Is IE9 a modern browser?
This is just a troll post getting way too much attention. Let's consider a few facts to put it in perspective.<p>Firstly, neither IE 9 nor Firefox 4 has been released, and neither HTML5 nor CSS3 is a standard, nor will either be for several years at a minimum. The entire argument in this post boils down to not liking one experimental piece of software over another because the author's personal preferences for experimental features are not supported.<p>Secondly, when it comes to performance, IE has been getting better with every version while Firefox has been getting worse. If you want to talk about modern browsers in a <i>useful</i> way, instead of about bleeding edge features that no-one will be using on mainstream web sites for a while anyway, consider that Firefox is the only one of the major browsers that does <i>not</i> handle each tab independently, leading to obvious performance and security problems.<p>Thirdly, the trend for Google and now apparently Mozilla to release updates every few weeks is <i>not</i> necessarily a good thing. The major advantage is supposedly that it allows browsers to develop faster, but as any Linux advocate can tell you, it's no good having a great platform if no-one is building great stuff on top of it. For developers, automated updates every few weeks are often unhelpful, because you're always trying to test against a moving target. When you have to deal with inconvenient realities like contracts and customer approvals on major projects, it's now almost impossible to include testing against Chrome and soon Firefox because you don't even have a stable version to use as a basis for tests. I have no problem with pushing security patches more regularly, but they shouldn't be changing functionality and obviously Microsoft does this for IE anyway.<p>Maybe I'm just weird, but I consider issues like performance, reliability, and having a stable foundation to build on to be far more important than supporting your own browser's take on some hypothetical future "standard", which is just IE vs. Netscape all over again. On that basis, IE is currently the only one of the big three that is actually going in the right direction. It's just a shame they're not providing it on XP.