And replace their HTML rendering engine with webkit.

Why? They're already close to having IE9 on the phone.

This IE9?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326048

edit: I predict severe downvoting once people start arriving at their offices in Redmond...

The standard is constantly in flux and IE has long dev, testing, beta and release candidate cycles because they need to be backward compatible for the sake of companies.

If IE9 implements it, there's a danger of people developing sites that implement workarounds and fixes and will break when the issues are fixed.(i.e back to ie6 days).

For the new features here is the labs version:

http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/

>edit: I predict severe downvoting once people start arriving at their offices in Redmond..

Is this some kind of joke? Usually if you bash MS and praise Apple/Google you get modded up real high. Say thing that can be construed as mildly positive to MS or midly negative to Apple and you'll not get upvotes or get downvoted. There are HN users who have quit HN for good because of this.

There are HN users who have quit HN in disgust because of this.

If you're getting downvoted for bashing MS, then you must be doing something wrong, like being way off base with your hate or something.

> If you're getting downvoted for bashing MS, then you must be doing something wrong, like being way off base with your hate or something.

No joke, sadly.

While I get carried away sometimes (Windows has improved a lot since my windows 2003 days, WP7 is neither "Vista Phone 7" nor "WinMo 7") I see very frequent downmods when I paint Microsoft technologies in unfavorable light, most of them occurring early in the morning PST (I live in GMT-3, so I post a lot before US west coast wakes up). Since I have been very active these days, most posts where this happened are buried deep in the threads pages and may take some time to unearth.

To be fair, I also notice some backlash when I paint Apple in unfavorable colors too.

Well, I've seen most posts/stories critical of MS going up highly.

Not so for Apple comments/stories.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800253

http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/

It really depends. When I criticize Windows, its innards, .Net or C#, I get consistent downvotes. Less consistent when I criticize Sharepoint (which makes sense - nobody likes that monstrosity). Internet Explorer, OTOH, gets little love from everyone and seems even less popular than Sharepoint.

I must say, I've been using WP7 for a little while now, and the browser is the only place I really have no serious complaints. While I'd love to be able to use canvas and the like, the browser is really smooth as it stands. I hope the IE9 update only makes it better.

They still have not managed to roll out their first update, containing critical bug fixes.

This does not exactly bode well for IE9 rolling out at all. And then the mobile webkits not only have pretty damn good support for actually displaying pages but have made quite monstrous performance improvements recently.

Which critical bug fixes are these? I've owned and used a WP7 since a few days after launch, all of the bugs are in the "annoyance" category, I don't know of any absolute show-stoppers.

Well I have to think that the SMS cache corruption bug mentioned in the article would be considered critical.

That's hardly a widely experienced problem. Google "windows phone 7 text messages corrupt"; first result is a MS answers submission by DanTup - the same guy who's blog is referenced in the HN post.

First of all, IE9 is still years behind Webkit, Firefox and Opera in HTML5 and CSS support. Second, we'll see how quickly they can actually trim it into something usable on a mobile ARM platform; closeness is relative.