms meme will never die, because this is an important issue for many people. For major releases, like IE9, they could have taken another approach. Like, for example, abstracted many components (css/html engine, js engine, plugins framework, etc.) from the underlying OS and then port just the bridge between those components and underlying OS. It's not easy and there're always many quirks, but we're talking about Microsoft, after all.

jerome_etienne 16y ago

im surprised how honnest they are. sure they control what they say, but it is far from the usual "ie9 is better than all other browsers" diagrams they usual give us

greyman 16y ago

I wonder if we also could have something like "HN questions" here?

steveklabnik 16y ago
My searchyc foo is weak, but I think this was done a few weeks ago. And also, this is directly part of Microsoft advertising on Reddit. Since HN doesn't have ads... Not saying they wouldn't ever do it, just that's how it got on Reddit in the first place.

bl4k 16y ago

Standards plays are political and market based, nothing to do with IE being slow or them being stupid. Innovations we can thank IE for that were never 'standard': * innerHTML * css applied to chrome * XMLHttpRequest * i18n DNS * double-byte char support (since 96) * embed (or was it object? one of the two - the first one) * first video embed (IE2 on Mac) * hasLayout * iframe * marquee (for the lolz) * contenteditable * opacity/filter * favicons * first implementations of CSS, tables, 128-bit ssl, xml (5) and xstl (5) It works better when coders who build browsers decide new features, not some guys sitting around a table trying to agree on what an image display should look like. Exactly what Andreessen did, he just added stuff to Netscape and let the loonies complain about it not being 'proper'. We criticize Microsoft for the same thing. People don't complain about Intel and AMD with instruction set standards, but they complain about web standards because it is easy to.

points 16y ago
You're quite wrong. HTML5 is innovating. IE is way behind when it comes to innovative features. And please don't hold up 'innerHTML' as an example of a good thing.
- bl4k 16y ago
  That is my entire point. They are far behind now because we criticized the for so long and they threw in the towel after IE6. Microsoft did almost zero browser innovation after 6 and until now, whereas previously they innovated. And now they can't win either way. It just shows that the sentiment the entire time was anti-msft
  - points 16y ago
    I disagree. They stopped innovating after they killed all of the competition. They didn't need to any more. MS certainly don't have a vested interest in the internet - it goes against their core business.
    - bl4k 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

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DevX101 16y ago

I love reddit, but I place some of the blame in this fiasco on the reddit admins -- raldi & company. They came out a few weeks ago and mentioned explicitly that they were MANAGING the ad campaign for IE9. Now, the reddit admins are abosulutely excellent at connecting with their audience. When the site goes down for a bit, they put out technical no-BS posts that get upvoted close to 1000 times, and all is forgiven. The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'. Reddit is at an important inflection now, and the admins need to step up and become the Don Draper for their world of tech users. If this campaign had succeeded, I could absolutely see many other companies coming to them and paying big bucks for similar campaigns. There's still an AMA coming up today, so there's a chance to recover, so we'll see how that goes.

alphabeat 16y ago
Do you have a link to where they mentioned they'd manage it? If they did, your points speak volumes.
- DevX101 16y ago
  Here's the link announcing they will be managing the campaign: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_word_from_our_sponsor_because_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_wo... Quote from the link: "See, Microsoft is getting ready to release Internet Explorer 9, and they reached out to us because they genuinely want to start a dialog with the reddit community. In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign."
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
ZachPruckowski 16y ago
>The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'. How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice. Regardless, I blame Microsoft for not understanding marketing. The whole point of doing this sort of Q&A thing is to give a community exclusive access to build rapport. That's just basic. And they promised exclusive access and instead delivered marketing tripe where people were expecting exclusive developer commentary.

