A ton of activity today around the announcement that the Internet Explorer team will be introducing a big huge hack with IE8 to allow it to function like a normal modern web browser.

Mo's got a better idea:

In real terms, though, it's not worth the effort. Release a version of IE 6 [that] can be installed standalone and let the tiny handful of corporate users with weird intranet applications use it, and everyone else will use IE 8 with similar quirks / standards-compliant switches as Firefox ...

Seriously. Why not let users run old versions of IE side-by-side with IE8? Pushing the problem of determining which browser / engine to use onto the user seems like the right solution here because the right thing is too complex:

The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action. A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.

The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix - namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity.

The MIT guy then muttered that sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, but the New Jersey guy didn't understand (I'm not sure I do either).

And in this case, the right thing isn't even right. It's a big huge hack.

Of course, putting yourself in Microsoft's shoes, it doesn't take long to figure out the problem with letting users choose between different browsers.

Note: I wanted to make a crack in here about rebranding IE6 as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework but it wasn't working...