On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 8:59 PM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:

Think again, ie8 is the next ie6... knew that before someone blogged about it: http://infrequently.org/2010/10/ie-8-is-the-new-ie-6/

IE8 will not survive anywhere close to as long as IE6 did, for two reasons:

1) The major reason for not upgrading from IE6 is intranet apps. IE9 includes an IE8 compatibility mode. It's probably not perfect, but if your app works in IE8, it will normally work fine in IE9 with little effort. That was not the case at all when upgrading from IE6 to IE7: there would often be no way to do it without rewriting substantial parts of your application.

2) IE6 was released in August 2001, and IE7 was released in October 2006 -- over five years later. IE8 was released in March 2009, and IE9 was released in March 2011 -- about two years later. People will only start migrating away from the old version when the new version is released, and that gives IE8's demise a three-year lead over IE6's right there.

The big impediment to IE9 adoption will be lack of XP support. But I very much doubt that any large number of Vista or 7 users will still be on IE8 three or four years from now, let alone ten. IE9's adoption rate will look much more like IE8's did. For comparison, IE8 was released two years ago, and our stats have it at about two-thirds of IE's overall market share, roughly twice IE7:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-02/SquidReportClients....

I'd give comparisons to IE7 market share in October 2008, but we don't have any, it seems.

Moreover, IE8 is not and never will be quite the nightmare that IE6 was. The reason IE6 was such a horrible problem wasn't because it was slow, or didn't support cutting-edge features. It's because it implemented critical functionality very differently from other browsers. IE6 does CSS very differently from any other browser, so you have to do your CSS twice: once for IE6 and once for everyone else. IE8 doesn't implement as much CSS as other browsers, but what it does it does well. It's as CSS 2.1-compliant as any browser out there -- perhaps even the most CSS 2.1-compliant browser. So if you just avoid CSS3 features, or use them only for aesthetic touches that not all users have to get, writing CSS for IE8 is no problem.

One reason developing for IE8 will still stink is because scripting is still very different from other browsers. IE9 has made enormous progress toward running scripts written for other browsers. It's not "same markup", but it's not too far off. I've been writing various web standards tests in JavaScript over the last few months, testing initially in Chrome and then tweaking for other browsers. For the most part, IE9 doesn't require too much more tweaking than Firefox or Opera to get it to work. IE8 is simply hopeless -- I don't even try. (Fortunately, web standards tests can get away with only working in the latest version of every browser.) Terrible performance and lack of support for canvas etc. are an issue with IE8 too, but I wouldn't think those are the biggest.

Still, all in all, there's reason to be optimistic about the future of web development. Not only are fancy new features being added, but new versions of browsers are really becoming more and more interoperable, in a very noticeable way. Three multi-billion dollar corporations plus two in the hundred-million-plus range are all working on five competing browsers. I don't think we're going to see any desktop browser as terrible as IE6 -- even compared to its cutting-edge competitors -- for the foreseeable future.