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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

IE is certainly making good progress lately. However, when every other browser is releasing updates every 6 weeks, Microsoft could substantially benefit from not only a faster release cycle, but also automatic background updates.

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I suspect that there are some entities that consider the slow release cycle a feature.

Certainly I consider UX stability a good thing.

Just this week gmail decided that being able to open my calendar in a single click was a horrible idea. It only took me a minute or so to figure out wtf happened. But multiplied across a large number of people of varying computer literacy and near weekly changes you are talking about a lot of lost time. Much better to have an annual or biannual training day where changes across a range of software products can be introduced.

I suppose someone will be along to stamp NOT AGILE on my forehead shortly.

zomg your statement is a travesty on all things best practice, and you should be branded a heretic for all times to come!

I suspect market forces will squeeze out those entities.

Yes because every company will eventually be a startup with only a handful of employees and little investment in technology so that they can jump on the newest technology without costing the company billions. /snark

No, what's going to happen is SaaS companies are going to stop supporting old browsers and their webapps won't work in the browser the IT department is clinging to, the IT department heads will get fired and replaced by people who do a better job prioritizing. "Let's keep using IE8 because it's the newest browser to correctly run that app we developed in 2002" is going to cost people jobs.

Or big companies just won't use SaaS products that don't support their version of IE.

Yup, that's possible. I'm betting the VP who wants to use Gmail is going to overrule the IT department head though.

You might be surprised. Supporting extra stuff can have serious IT costs. When the head of IT says it's going require x dollars, y FTEs, or z weeks in schedule slippage to bring on that support, the CEO turns to the VP and says, "Jim, is this really worth it?"

But things can shift slowly. I worked at a big media company when the iPhone was launched. The next day, the CIO emailed the entire company of 20k and said that iPhones would not absolutely not be supported, and to please stop asking no matter what VP/SVP/EVP you were. It was years before iOS was permitted on the network.

This is exactly my point. This type of thinking is simply going to be weeded out. More efficient IT heads will replace the slower and costlier ones. Companies will lose potential employees who don't want to carry around a BlackBerry Curve or use Lotus Notes. The market has a way of correctly slow moving companies.

I think we agree more than disagree, but I still take issue with your statement of "more efficient IT heads" and that they need to be "weeded out." It's not a type of thinking -- there was a clear business reason. Re: my example of the large media company I worked at:

In 2007, it was a very small minority of employees who could afford the $599 device and wanted extra support for it outside of BlackBerry Enterprise Server. By 2010, there were a lot of iPhones and the case could be made that it would meet the needs of a significant portion of the company while pushing device costs to the employee as a BYOD, thus saving money while still being able to enforce some security policies thanks to iOS 4. The head of IT wasn't being a stodgy old fart (ok maybe a little) -- he/she made a rational policy decision that I think was correct at the time. Today I think they're on Google Apps.

The problem I'm seeing now is that dozens of employees are sharing logins for the same SaaS tools. And all the passwords are the same so that it's "easy to remember." A single password compromise could leak a lot of data and cause a lot of damage.

People like you and me know encrypt drives and walk away from a stolen laptop with only the cost of hardware, but IT managers today seem like they have a bigger headache to manage.

My point is that the old IT position of updating slowly is being attacked on multiple fronts. From users who want to use modern technology, from SaaS companies who are increasingly dropping support for old-but-not-that-old browsers, and from browser vendors who are all moving towards rapid release cycles. Even IE.

I'm saying that the IT head, when it eventually gets to IE11 in 6 years and turns off automatic updates -- a feature that is on by default --, is going to find himself rather isolated and in my opinion a new crop of IT is going to form that's more nimble as a result.

IE is certainly making good progress lately.

If IE is making progress in usability, I don't really see it. I typically use Chrome for three reasons:

1. It's fast

2. It has better plugin support (i.e. Adblock)

3. It doesn't have random freezes

Just today I thought I'd give IE 11 another try on my Windows 8.1 system. It wasn't long before I started experiencing weird random freezes that I literally never get in Chrome. Anyone reading my comment history will show that I use a lot of Microsoft technologies (Visual Studio, Windows Phone, etc) but I am frequently left wondering what the heck Microsoft is doing with IE because it's not working.

