Is IE8 the end of the line for Internet Explorer? | Hacker News Reader

Is IE8 the end of the line for Internet Explorer?

weblog.infoworld.com

7 pointsccraigIW11 comments

I wouldn't be surprised by this. MS is in a real bind in this case. Many of their cash cow corporate customers are reluctant to upgrade to anything past IE 6. So MS is essentially putting effort into subsequent browser releases largely used by the less-profitable part of their user base. Those corporations are going to cling to IE6 and XP until there is no other option because they just don't want to go through the upgrade pain.

MS can't really use the browser to force adoption of Windows the way they wanted to before. They're not in a position (like Apple and the iPhone) where the browser is critical to their competitive advantage in a new business space. So really, what are they getting out of it?

MS can't really use the browser to force adoption of Windows the way they wanted to before.

Ironically, they brought it on themselves with a combination of such a bad and non-standard implementation that many corporate sites were, and continue to be, tied to a broken version of IE, and a painful upgrade path by tying the browser to the OS. If IE was treated more as an application rather than a component, and multiple versions of it could be on the same install without hacks or issues, corporations would be able to ease into an upgrade path, of both the browser and the OS.

"If Microsoft intends to pull the plug on IE after version 8, it will need to articulate a clear legacy migration strategy that allows these shops to preserve their investments in ActiveX controls and resources.

[...]

Finally, there's the matter of third-party developers using IE's rendering engine with their own applications. This embedded object is invariably an ActiveX container for the IE engine that's installed with Windows, so any attempt to remove IE from the OS -- or to radically change its core underpinnings -- will need to account for applications that rely on the existence of an accessible, programmable IE object model."

Can't they just stop producing newer IE versions and offer minimal support (mostly bug fixes) for the existing ones? This way the internet would have its better standards-compliance and the corporate intranet apps would have their compatibility...

I wish they would just separate out the backward-compatibility considerations into a separate browser, which has to be set up individually for each ActiveX-enabled website it accesses, and doesn't allow the user to leave that site (or, if it does, opens it in the standard browser instead.) Make it ugly, make it annoying to use--in short, make it as Enterprise-y as its users. Hopefully they'll recoil at their own visage and demand a standards-compliant site, that displays in "the nice browsers" :)

People consistently keep falling back on this argument that there are a large number of sites that MS has to continue supporting because of reliance on legacy ActiveX-type systems. I just don't see it.

Firefox is only a few years old, yet there isn't a single site I've visited in recent memory that doesn't work properly. For a browser that "only" has ~25% of the market, every single site out of thousands I've visited not only work properly, they tend to break in IE 6/7 and not standards-based browsers.

There has been a mass of work done on the developer side of things across thousands of public-facing web properties in the last few years to be much more standards compliant.

Microsoft shouldn't worry about "breaking the internet". They've already done that. By just releasing updates to their browsers on a regular basis, orienting around w3c standards, and providing definitive support cut-off dates for old software, they will easily move the mass of their users forward.

Its very simple, really. If they simply just adopt web standards and stop supporting their old crap, suppose it breaks some Fortune 500 internal sites. What are these companies going to do, drop Microsoft and move to other standards-based solutions? In the end, they end up using modern software anyway. Microsoft is creating their own problems.

He talks about enterprise web software, not so much public sites/blogs/etc.

I know it's not going to happen, but I say if IE updates break existing enterprise web sites because they are more standards-compliant, then go for it. Any place that's holding on to IE6 because they're afraid to break IE-only web sites probably isn't going to update anyway.

The timesheet and employee self-services system where I work are IE-only for no good reason. The timesheet site is a Java applet, and the employee self-services system uses XML and Javascript to render content. There's nothing I've seen on either system that cannot be done using simple web standards. I guess people who use Macs here (and there are a number of them) have to have access to a PC to get paid.

As long as we allow enterprises not to be standards-compliant through and through, we, as web developers, will continue to have IE-related headaches.

Oh please God, I really, really hope so.

IMMINENT DEATH OF MICROSOFT PREDICTED.

Erm, no. IE will live on and bring with it a raft of stuff -- like Silverlight -- we'll need in order to explore the Microsoft Internet.

Sounds like you're commenting on the headline without actually reading the article.

The article is about speculation that future versions of IE will no longer use the Internet Explorer rendering engine, and instead use either Webkit or an internally developed rendering engine code named Gazelle. It proceeds to detail the backwards-compatibility challenges Microsoft faces in this endeavor.

The article does all of this without once predicting the demise of Microsoft or its browser product.

What makes you think we're moving toward a Microsoft Internet? It seems to me that we're moving in precisely the opposite direction. Flash is really one of the last few closed holdout technologies.

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