Enterprise Mode would be useful since that's getting a bit of traction as an alternative to staying mired in IE8.

agreed. That's why I'm always using CoRD (http://cord.sourceforge.net) for any kind of RDP use on the mac (I don't know whether it would work with this remote IE thing, but for sysadmining here and then, CoRD > Remote Desktop any day)

Azure VM instances that run in a VPN have major network issues that are caused by the MS infrastructure.

Depending on the latency you won't get the 'feel' for many websites, important nowadays with CSS transitions and WebGL.

MSIE is circling the train in terms of marketshare. The VMs MS provided for testing were a godsend, but forcing devs to give up their work flow would likely result in them just dropping MSIE support.

Edit: never mind, found answer here http://askubuntu.com/questions/190425/how-to-install-interne...

what a nightmare!!! It is simpler to just detect IE user and ask them to switch to ff or chrome.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEs4Linux

[1] https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

Or perhaps bandits doing the same thing.

In any case, a large collection of bespectacled Microsoft employees circling a train on horses whilst still wearing 1980s software developer outfits (shirts with pinstripes in them but white collars, high-waisted ironed trousers with a slim gold belt buckle, and big glasses, and a bushy moustache) in all the dirt would be witty, whilst dragging green-screen CRTs and big 5.25" floppy discs in their saddle bags with great difficulty.

I know, I know, this is terribly stereotypical but I think it would make for a great film in the style of Mel Brooks; you can contact me if you want obscure and off-the-wall film settings like this...

I don't want yet another email address to use a service, Flickr having required a Yahoo.com email address is a prime example, as is Azure.