Remember, guys, that IE deserves it’s bad reputation: after it won the browser wars and destroyed Netscape, MS left the world with IE6 for 5 years. With a non-standards-compliant browser having 99% of the market share, developers were forced to abandon standards to get sites to display properly in IE – which meant that such sites would appear ‘broken’ in a standards-compliant browser.

I can’t say how intentional it was, but MS certainly dragged their feet with updates to IE, especially w.r.t standards compliance, and effectively stunted the growth of the internet for years. They knew the internet was the biggest competitor to the desktop… was IE part of a strategy to make the web suck? It certainly looks that way.

Even if IE has changed it’s tune now, you’ll understand why a lot of people are rather excited by the prosepct of MSFT losing some of it’s control over the internet.

Most of the modern browsers have decent standards support. Even IE is getting better (though they appear to be dragging their feet).

I tend to forget that there’s good hackers at MSFT, at least they seem to be aware that IE6 stunted the growth of the web for years (I’m guessing a lot fo the IE8 team never worked on IE6). Still, it’s hard to forgive MSFT for that, I don’t think I’ll be easily persuaded to switch back.

It seems (personally feeling, no facts involved, feel free to criticize me) that all the IE8 Improvements were just catch-up agreements.

They focused on speed because… that was one thing they really lacked.

The Tabs in IE7, something IE6 lacked… This list goes on and on (find bar, you can almost call slices “add-ons”)

But IE8 doesn’t catch up, they DON”T support standards completely, they are just giving the current user base a reason not to switch.

If windows came with Firefox, how many people do you think would switch from Firefox 3 to IE7?

What about Firefox 3.5 to IE8? A lot of people have a “It came with my computer bais.” because when IE8 was released, it had a market share of like 1% to 1.5%

When firefox 3 came out, its changed to about like 17% in 3 days…

Look at Global stats counter.

Just look at the push for speed in getting the OS loaded on computers.. many linux distros are chasing this (just read the stuff coming from Ubuntu for example), as have MS made vast improvements in this area. Most coders with any milege will remember the sudden God-send arrival of the Splash Screen – it effectively reduced perception of load/initialise times.

OS integration is undoubtably what gives IE (in whatever flavour) this edge – you just click the little “e” and, well, you’re ready to go.

I understand if you don’t like Microsoft or IE8, but really, if you need to vent, vent on the comments section of someone else’s blog. Don’t vent on TechCrunch. It’s really uncool, and it gives TechCrunch a bad name.

i think it is very interesting, that you mean SVG is not used.
Do you never used GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps, do you never seen graphics in wikipedia?

My advice, seriously try IE8 alongside FF on the same machine before making hasty speed judgements.

Definitely, this is the beauty of the competition we are getting from all sides, but some peoples bias are idiotic.

Now if anybody got into the IT industry they should always expect for standards and compliance to change and that’s part of the job. Unfortunately there’s been too many bias geeks rooting for their side. I personally like all the browsers out there, and as i mention before, i like firefox for it’s customization, chrome for it’s simplicity and speed and IE8 for it’s speed and productivity.