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Mark my words, the decision of not to making IE9 compatible with XP will lead to thousands of hours of developer time and millions of dollars wasted in fixing browser compatibility issues. This will just be another reincarnation of the IE6 effect.

BTW the tl;dr version is an excellent summary. It is a warning to all the marketing people out there that the internet will make a bare truth tl;dr version of any sugarcoated market-speak you publish.

[disclosure: I've just spent the last few hours getting some new stuff working in IE7 and 8. at the moment my level of contempt for all things IE is pretty high :) ]

I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP. It's 10 years old, and if they've decided to make use of features of Vista and 7 not available in XP, then good for them. Seriously.

I'm also inclined to think that any non-enterprise user still running XP and IE isn't going to manually upgrade to IE9 without being forced to. Those that would are also able to install any of the alternatives that do run on XP

The tl;dr summary should also have addressed the forced and cringe-worthy name-dropping of internet memes of the past few years, that is in the beginning of the reply.

It actually comes across as a bit condescending: "Let's show them that we know their community by mentioning the Star Wars Kid and Stephen Colbert."

>"It is a warning to all the marketing people out there that the internet will make a bare truth tl;dr version of any sugarcoated market-speak you publish."

Absolutely. The way you build rapport with a community like that is to give them something "exclusive". A Developer Q&A promising to address their feedback qualifies. An extra helping of market-speak does not. It's sort of hard to feel special because you got canned PR answers. So they built exactly 0 rapport with reddit and probably even cost themselves.

in response to a question about websockets and friends:

Our approach when deciding what technologies to support starts with data. There are three things we consider: What are developers actually doing on the web today? What do developers want to do in the future? <snip> We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used.

Isn't this arse about? Isn't it kind of hard to use new tech if it isn't supported. I'd love to be able to use some of the new HTML5 things, but IE is holding us back

XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience.

WTF sort of a response is that? There's some good answers in there, but this sort of spin-driven markety rhubarb works so hard to hide it. Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.

Their entire attitude is worrying. I'm afraid that this is going to hinder the web again, it just looks like they want to release the bare minimum they can to get marketshare instead of actually make a good browser.

Opera, with its 5% market share (or so) has been reigning on the tests and innovation for ever, and Microsoft can't get enough employees together to work on a browser?

As far as I'm concerned, nobody should recommend IE for anything, as the risk of Microsoft pulling another IE6 is too high, and not worth the reward.

>>XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience.

>WTF sort of a response is that? There's some good answers in there, but this sort of spin-driven markety rhubarb works so hard to hide it. Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.

I love how every time MS makes a new OS they publicly trash their last one. NT had the greatest uptime of any OS around... Until Windows 2000 came out. Then it suddenly had an average uptime of 9 days.

> Isn't this arse about?

Not entirely, for two reasons.

1. Supporting what's actually out there is at least as important as supporting what isn't out there yet because the browsers don't support it.

2. The very next sentence said: "We also spoke to developers and partners to understand what they were going do in the future and what they couldn't do today."

> Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.

Even better, why not take a leaf out of the books of the four major cross-platform browsers and make opportunistic use of OS features.

This right here is a very bad attitude toward software development because it prevents you from making the product that proves its worth to users and developers. It seemed in the original article that they justified almost every design decision with "Our marketing team told us to." It almost feels as if they're preemptively trying to blame someone else absolve themselves of blame. I'm not sure to what degree this is influenced by the editing.
i think its just indicative that IE will always be behind the curve. or, to look at it differently, they're a big company willing to let others blaze the trails while they follow behind at a safe distance.
> Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.

Then the knee-jerk reaction becomes "But why did you do that?" and the response still seems unsatisfying.

I think asking for IE9 on XP is like asking for a Python project to be compatible with Python 2.3-3.2. Assuming it could be done for a complex project, is it worth the effort, compared to targeting 2.6+ instead and leaving people on older, long-supported systems behind?

"We couldn't figure out a Microsofty-enough way to do websockets"
why does it suprise you? it's coming from a company whose latest operating system still doesn't offer A PROPER TERMINAL EMULATOR (you know, like putty minus the ssh) on the grounds of lack of demand from its customers.
I read the original thread on reddit and this pretty much sums up what I silently thought to myself.

It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, but they completely sidestepped hard questions. It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.

