Farewell, Vista.

[etoven]

MS has declined, sure, but their entire company is a complete 180 from what they were in the late 90s. Their entire design philosophy is a million times better than it was in those days, and these days all their products are incredibly well designed. Internet Explorer is a VERY capable browser now that has received nothing but high praise in the tech field, due in no small part to a completely different team behind it. That team, I should add, is directly responsible for NUMEROUS parts of the current HTML5 standard, working with the standards group for the last few years (along with Google, people at Firefox, and yes, Apple, though Apple has in a few ways been a bad actor). Their "sandboxing" of IE in Windows Vista and 7 eventually spread to every other browser maker out there, as well as their later "hardware accelerated rendering". It doesn't matter what browser you use, MS is responsible for a number of pretty important things in browsing these days (again, a complete shift from not even attempting to catch up several years back).

MS will never have an OS as successful as XP again, and that's great news for us. I really don't see MS going out any time soon though. They seem to still be a major player, just not at the monopolistic levels of the past, which is just fine by me as it fosters healthy competition and innovation. That's exactly what we're getting.

Biggest difference now? Windows can play the vast majority of my back catalog of games. Other OSs can't. So, I choose Windows. I'd go Ubuntu in a flash if "Wine" actually was more than a flash in the pan.

You absolutely never had to develop for IE 9, it's still a major pain in the ass. Just today, I had a issue with a web app I wrote that I had to fix, and guess which browser was the only browser that had a issue.. Not to mention that IE9's CSS 3.0 support is damn near shitty as best, so my site looks like crap in IE9 only, unless I create a bunch of BS hacks just to conform to one browser.