_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!
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-af-monthly-201102-201202
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-as-monthly-201102-201202
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201102-201202
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.
Much? IMO IE8 is the real boat anchor. It do not support decade-old standards like the DOM Level 2 and XHTML.
HTML5 isn't a standard yet, so how can you be conformant?
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.
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.