[Responding critically because this comment was posted critically.] I had to re-read the Catholic comment before I found you weren't being intentionally offensive. The analogy would have been better stated if it were a Catholic priest doing an AMA. Asking a Catholic would be like asking an IE user why a Microsoft employee was arrested for embezzling, why Microsoft doesn't support Open Source, or why they arbitrarily refuse to make their browser more cross-platform. An IE user is justified in dodging the question since they don't really control those things, they just use the product.
I saw this comment yesterday and didn't take the bait, because I figured, hey, this HN, it'll find the faint grey bottom of the thread soon enough. I'm embarrased by what happened instead.
That last sentence does not belong here.

EDIT: "...completely sidestepped hard questions" is a perfectly understandable sentence that does not require an analogy to explain its meaning. The last sentence does not add any value. Taking it out will only increase the quality of the comment.

> It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.

Weird, I just read one about an Atheist -> Catholic conversion, and he side-stepped those issues as well. (And I say 'as well', I mean 'also', because he didn't do as good of a job as the Microsoft rep did.)

Take it to Reddit, please.
>he doesn't answer the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible

So you're saying:

child abuse - IE9 has less instances of $problem than in the general browser population

homosexuality - IE9 doesn't allow $action and thinks it shouldn't be allowed elsewhere

bloodshed - IE9 is a browser and it's code has errors too

ridiculous things - I don't like IE9 so IMO MS is full of BS

Standards plays are political and market based, nothing to do with IE being slow or them being stupid. Innovations we can thank IE for that were never 'standard':

* innerHTML

* css applied to chrome

* XMLHttpRequest

* i18n DNS

* double-byte char support (since 96)

* embed (or was it object? one of the two - the first one)

* first video embed (IE2 on Mac)

* hasLayout

* iframe

* marquee (for the lolz)

* contenteditable

* opacity/filter

* favicons

* first implementations of CSS, tables, 128-bit ssl, xml (5) and xstl (5)

It works better when coders who build browsers decide new features, not some guys sitting around a table trying to agree on what an image display should look like.

Exactly what Andreessen did, he just added stuff to Netscape and let the loonies complain about it not being 'proper'. We criticize Microsoft for the same thing.

People don't complain about Intel and AMD with instruction set standards, but they complain about web standards because it is easy to.

Are you saying that IE invented tables, embed, css etc? That is not true. Embed were invented by Netscape. Tables were a IETF proposal that were implemented by Netscape first. Css were a W3C proposal, although IE were the first mainstream browser to implement it.

hasLayout is a workaround for a bug in IE's rendering engine.

I thought IE were the last browser to support i18n domain names.

You may be correct about the rest though, and contentEditable and XMLHttpRequest are great features we can thank IE for.

Do you have any references for Microsoft's invention of HTML tables, CSS* , SSL2 and 'i18n DNS'?

* Sure, IE may have had CSS support before Netscape but that hardly makes it their innovation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Css#History

hasLayout? (I know what it is, but, seriously?)

CSS applied to chrome: do you mean styling scrollbars?

XMLHttpRequest is a great thing, as is contentEditable. And IE5 was a really good browser for its time. The criticisms at that point were not generally technical but to do with motivation. IE gained market share in the upper 90% range and that, not criticism, is why the following decade of web development was marked by technological stagnation.

Do you seriously consider hasLayout or filter to be innovations? hasLayout is at the very best a hack, and at the worst a terrible, opaque feature to let the developer peek into the Trident rendering engine to deal with bugs. 'filter:' is platform specific so I don't think I need to elaborate.
You're quite wrong.

HTML5 is innovating. IE is way behind when it comes to innovative features.

And please don't hold up 'innerHTML' as an example of a good thing.

Wrong, SSL was developed by Netscape, including v2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_ve...

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/ssl/draft02...

at that moment it was referred to as 0.2 though.

Just to clarify for those that haven't read the answers, this doesn't look anything like the "IE9 team" responding. It looks like a marketing team responding.

That's why you get BS answers like "XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience."

I'm just wondering; if they had said "we don't want to have to spend time and money backporting new APIs and we want to encourage you to upgrade Windows", how would we react? Frankly I would have far more respect for an honest answer like that.
Can we kill the IE-should-be-built-on-webkit meme? One of the web's strengths is the wide range of independent and compatible implementations.

Yes, the differences suck when you are dealing with CSS incompatibility problems, but when you look at the big picture it remains vitally important.

