HN Explorer

Poll: Can / Should IE be killed?

8 points by nudge ↗ HN
Following http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221831 and the countless other complaints about Internet Explorer, I was curious what the general feeling here was about whether it was possible / desirable actually to work towards dramatically reducing its usage.

Just to be clear, I don't mean IE6. I mean the entire IE brand, including IE9.

Possible arguments for: Even though they are working towards greater compliance with standards, IE9 is still far behind the other browsers. Moreover, there's no reason to think that remedying this situation is a high priority for the IE team. Bringing IE usage down to a small fraction of users would save countless hours of web design time.

Possible arguments against: Losing IE would give too much control of the market to a small number of actors, particularly Google. Even though IE has many flaws, this is preferable to a single actor having that much control, particularly given their high market share for search. Moreover, IE9 is good enough now, so it's not as much as a problem.

Please do leave comments outlining reasons (either way) and, if you think it's something that can and should be done, possible ways to do it. Let's not just keep bitching about it - let's make it happen!

13 comments

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makecheck
I look at it as a waste of talent. Microsoft has plenty of software that needs improvement; if the entire IE team went to work on Windows, I think it would do more good than implementing another browser (when at least 2 superior browsers exist for Windows).
TimothyBurgess
Microsoft has had plenty of time and more than enough resources to get their browser right. But for whatever reason, they can't seem to get it up to par.

IE struck out a long time ago and I think it would truly benefit mankind if they were benched permanently while letting one of the big boys take its place at bat as the default Windows browser. Sadly the chances of that happening are slim to none... without consumer action. ;) And that's why I'm upvoting this. I've wanted a browser revolution for a long time now!

devspade
So far the most votes are for "IE can and should be killed". Should is debatable, sure. But I'm interested in how. Because I'd argue it can't be done by anyone not named Steve Balmer at the moment.
joh6nn
sure it could: if even a handful of major sites decided to simply block IE, it'd be dead in the water. that's EXTREMELY unlikely to happen, but it's certainly possible.
devspade
this is the one place you might have a shot - if google, amazon, facebook, etc - were just like you straight can't use IE or our sites - then maybe, but no chance the big dogs do something like that
TimothyBurgess
I wonder if there are any petitions out there for the cause of ending IE. I'm sure there are but obviously none have been properly executed.

It'd be a super long shot, but I'd bet that with some generous donations and a proper campaign, a viral petition could get thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of signatures requesting that something seriously be done about IE. Could Steve Balmer and Microsoft ignore hundreds of thousands of people? Sure. Would they? Maybe. They do seem to think they know what's best for everyone. Would it hurt to try? Definitely not.

bod
The problem is, that except a tiny fraction of developers no consumer cares about their browser as long as it just works. There is no reason to switch. A browser is simply a browser no matter what its name is. All seem to do the same. The most common reason people activly change their browser is, as far as I noticed, because it's a new trend (firefox and now chrome).

And noone can blame business, that it doesn't dare to loose a significant amount of customers by not supporting IE with their website.

benologist
Course it shouldn't. If you're going to kill off browsers then sooner or later we'll end up with one all over again.
bod
What's wrong with killing the weakest, so the drove has a better chance to withstand in the future?
benologist
Because there's another weakest next in line.
noibl
Not necessarily. What we need is a browser industry where negotiations over standards happen in good faith. Because that didn't happen, we got IE6 holding back the web for nearly a decade. Because that didn't happen, we got WHATWG.

Opera, Firefox, Apple and later Google have vividly demonstrated that it is possible to have a diverse range of browsers while safeguarding interoperability and pushing forward on new tech. Microsoft came late to that party after W3C was embarrassed into adopting WHATWG's work and have yet to show solid commitment to being a trustworthy industry player rather than simply cherrypicking from work done by others in order to make themselves look good.*

* OK, so that may be overstating the case and the IE team has contributed under the W3C process. Still, WHATWG is not going to stand still and Microsoft still hasn't gotten on board with that.

mooism2
How about if Microsoft kept IE but adopted WebKit to display the actual pages instead of maintaining their own renderer (Trident?)?
yuhong
In this kind of discussions, I am surprised no one mentioned MS' own Tasman engine in IE5 for Mac, which was ahead in standard support back in the day.