Tomek_ 16y ago

Not the best moment in MS' history but some of those questions are kinda "low" too: people seriously expecting that there will be IE9 for Linux? Come on, get real!

cryptoz 16y ago
IE is the only (common, useful) browser that doesn't run on Linux. It's not that absurd to hope that future versions might be cross-platform.
- Tomek_ 16y ago
  IE on Linux would only be used by webdesigners (all 17 of them that actually use Linux) to test if a webpage works good in it, a "normal" Linux user would never use it as his default browser, if only because: a) it's not open-source b) it's from that "evil" Microsoft So there's no sense for MS to invest money into that sort of adventure.
  - cryptoz 16y ago
    Microsoft makes gobs of money from ads on Bing searches, just as Google does from Google searches. In the consumer market, Windows share is falling. Google is releasing an OS later this year, Apple's products are obscenely popular. Android is more and more popular every day. People don't care what OS or browser they're running half the time. The thing is that IE is not an option; it can't be bundled on the most popular smartphones, or the most popular tablets because MS won't let it be. I'm not suggesting that Gentoo nerds who write web software are going to care; I am suggesting that MS is losing out badly because of their Windows-only attitude. The future is NOT Windows-only software: the future is cross-platform software. Microsoft is making a big mistake by not allowing anyone to use IE unless they also use Windows.
    - Tomek_ 16y ago
      At no point I wrote that I'm for IE being Windows only. Sure, Mac version would make sense. But a Linux one? Not really.

marknutter 16y ago

Lack of Websockets support so disheartening it almost makes me want to cry.

lukifer 16y ago
This one drives me crazy too. At least it can be emulated via Flash or Socket.io to support the same features on IE.

Griever 16y ago

The refusal of including auto-update is pretty infuriating to me. "Will you force users to keep IE up to date so developers don't have to support legacy browsers. Corporations don't want to have the latest version of a browser." Alright, I understand that auto-updating could be an issue for IT at large corporations, but why not just make it a feature that is enabled by default? I'm sure IT guys who DO want their users using the latest stable release would be quite happy, and those who don't could easily disable it.

deleted 16y ago
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mirkules 16y ago

Just read the original, and while I do disagree with Microsoft's approach to answering these questions, I think the reddit community did a disservice to themselves (and possibly the entire hacker community) by transparently disguising attacks in the form of asking a question. For example: "When will they be releasing a Mac OSX version? I couldn't find the download link on their site. I must be an idiot. But I submitted a question so I'm sure they'll get back to me and tell me where the download link is. I've also got a Linux machine at home. Perhaps I could use that? Has anyone tried the Linux version yet? Does it work OK? I couldn't see the Linux link either, but I wasn't really looking very hard. Some companies don't support Linux, so perhaps it's understandable if they haven't got a Linux version yet. I'm sure it'll be coming along soon. But I can't imagine anyone would release a new browser these days and not have a version that runs on Macs. So it must just be me. Right?:-/" I'm not saying tough questions shouldn't be asked -- they should, and were -- but this particular kind of question is immature and should have just been ignored. I'm not at all surprised MS decided to respond in PR speak (although I still don't condone it). Personally, I'd love to see Microsoft reach out to a more mature audience and actually have their engineers answer questions this time.

niels_olson 16y ago
Perhaps we should invite them to an HN ama?

nphase 16y ago

Making a browser gives us more power to control web technologies. This makes me truly sad. It's clear they've learned nothing from their own browser history and have a terrible attitude towards the progress of the modern web.

dbrannan 16y ago
It seems they are still fighting for control through the web browser, and its a strategy ingrained into their very core. I would think they would do everything possible to protect their cash cows (office + os) and limiting browser functionality to the least common denominator (IE) is the easier way.

deleted 16y ago

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Locke1689 16y ago

I saw this and at first I was hopeful that something good would happen. Then I saw the comments and remembered that, for every smart Reddit user there are about 99 blithering idiots. Most of the comments were troll responses and a circlejerk of Microsoft hate. Very disappointing.

gbrindisi 16y ago

I hate when i read a lot of "Because Marketing told us so...". I know this is how the world is going, but damn it's harsh.

Groxx 16y ago

>As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety. I doubt I'm the only one, but... I'd be willing to bet the delays in adopting updated browsers is a far worse security hole. I can't count the number of times I've heard of a company getting a virus into the network through some specific version of IE, and which only works on some specific version of XP. Businesses which don't update are a script kiddie's wet dream, because they're such an easy mark to cause trouble to. And, to the writer of the tl;dr version: wow. That's a billion times more readable than the official responses, and remarkably accurate for the ones I was able to stomach reading. Excellent job.

deleted 16y ago

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