Posted as a comment to the IE Blog
Yea, I know that IE is in a tough spot. This is (at least) partially deserved but I’m going to try and not hold a grudge.
I personally think that you should really consider making the real IE8 engine (”super standards” as some have called it) the default option. Or at least make it the default option when HTML5 is used.
If you are serious about promoting web standards, its time to start teaching the mom and pop web developers of the world. If the default is IE6/IE7 mode all of their new websites will work fine and they will go on their merry way… still coding incorrectly. Feel free to document the meta tag as the first bullet in your IE FAQ, but don’t let the unknowing masses perpetuate the issue (and just push solving the problem till a later date).
The message I get from your proposal is that Microsoft cares more about its (short term) IE marketshare than the (immense) difficulties that web developers have to deal with today. And really, you can do that if you’d like — but it makes me realize (even more) how bad it is to rely on proprietary software from a very proprietary company.
The web is a great and wonderful thing. I sure hope that it doesn’t die, but moves like this are not helping.