[bad_user]

> I love HTML 5, but I can't imagine any of the features to be "killer" enough to make users switch to more modern browsers.

Funny you should say that. Users don't really care about features. What they care about is being able to view the content.

Flash is so popular today only because of services like YouTube. It only takes a YouTube to make HTML 5 popular, and speaking of YouTube, guess who owns it ;)

> Adoption of HTML 5 features will occur as rapidly as they're introduced into IE

Complementary to the point above, Microsoft doesn't have any options but to implement it, otherwise they'll lose more market share.

Not to mention that plugins can be developed by third parties for IExplorer to add HTML 5 functionality. Google already started doing that with Gears.

[amadiver]

Right on - they care about viewing the content. So if YouTube switched to <video>, over night, tons of users would switch browsers. Except that's never going to happen. My guess is that YouTube might serve up content using the <video> tag if the user isn't using a modern browser, and Flash content if they're using IE. I can't see them making such a reckless business move ( some users wouldn't/couldn't switch browsers, and there goes millions of paying customers ["paying" in that they view the ads]).

With companies like Google playing it conservative ( as all web devs do ), and adapting content to allow IE users to view it, there's not going to be an incentive for users to switch browsers.