Right, like you're gonna skin something......  

Well it's 'Beating a Horse to Death', which is kind of easy to understand, 'Spanking the Monkey', I'm not all the sure I want to know. 

Oh well, can't be right all the time, but just once would be nice.

Obviously, I'm no mod, so I'm shutting up now at any rate.

I have never liked Microsoft, they always seem to come up with over bloated software which are slow and a pain to use. Then along came IE 8 ,Windows 7 and Office 2010. Its amazing what a bit of competition can do. Looking forward to give IE 9 a go, who knows I might even like it.

Will be waiting for it to go out of beta first. For me installing IE9 in its beta stage is just asking for trouble.

Real SVG support, about bloody time.

Maybe they have their act together at last.

Blah indeed. H.264 is so patent laden I doubt Mozilla will go down this track. VP8 maybe ... not as good but royalty free. The death of flash is at hand

The worst part in my opinion is how far behind the curve they were, even at launch.

I was excited when IE8 came out because of the new features, then I realized it was just as bog slow as every other version.  More than a little disappointing.

IE9 looks to change that...finally, something that actually exceeds expectations instead of just disappointing everyone.

As to Flash, it will undoubtedly be used less but I wouldn't expect it to die.  There's still plenty you can't do in HTML5 (protected content for one example.)  Hulu or any other legal streaming sites wouldn't be able to operate without that.

On that note flash also won't die cause it'll take time to get rid of HTML4 browsers, for reasons already mentioned.

? what happen to the Zombies

Yes but we can hope!

And this is why competition is so important - look what happens at Microsoft when there's serious competition to IE .

From what I've read so far, it looks like Microsoft is pushing hard on performance and standards compliance on this one. Although I think Firefox is working on hardware acceleration and HTML 5 as well, it's nice to see that Microsoft is finally trying to push forward and actually try to make progress in areas people care about.

What I think has flown under the radars of a lot of people is how much they are actually doing with HTML 5. In fact, if everything I've read is correct, they are actually working a lot with the W3C to refine the spec and are helping the W3C write test for it.

In fact, they're doing so much, you might say that Microsoft is writing the new HTML specification. Okay, maybe that's going a bit too far - but it does seem that Microsoft has really changed their approach to how they deal with the whole issue of them lagging behind other browsers when it comes to specifications for web standards.

I'm undecided if this is a good or bad thing. However, this is Microsoft's new claim for compatibility with standards:

Source: IEBlog

That's right - Microsoft is, for the most part, claiming that IE9 is gonna beat the pants off of Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome when it comes to standards support. Now, they're not really saying it explicitly, but they have been pushing forward a lot of tests for standards support, and they're mentioning the tests a lot in their blogs.

Problem is, they haven't really shown any UI yet, so there's no telling what it'll look like.

However, Microsoft's testing is to be believed, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome may end up in a role reversal when it comes to standards support.

They're comparing a browser that won't be released for a while yet with browsers that have been released though.  There's plenty of time to catch up.

As to Firefox, I don't think they were even working on adding hardware accel before MS announced it.  I've been wrong before, but I don't recall that anyway.  So far it's a big 'me too' shout since they haven't enabled it by default and we don't know if it's actually used the same way or not.

I'd like to see a proper comparison, but then, we'd need to wait for actual release software for that anyway.

For anyone interested in IE 9, is it worth pointing out that these "preview" versions install alongside IE 8 -- they don't replace it. So you can safely install it to test it out, without it replacing a complete browser. IE 9 is not currently a full "web browser", it has no interface or other features expected in one. It's just a preview of what it will become as a browser.

As for hardware acceleration, Firefox developers have been working on that for a long time, before MS ever announced that it was going to be a feature of IE 9. Some Direct2D acceleration is already in the current Firefox 4 betas, although it isn't enabled by default, as there's still work to be done. It's a logical step forward -- it's kind of crazy that so many people use their web browsers each day to watch videos and other video-intensive activities, and that isn't being accelerated by their video cards, right now. (Of course, the other browsers will be trying to bring such acceleration to other platforms besides Vista/Windows 7 -- IE 9 will only run on those, so MS doesn't have to try to make it work anywhere else.)

As for standards support, there's no question that IE 9 makes great strides forward. But of course, the comparisons like the one listed above are just the standards that Microsoft cares to talk about -- there are others that they haven't implemented in IE 9 and probably won't, that are also useful. It's more useful to check broader tests, such as http://www.html5test.com/ and http://css3please.com/ to see what important standards a browser supports.

I hate to say this - but we may see businesses in really bad situations if they don't upgrade. Hackers are out there, computers fail, XP won't be sold forever, etc.

IMO any business that doesn't have regular refreshes of their software and hardware is likely to see an increasing financial burden for supporting their systems in the future.

Sooner or later, they'll eventually reach the point where maintaining the system is impossible.

Frankly - I would not be surprised if this actually leads to many corporations becoming bankrupt.