With a third of the market share of IE 6 it is ridiculous to talk about Apple as any sort of player in the browser wars. Just silly. It doesn’t really exist on any significant level.

Perhaps you’ve heard of iPhone, which more and more people use to access web content? Or iPad, which they soon will be using? Both of these use Safari, a browser based on open-source Webkit.

Or maybe you’ve heard of Google Chrome, an excellent, superfast, cross-platform browser also based on Webkit and also finding its way onto Macs, PCs, and smart phones.

The fact that some good folks are still stuck using IE6 (a browser which Microsoft itself wants our help to kill), principally at their places of employment, doesn’t mean these same people aren’t also using Firefox at home, or smartphones powered by Opera Mini, Mobile Safari, or Chrome.

You may have intended your comment as mere trollishness but it’s a valid point to raise—reasonable businesspeople might raise it as well. And it’s important to counter these points with facts. Good web experience is no longer confined to the desktop and it is certainly not confined to IE or any other single browser.

The biggest problem, though, isn’t with IE 8 and wont’ be fixed by IE 9. Our biggest problem is that IE 7 and 6 keep sticking around and refusing to die like a bad 80s horror villain. IE 7 isn’t so bad; it’s not dying fast enough but at least it is dying and should be gone by the end of the year. But IE 6 is a different story.

IE 6 usage is still about 20% (NetApplications), and is dropping by only about 0.8% a month, give or take. At this rate, by April 2011 we’ll still have about 10% of Web users on IE 6, and we won’t be statistically free of IE 6 until the world ends* in 2012.

Microsoft could fix this by pushing out the most recently available version of IE for everyone’s system as a critical update. For those Enterprise shops that really do need IE 6 for their Active-X-based intranets, give them a special standalone version of the browser. But still make people upgrade their main browsers, and make it completely seamless. (And for God’s sake, don’t limit it to authentic Windows users. You may not care about pirates, but they still use our web sites!)

But Microsoft won’t do it.

* The Faux-Mayan Y2K!

Also I don’t like it how MS double checks for windows key when upgrading IE. That prevents many users to upgrade so they use the old browsers which makes up the web developers to multi test all these latest versions of IE.

IE should be free unconditionally regardless of if your Windows lic. is legit or not

“Don’t you use that tone with me!”
“What tone?”
“You know very well what tone!”

I, for one, am ready to give the Microsofties another chance. Their backs are up against the wall. They’ve been living off of corporate momentum for years now. They know the gig is up and they’re (finally) trying to do the right thing.

Let’s let them.

I care about web standards. We all care about web standards. Microsoft should acknowledge that and fix it with Internet Explorer 9.

I wish all the browsers were exactly the same at the backend, only different at the frontend. I gives designers and developers like us a peace of mind.

There shouldn’t even be a term like crossbrowser compatibility. There shouldn’t be a fight what browser has the best engine.

There only should be a fight what browser is the most beautiful one.

★ Ed Bott’s Lament

The backward compatibility button in IE8 is a decent compromise, though it still produces at least one help desk call for most users. But that wouldn’t work if they switched to Webkit, would it?

As for their anti-competitive practices regarding web browsers, I have to disagree with some of that. By bundling IE with the OS for free, Microsoft didn’t take advantage of the internet explosion – they created it. If all we had was paid browsers, most of the world would still be running around in walled gardens created by AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. Not to say Bill was an angel. His intent was to turn the internet into a killer app – which he did – but also to put MS in a position where they dominated the market – which he also did.

Ultimately, the problem is that IE6 should have been more standards compliant. Nevermind that no browser was standards compliant back then, compliance should have been one of the driving forces behind the design of the product, as it was with Windows 2003. We’re all paying for the fact that it wasn’t, but that’s water under the bridge at this point. The best we can hope for now is for MS to make their current rendering engine as modern and compliant as possible.

IE was able to win because of bundling, a practice that ignorant judges once considered anti-competitive but is now a-ok, because really, who the fuck ships an operating system without a web browser?

No one, now.

Formerly, everyone.

Browsers were software. Paid software.

You wanted Netscape 1.1, you bought it at CompUSA.

And people still buy Opera.

Microsoft decided to own the browser business by making a me-too browser and giving it away with their operating system.

I remember when IE was better than Netscape.

Netscape rightly tossed their non-standards-compliant rendering engine instead of patching it (as IE is still doing), and replaced it with the standards-compliant rendering engine that powers Firefox today.

Unfortunately they lacked the resources to get this transition done quickly. (They lacked those resources because their browser was now free, as they couldn’t sell it when Microsoft was giving theirs away.)

During the long painful transition to a standards-compliant Netscape, Microsoft threw resources at IE, and it leapfrogged ahead.

Judges who termed this behavior anti-competitive weren’t ignorant, they were observant and accurate.

Likewise, Apple bundles Safari with its OS because Microsoft stopped updating Internet Explorer for Mac OS in 2000.

If Apple hadn’t built a browser for Mac users, they would have had an ever-poorer experience on the web relative to Windows users, with the result that people might stop buying Apple computers merely to get a working modern browser. Again, this would have been highly anticompetitive on Microsoft’s part. And it’s not like they were struggling in the desktop wars; they already owned 90% of the market.

So: your point that “who the fuck ships an operating system without a web browser” ignores the ten years of history and Microsoft manipulation that today compel OS makers to include a free bundled web browser.

Admittedly, given the ever-increasing importance of the internet in our lives, we might have ended up with bundled browsers anyway. But the way we happened to get here is important to remember.

IE6 is pretty much garbage now, no question. But don’t go rewriting history just because it doesn’t favor your little team.

Which little team is that, sir?