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The Man At Microsoft Charged With Destroying IE6
Barence writes "The man in charge of Internet Explorer has told PC Pro that he's been tasked with destroying IE6. Internet Explorer 6 continues to be the most used browser version in the world at the ripe old age of nine. IE6's position as the default browser in Windows XP means many companies still cling to the browser. 'Part of my job is to get IE6 share down to zero as soon as possible,' said Ryan Gavin, head of the Internet Explorer business group. Microsoft has also been giving further previews of Internet Explorer 9, with demonstrations showing two 720p HD videos running simultaneously on a netbook, thanks to IE9's GPU-accelerated graphics."
If IE9 is supposed to destroy the previous versions of IE then they better support IE9 on XP.
XP is still a solid operating system and currently has the highest market share.
No one is going to upgrade their OS just because there is a new browser from Microsoft.
7 is well beyond a viable replacement for XP in any useful category you can pick. The time to upgrade is here.
Karma is a bitch...
I expect they are now regretting that the barriers they put in place to prevent IE6 being displaced by Firefox, Opera, and other browsers is now effective at preventing IE6 from being displaced by another browser from themselves.
-- Terry
Much simpler solution: Pay google a meager sum to add some javascript that displays an "upgrade to IE9" link instead of google search for people still running IE6. Do the same thing on Bing.
google already does that on youtube and google docs
Since when did Microsoft start caring about backward compatibility?
Wait, what? When did Microsoft stop caring about backwards compatibility? Backwards compatibility was, for many years, the greatest asset that Windows had, and IMO is the biggest reason that it became as widespread as it is. It's also the source of many of their biggest security problems.
In fact, in the last few years (with the end of the 9x series kernel, the introduction of XP SP2, the introduction of UAC, and the removal of the 16-bit subsystems in the 64-bit versions of Windows), they have shown a willingness to break backwards compatibility that they had basically never shown a decade ago.
Forcing upgrades is a different matter, and is more concerned with forwards compatibility, which doesn't really have any bearing on this discussion.
KHTML was an underachieving render engine a decade ago, with little users and little developers. Now, WebKit is the world most advanced and most used web rendering technology out there, used by leading companies such as Nokia, Google, Adobe and even Microsoft to deliver web pages with speed and standard compliancy.
WebKit was the first web rendering engine to support a bytecode interpreter for Javascript, significantly increasing performance. They had support for HTML5 video back in 2007. It was the first engine to fully pass the Acid3 test. They created the basis for CSS transitions and animations, and relayed their concepts back to the W3C so other browsers can benefit from their work as well.
Long story short, WebKit is awesome. Sure, KHTML was the foundation for it, but KHTML never was what WebKit is today.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Including IE in Windows and making it the default browser isn't a barrier to using another browser. If it were nobody would be using other browsers today.
You clearly don't remember this, but from IE4 to IE6, Microsoft tried as hard as they could to push web developers toward proprietary technologies that were only compatible with Internet Explorer. They went out of their way to make IE's rendering engine try to guess what developers might have meant when writing sloppy non-standard code, which resulted in web sites that were designed exclusively for IE not working in any other browser (and being an enormous pain in the ass to fix). Also, because IE's support for the standards that other browsers were trying to implement was so shoddy, web sites designed for other browsers wouldn't work correctly in IE (also an enormous pain in the ass to fix), so there was a huge disincentive for developers who used IE as their primary browser (because it was bundled with Windows) to even try to support anything else.
With ~90% market share, Microsoft decided that IE6 was "good enough" and shut down development. But IE6 wasn't good enough, and somebody decided to take the Mozilla Suite, strip out all the non-browser stuff (the email client, the address book, the WYSIWYG HTML editor, the IRC client, etc. etc.) and try to make a stand-alone browser people actually wanted to use. And, after awhile, people started using it, and Microsoft was embarrassed.
So, they tried to clean up a few things with the release of XP Service Pack 2, then began an active attempt to make a browser that doesn't completely suck ass. They're years behind, and they know it, but they're slowly attempting to catch up. They also know they're not the leader of the pack anymore, so they have to cooperate with other browser developers and play the game on their turf, which is a weird thing for Microsoft to be doing.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;