While we're at this, please kill IE9-on-non-Windows too.

End users who chose not to use Microsoft OS are unlikely to choose Microsoft browser, especially when they have better, native browsers available out of the box.

Porting IE9 to other platforms is a lot of work for a "nice to have" feature for web developers. Such effort is better spent on making IE suck less on its only platform.

I love reddit, but I place some of the blame in this fiasco on the reddit admins -- raldi & company. They came out a few weeks ago and mentioned explicitly that they were MANAGING the ad campaign for IE9.

Now, the reddit admins are abosulutely excellent at connecting with their audience. When the site goes down for a bit, they put out technical no-BS posts that get upvoted close to 1000 times, and all is forgiven.

The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

Reddit is at an important inflection now, and the admins need to step up and become the Don Draper for their world of tech users. If this campaign had succeeded, I could absolutely see many other companies coming to them and paying big bucks for similar campaigns.

There's still an AMA coming up today, so there's a chance to recover, so we'll see how that goes.

The actual responses are here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te...

The comment linked summarizes the IE team's responses in the voice of a M$ strawman, ready to be attacked by Reddit. As a result, it makes for a more entertaining read if you like to hate Microsoft, but it doesn't tell you what they're actually thinking.

I preferred the long version.

The refusal of including auto-update is pretty infuriating to me.

"Will you force users to keep IE up to date so developers don't have to support legacy browsers.

Corporations don't want to have the latest version of a browser."

Alright, I understand that auto-updating could be an issue for IT at large corporations, but why not just make it a feature that is enabled by default? I'm sure IT guys who DO want their users using the latest stable release would be quite happy, and those who don't could easily disable it.

I think that tying IE to operating system is a bad decision. If they can make whole MS Office package available on OSX, then why is browser that special ? Of course I know many of the reasons why _not_ port IE to other oper. systems, but it would make my life easier if I could have all browsers on my machine for development testing.
Lack of Websockets support so disheartening it almost makes me want to cry.
Just read the original, and while I do disagree with Microsoft's approach to answering these questions, I think the reddit community did a disservice to themselves (and possibly the entire hacker community) by transparently disguising attacks in the form of asking a question. For example:

"When will they be releasing a Mac OSX version? I couldn't find the download link on their site. I must be an idiot. But I submitted a question so I'm sure they'll get back to me and tell me where the download link is. I've also got a Linux machine at home. Perhaps I could use that? Has anyone tried the Linux version yet? Does it work OK? I couldn't see the Linux link either, but I wasn't really looking very hard. Some companies don't support Linux, so perhaps it's understandable if they haven't got a Linux version yet. I'm sure it'll be coming along soon. But I can't imagine anyone would release a new browser these days and not have a version that runs on Macs. So it must just be me. Right?:-/"

I'm not saying tough questions shouldn't be asked -- they should, and were -- but this particular kind of question is immature and should have just been ignored. I'm not at all surprised MS decided to respond in PR speak (although I still don't condone it).

Personally, I'd love to see Microsoft reach out to a more mature audience and actually have their engineers answer questions this time.

>As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety.

I doubt I'm the only one, but... I'd be willing to bet the delays in adopting updated browsers is a far worse security hole. I can't count the number of times I've heard of a company getting a virus into the network through some specific version of IE, and which only works on some specific version of XP. Businesses which don't update are a script kiddie's wet dream, because they're such an easy mark to cause trouble to.

And, to the writer of the tl;dr version: wow. That's a billion times more readable than the official responses, and remarkably accurate for the ones I was able to stomach reading. Excellent job.

I saw this and at first I was hopeful that something good would happen. Then I saw the comments and remembered that, for every smart Reddit user there are about 99 blithering idiots.

Most of the comments were troll responses and a circlejerk of Microsoft hate. Very disappointing.

Making a browser gives us more power to control web technologies.

This makes me truly sad. It's clear they've learned nothing from their own browser history and have a terrible attitude towards the progress of the modern web.

I wonder if we also could have something like "HN questions" here?
im surprised how honnest they are. sure they control what they say, but it is far from the usual "ie9 is better than all other browsers" diagrams they usual give us
Not the best moment in MS' history but some of those questions are kinda "low" too: people seriously expecting that there will be IE9 for Linux? Come on, get real!
I hate when i read a lot of "Because Marketing told us so...". I know this is how the world is going, but damn it's harsh.