[givan]

After the IE 6 pain no web developer will forgive microsoft for the time lost and pain.

They test for IE only because lots of people use it or because their jobs require this, nobody likes IE, it always had bugs, was insecure and most important non standard.

IE9 is closer to normal, but microsoft lost is trust, they had the chance to change something much earlier and they did nothing, they are only acting now because IE market share drops fast.

[axefrog]

Oh come on. Microsoft is not some horrible uncle who did you a great wrong and needs "forgiving". It's a company. The people who work there come and go, change departments and so forth. Yeah, sure, the people who worked in the highest positions back in the day employed some shitty tactics way back when, but times have changed, many of those people have moved on and much of the company's outlook has shifted significantly.

Holding an emotional grudge against a transient, evolving collective is stupid. I don't think everything they put out is great, I would love to see Ballmer step down and give someone else a turn (someone with some actual passion perhaps), but IE6 was a product of the mindset at the time, and times have changed. Get over it.

[NameNickHN]

Optimizing websites for IE has cost webdesigners time and money. It has cost their clients money. It was a frustrating process whereby the designers got heat from their bosses and their clients. That is something most designers will probably remember forever.

It's not the bad software that lost Microsoft so much goodwill from the designers. Software can be fixed. It was the attitude from Microsoft towards the problem. It simply took them too much time to make things better. IE9 might be a good browser and most designers might acknowledge that. But ~10 years is way too long for a big corporation like Microsoft to make things right.

[masklinn]

> Oh come on. Microsoft is not some horrible uncle who did you a great wrong and needs "forgiving". It's a company.

> Holding an emotional grudge against a transient, evolving collective is stupid.

It might be stupid, but it's also human and it's precisely what has happened.

> Get over it.

Amount of helpfulness: none, givan is explaining the issue regardless of whether it concerns him personally, and denial is pointless. Humans are emotional first and foremost, and when they've spent years in pain (extra stress, work and money lost) due to one specific entity (person, vendor or other) they will not easily forget and forgive. That's how people work. Microsoft made their bed, and they have to lie in it whether you find that logical or not.

[EdiX]

    Yeah, sure, the people who worked in the highest positions back in the day employed some shitty tactics way back when

Like not allowing other browser on some devices, requiring locked down BIOS, patent lawsuits against competitors. Oh, wait, that all happened this year.

[axefrog]

Yeah, they should be more like Apple and make it so you can install whatever you wan... oh wait...

[danssig]

I have a MBP and I can install what ever I want. What are you talking about?

[EdiX]

I didn't say Apple is better.

[nirvdrum]

I think your history is a little skewed. When IE6 came out, it was an awesome browser for the time. It was light years better than anything else out there and yes, it embraced/extended HTML & CSS, but really, no other browser out there supported the specs either. They were the de facto standard so it wasn't even a problem.

The reason IE 6 is such a problem is Microsoft didn't do anything with IE for years after that while the world evolved. But I'm really not convinced the Web would be anywhere near what we see today if Netscape just kept pumping out increasingly bad browsers.

[masklinn]

> I think your history is a little skewed. When IE6 came out, it was an awesome browser for the time. It was light years better than anything else out there

No, because it had been preceded/preempted by IE5/Mac, which had feature IE6 never got (such as full support for PNGs including gamma correction).

[huggyface]

When IE6 came out, it was an awesome browser for the time.

IE 4.0 was an awesome browser for the time. In fact it was such an awesome browser, and had so little friction to use, that it largely killed the browser market.

IE 5.0 and 6.0 were minimal effort, piecemeal, close to zero improvement iterations.

Microsoft deserves every bit of disdain that they get. Even still if there are ever movements afoot to try to move the web forward, Microsoft will always resist. People can herald IE 10 for finally incorporating a lot of long overdue functionality, but Microsoft does it only because they have little choice beyond abandoning the market.

Windows Phone 7 demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to the web -- the browser is relative junk. It is quite literally years behind competitors.

[powertower]

IE6 came out in 2001, and at that time was the most standards-compliant and feature full of all the browsers on the market.

[masklinn]

> at that time was the most standards-compliant

Nope, IE5/Mac was better.

[dlikhten]

I cannot agree with the "lost trust" enough. MS lost trust with it's attempt to strange with IE. Honestly if IE was the only browser, I'd be ok, if it was a good browser. Only when people started doing everything in their power to avoid it did MS even pick up the keyboard to fix bugs.

[CJefferson]

Are we also not using firefox, for the awful later netscape 4.X releases?