You'd be surprised how often this gets brought up internally (I'm a Microsoft employee), but unfortunately I can't say much more other than I've heard Ballmer directly speak about reasons for and against it.
Why bother anymore? The browser is a legacy of trash. It's been broken for so long and to point where developers have come to rely on its brokenness. Fixing it will inflict so much more pain on developers that we are in a situation where a legitimate debate could be had over whether it's even the right thing to do. They have some of the best programming minds in the world over there, but when they're at such a severe disadvantage with that minefield of an application how can they be expected to deliver anything more than the embarrassment that IE has been over the past several years? Has there been any substantial discussion about starting over?
Thanks for the reply. Before joining MS in March, I was building web apps just like most of the commenters here and I'd like to try to get feedback to the IE team if I can to make that app development easier.
The IE9 Platform Preview 2 has gotten positive reviews and it seems like the team is listening so I think it makes sense to keep talking and asking.
That used to be my favorite example of how Microsoft was scared of the web and how that directly hurt their customers. I'd lost track years ago and I can't believe this still isn't fixed.
For reference, it was 2003 when this feature was added to Mozilla.
It would be absolutely lovely if you would force-install IE9 alongside lower versions, and use IE9's rendering engine from lower versions if a special meta tag would be present in the webpage.
That way you get all the backwards compatibility anybody will ever want, and we can finally forget about IE6&7(&8). Cheers!
If you're not going to adopt webkit or make trident open source, can you at least make it easy to run it on mac and linux without downloading insane amounts data of VMs.
Why don't you release a version of IE6 for those businesses with internal apps and way behind website, and release a new browser that has new branding and be as compliant as you can be? This all-things-to-all-people approach seems a waste.
