IE9 could be outdated in a few weeks, Sauce Labs says
itworldcanada.com
“Microsoft didn’t learn its lesson with the way it approached IE9,” he said. (Jason Huggins)
itworldcanada.com
It seems to me that they completely fail to understand the costs associated with maintenance of corporate systems. It's inconceivable to me that they could take this so lightly. Having rapid changes (even if they're smaller) with little control of when they are deployed is a recipe for disaster for many IT organizations, and thus a good way to get your product kicked out of the enterprise.
Enforcing updates would also likely improve IE's market share, as all those not-recent versions are part of the cause of developers migrating towards Firefox / WebKit browsers. How much has this hurt Microsoft? Enough to make it worth losing the stragglers who aren't paying to update anyway?
edit: of course, there's a solution to all this: the ability to specify the particular version of a browser you're targeting, if it matters. Then at least a warning can be thrown, and if multiple renderers are included, they can be used selectively.
The advantages would be twofold. First off, people who need to use a 10 year old version of Internet Explorer because of crappy internal apps could continue to do so, and they could install and use a new version of Internet Explorer for using the real world, modern Internet. Secondly, we'd avoid having to hear about the (legitimate) woes of developers who need to run multiple copies of Windows virtually to do testing, or use third-party hacks to get multiple versions of IE to run on a single copy of Windows.
And I'm suggesting that the above be done for new versions of IE. But it's just as possible for Microsoft to release an application version of IE6 that users more recent versions of Windows could install in order to run those ancient internal web applications. There's benefit here too in terms of showing people that they need to use an old-and-busted version of a program to access their internal stuff vs the new-hotness they'd have to use to access the public Internet. Even rebranding Internet Explorer with a different name would help toward that somewhat (if you could install it along side the ancient version of IE6).
Similarly, I hate that Chrome only allows one installation, with the exception of Canary (windows only). What's the point? Give them a unique ID, and namespace everything! Get clever with hardlinking binaries if nothing's different, but sheesh.
</rant>
That's likely the best solution, yes. I guess we can hope it goes that way eventually, right?
Yes. If corporate IT departments get burned enough, they'll stop basing their in-house applications on proprietary standards that come and go like boy bands. That might not be good for Microsoft but they certainly don't want to be the only vendor offering lock-in as a "feature," do they?
If upgrading a browser breaks an application you wrote, chances are 99.999% that it's your fault, and nobody else's. Either you have a bug, or you chose the wrong tool for the job in the first place.
At the time, IE6 was more standards-compliant than any other browser. The problem here isn't that it was a bad browser, it's because the standards refuse to sit in one place.
I shouldn't have used the term "proprietary standards" at all -- it's a bit of an oxymoron.
These things must be in the hands of those responsible for maintaining the systems. Anything else, and the potential risk is too high, and enterprise customers will have no choice but to stay away.
Heck, right now you're giving them one more excuse to stay with IE6.
EDIT: you also haven't defended your stance on forced upgrades in the nature of Chrome. Even if you were right about frequency, forcing the changes whether the users are ready or not is madness.
Enterprise environments are the problem here, MS's deployment model is just a symptom.
Edit: To clarify, my point is not that automatic updates wouldn't work, but that enterprise environments are such a large part of the current internet that web developers cannot ignore them. I'd rather have enterprise users on 'Outdated IE9' that I have to deal with than have 'Oh, are these customers on IE9.0.1.2, IE9.0.1.3, or IE9.0.1.4?'.
Microsoft is under no obligation to provide a crippled version of IE9, and while the companies would whine a lot, they would fall in line (it is not like they would install Linux on the desktop instead, or even use Firefox).
Enterprises happy to go along with this argument, so they can claim to do all this browser and internal app testing approaching NASA levels.
Yeah, right.
When last were the APIs used by "enterprise customers" revved? IE6?
Believe me, I don't like supporting customers on IE6. But the fact is that the very same lumbering behemoths that won't move also happen to be the same 800-lb gorillas that can authoritatively say "support us or we take our business elsewhere", and we have little choice but to comply.
Now, corporate systems may be currently filled with a lot of IE6-only (cr)apps, but even Microsoft wants people to move on from that. If internal corporate intranet systems were forced to be standards compliant, there's no reason to assume they'd be any worse off than the million of public internet systems that exist on the other side of the firewall.
I just hope they only whine about it, and don't go to their lobbyists.
In fact, the release of IE9 may already be enough to create that market. The main problem I see with this is that it may be very hard to make a sufficiently-compatible IE clone.
* Probably, it is, in quirks mode or something like that.
Obviously... there would have to be a limit to who could get this plugin - we don't want people installing ActiveX all over again unless they really need it!
IE9 can only be a step forward.
If your company is dependent on hundreds of in-house web apps, or worse - dependent on bought-in webapps that you can't fix yourself then being forced to upgrade is insanity.
Sure, Microsoft should release new versions of IE more quickly than they currently do, but they shouldn't be dropping support for older versions.