MS To Slip IE8 Into Vista and XP Through OEMs

crazyeyes writes "Microsoft says it's 'optional,' but they are already planning to slip Internet Explorer 8 into all Windows Vista/XP PCs by March. MS claims that IE8 will offer better performance and security. But what about unwanted stuff like 'Monetization opportunities (for OEMs)' and 'These services will be used (by OEMs) to deliver brand exposure... to the users'?"

Comments

IE must be architecturally borked

[mcrbids]

IE has so many serios deficiencies that have been longstsanding and obvious, I can only conclude that these shortcomgs are architectural. Things that force web developers to implement two separate versions of their JS libs _ one for IE and one for everybody else who somehow, despite greatly reduced resource availability, are able to implement these features.

Whether you are talking about connection handling, spacing and padding attributes, or listen handlers, it's just a public embarrassment for the company that once cried 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!'.

At my company (a vertical niche information system vendor) we've become so jaded that we now tell our users that we actually support firefox and only test for IE. Not surprisingly, our users are about 90% FF.

MS, you're dropping the ball, here, and those developers you once coddled have been SCREAMING about it for years. You're getting exactly what you deserve with your plummeting browser market share!