As long as http://crashie8.com/ crashes IE9, it shouldn't be considered a modern browser. A modern browser requires a development team that is responsive to large bugs (analogous to PHP and Java being modern languages because they quickly responded to the big-magic-number bug). None of the other "modern browsers" (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) have any crash-the-computer bugs anywhere near the scale that IE9 still has.
Are you claiming there are no crash bugs in those other browsers? I can crash Chrome tabs just by creating lots of HTML 5 audio elements in a loop. And I'm sure there's more.
Of course not - but the crash bugs should ideally be isolated (like your Chrome crash doesn't impact other tabs), short-lived (this bug has been around since mid-2009), and not impact the operating system (only cure for the crashie8 glitch requires loading taskmgr).
I just tried navigating to crashie8.com on IE9 RC, and while it crashed the tab (and one of the other tabs that shared the same process), nothing happened to the main IE window. The isolation seemed to work alright. Did you try this with the beta or the RC?
How many years of your life have you spent working on a software with a large user base?
I humbly submit this number must be very low, because fixing a bug in a widely deployed product is not as easy as you believe it is.
For instance maybe fixing the bug in crashie8.com would break a lot of websites relying (indirectly) on that bug.
It's easy to have your very own definition of "modern" and then say "This is not modern, because modern means having a yellow status bar".
Actually when you said that PHP is a modern language I must say that your definition of modern sounded pretty different than mine.
Lastly, I challenge you to find a single currently working crash-the-computer bug in IE9. Crash the tab, yes. Crash the browser, maybe. Crash the computer, very unlikely.
I know that page shouldn't crash any browser, really, but the crash happens as a result of poorly-written HTML (a missing </form> tag) that IE can't seem to handle.
The poorly-written HTML, however, is frequently generated by larger ASP.NET-based CMS systems (and occasionally SharePoint servers) that start the <form> in the header and don't close it on the page. This snippet is just a shorter example of the error, but is certainly not the only instance where this problem rears its ugly head.
That would be an example of yet more problems originating from MS products, then, right? I don't see why MS can't get this right. MS has the resources to produce a good product, but when it comes to the web, they fall on their faces.
Hey check your facts. I just tried with the RC build of IE. It never loaded the site but the browser didn't crash and the rest of the tabs are working fine.
Of course I can't rule out them getting it right in future releases, and I hope that they do. I was talking about what is out there in the MS ecosystem, today.
The thing is, web browsers are always going to have to deal with two kinds of people: The malicious and the incompetent. They both write web pages, and neither can be avoided completely.
And, when you get down to it, it's impossible to distinguish sufficiently advanced incompetence from malice. (This sentiment seems quite appropriate when discussing Microsoft's browsers.)
