Thoughts of a web designer and a user on IE8

As some of you might have noticed, IE8 made it into the world of regular users recently. Not another beta or release candidate but the real fucking deal. Since in the release, Microsoft seems to have only made the change of removing the "RC" tag, I just didn't fucking bother to write anything.

While watching the world for reactions other than simple parroting of Microsoft's lies, damn lies, and goddamn motherfucking non sequiturs, I found two reactions from very different perspectives that really show how little progress Microsoft has made in all these years.

Internet Explorer 8と XHTML (Google-translated version, for the Japanese-impaired):

"今さら気づいたのですが、IE8って Content-Typeが application/xhtml+xmlの文書に未だ対応していないんですね。ファイルのダウンロードになってしまいます。。。

Blogをはじめとした XHTML文書では application/xhtml+xmlで送ることが推奨されています。当サイトのように XHTML1.1にあえてしているものは尚更です。IEって昔から Webの進化を止めてるなぁってつくづく思います。透過PNGもそうだし、XML宣言もそう。レイアウト上のバグの修正もしてくれない。。。"

Internet Explorer 8 - faulty straight out of the box… (on the installation dialogs and process):

"The next step is [Choose your settings dialog]

How the hell do I know? I've not used the thing yet, I don't know what the features do, or whether I want them to do it - and I sure as hell don't want IE8 set as my default, nor do I like the way they've sneaked it in with a whole batch of other stuff where it's easily overlooked, so I'm going with the custom option.

...

The thing is, IE is the first point of contact with the Internet for almost every new computer user, and in the past has been perfectly usable with zero knowledge - with the introduction of IE8 I think newbies are going to be way out of their depth. Sorry, Redwood[sic], I've had great faith in MS products for a long time, but seriously, you can shove this one."