Microsoft Sends Flowers To Internet Explorer 6 Funeral

Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."

Comments

Translation

[iamapizza]

And by "a little piece of IE heaven," they actually mean "any other browser".

IE 9 perhaps?

[dmgxmichael]

Hmm.. So they might show up with a build of IE 9? Would be appropriate (turn a 6 upside down).

I feel sorry for the IE team at Microsoft - they get a lot of flak for a situation they didn't cause. They didn't choose to discontinue browser development in 2003. Where it up to them IE 6 would have been superceded in 03, 04 at the latest, instead of 07. And if IE 7 had come sooner IE 6 wouldn't have become as entrenched as it is now.

Re:IE 9 perhaps?

[jpmorgan]

But perhaps he's right? Everybody likes to jump on ACID as some ultimate measure of a webbrowser's worth. Neither ACID2 nor ACID3 were based on the most important or commonly used features of HTML, JavaScript and CSS, but a sampling of obscure little bits that most webbrowsers were doing wrong at the time.

As useful as ACID are, it's important to realize that they are NOT proper compliance tests. It could be argued that one of the real failings of the W3C standardization process is that they never produce a compliance test suite. So you can't accurately state that a browser (like IE) poorly supports relevant standards, without relying heavily on anecdote.

Human moment

[trurl7]

I think that's a fantastic gesture on their part. Yes, it's all in good fun, but look - one of Redmond's lawyer types could've gotten a hold of this, and gotten some judge to issue an injunction based on a combination of ip violation/unfair competition/market image tarnishing/some other frankly-my-dear-I-just-don't-give-a-damn excuse. Yeah, it'd never hold up, but nothing stopping them from just being dicks.

Instead, they took it in good fun, and did the human thing - exhibited humor. Yes, they're still evil, blah blah. But this has that WWI 1914 Christmas Eve soccer-game feel. So let's acknowledge it with good cheer.

Re:Human moment

[clone53421]

Perhaps not, but joining in on the festivities was certainly more than anyone expected.

Re:Hate to speak ill of the dead, but...

[jmactacular]

Reckless? Please. Everyone likes to hate on IE, but that's because we all have short memories. Back in the day, when IE 6 was released, it was easily the best browser around. And IE 5, and IE4. It is naive to think any software company can prevent every security hole at the time of release. There will *always* be a determined and clever attacker who finds a way after it enters the market. And being the biggest in the market obviously makes them the biggest target. IE also takes a lot of heat for "standards", but that's because sometimes they are inventing the thing that will turn into the standard, like the XMLHttpRequest object, the foundation of AJAX. Believe me, supporting IE6 in 2010 is the bane of my existence, but I don't think it's fair to assign blame years later, for something that was created so long ago. In fact, I am thankful they put so much work into backwards compatibility, otherwise I think things would be even worse. Ultimately, IE6 will be replaced by IE8 in the next 1-2 years as the corporate world rolls out Win7 deploys.