It still disgusts me that Internet Explorer has users at all. Even IE9 is still unbearably bad, especially from the web developer point of view. I wish the rest of the world would have realized this and ousted Microsoft from a business it has no place in.
IE9 is light years ahead of anything else Microsoft has put out and IE10 will be amazing in comparison as well.
That said, a large percentage of IE9 users are corporations which don't want to support non-Microsoft browsers, new end-users who don't have a clue about anything that's not Microsoft, and the millions of foreigners who just use what's provided.
Supporting IE9 isn't that bad as it used to be to support older IE browsers.
_the millions of foreigners who just use what's provided._
Funny thing to say after seeing the statcounter shown in the comments show that >40% of north americans use internet explorer compared to ~30% in europe 35% in asia, 30% in south america and 30% in africa. Infact North america is the only place where internet explorer has >5% lead over their next biggest rival!
I don't get IE9. It's not compatible with the legacy IE6 rubbish, and yet not conformant enough with HTML5 etc so it requires much extra work to support compared to FF, Chrome, Safari. Thank goodness for Chrome Frame.
It's not a standard, but I can tell you that tech innovators do not stand around and wait for some committee to decide "Oh yea, uhh lets make HTML5 the standard now". No matter what the standards say, any respectable web browser should be making their best effort to "conform" to the latest technology.
It may disgust you, but Microsoft deserves its place at the table, Microsoft were there right at the start competing with Netscape, and that was a good thing healthy competition in browser development. And didn't Microsoft win their battle with Netscape. In turn hasn't that inspired Mozilla to come back fighting with Firefox and didn't that lead to chrome et al, not forgetting opera and safari and others. I rest my case for big softie.
If you take "competing with Netscape" to mean "buying another browser and bundling it with another product they had a monopoly position on", maybe.
Perhaps they didn't "win" the battle fairly, but back when IE market share was in the 90%+ range, I think it was fair to say Netscape had unequivocally lost.
Mozilla/Firefox was a "Hail Mary" plan that only succeeded because a lot of smart people and a lot of money showed up at just the right time. I shudder to think what the web would be like had they failed.
IE actually did win on the merits back then, IE 3 was a far better browser than Netscape at the time and Netscape was having a tough time competing due to the shape the codebase was in. IE was quicker and lighter, so people started using it. The bundling was certainly a factor, but the fact that IE was the better browser for a time cannot be ignored.
I may have my version numbers mixed up, it's been a while and I was relying on memory so it very well could have been 4. The point though was there was a point in which IE was clearly out in front of Netscape.
The moment a provider throttles my internet based on "piracy" is the moment I begin investing all of my free time into making a free and invincible p2p solution.