IE's compositing and rendering are far ahead of Chrome, honestly. Direct2D and DirectWrite are really really good at using the GPU to render content, and the D3D-based compositing is really good. Microsoft is very good at graphics (and it helps that they control the whole stack of course).

If there's one thing I was really impressed with when trying out Windows 8 and whatever version of IE it came with, it's the hardware acceleration when scrolling. I've never seen such smooth scrolling before, ever.

The fact here is that IE is only available on Windows, whereas Chrome and Safari support all platforms. The common denominator for them is OpenGL. BTW, is OpenGL inherently inferior to DirectX?

IE has Adblock Plus.... https://adblockplus.org/en/internet-explorer

Also they need to support XP. XP usage is still mind-boggling-high:

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

~1/3 of windows users are still forced to run IE8 at best. If Chrome, Firefox and Opera can run on XP why can't IE11?

Maybe because Windows XP is 12 years old now, and people who use Windows XP are mostly from third world countries who don't really care wether they have IE6 or IE11 installed.

For a computer-buyer? It's 6 years old, not 12. If you bought a computer in January 2007, it ran Windows XP. That computer could've been a 2 Ghz dual-core 64-bit machine that should still run fine today, but the operating-system bundled with it is end-of-life.

We all know computer sales are in a slump because quite frankly a computer from 2007 is fine at most of today's computing tasks. So are you really shocked that users of such machines are bothered by the fact that their OS is now unsupported with no free-upgrade path?

There are, sadly, a ton of Enterprise clients still using Windows XP as well as a ton of home users in first world countries.

Windows XP still works "good enough" for most computing tasks. Having said that, since I'm used to more modern operating systems I find I'm lost on XP now but for people that never left it, it generally works "good enough".

"Windows XP still works "good enough" for most computing tasks."

Well... when those computing tasks increasingly involve using web services, then no, Windows XP doesn't still work "good enough".

What do web services have to do with XP?

If I reword that as "services on the web", does that make it any clearer?

That doesn't help at all. I think you mean applications on the web that aren't compatible with Internet Explorer 8 which is the latest version of Internet Explorer that Windows XP can install. But that is negated by the fact that the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox work fine on Windows XP so that is not an issue.

No, it still sounds equally daft. You are aware that the latest version of Firefox runs on XP, right? So what "services on the web" do you think are affected by running XP?

people who use Windows XP are mostly from third world countries

We're still being migrated from XP to Win7, if they keep doing the upgrades as people's computers come off lease (so they avoid extra downtime) I think the projected finish date was mid/early next year. At least 3 of my coworkers (~20 person team inside IT) are still on XP, this is a largish US corporation.

Seems to me that most people still on XP are stuck on XP due to ingrained resistance to updates. Who says they will be allowed to update IE even if they could?

Because one of those browsers is a core component of the operating system, used in a ton of places and embeddable by other programs which means a major update can potentially break a lot of things. And the others are just standalone programs that only have to worry about their own performance.

I'm just saying it doesn't have to be that way. They could keep the core os component running the old version and have the newer standalone version of the browser running next to it. There may be some minor technical hurdles with all the shared libraries. Sure. But there's no reason it couldn't be done.

Microsoft could still build a standalone version of IE if they really wanted. The reason they cut off support is laziness, greed (pushes people to buy new windows licences), and there's likely some legal issues due to the old anti-trusts cases where MS argued that IE couldn't be separated from the OS.

So, not wanting to maintain two separate codebases is laziness? How about the ROI on such a solution is hideously low.

What about the code base we all have to maintain supporting those shit browsers? Plus I doubt it's that fundamental a change to the code base. Just point IE to a few newer DLLs and write a different deployment package. If MS are able to update .NET, DirectX and all their other libraries and maintain backwards compatibility then I'm sure they could with IE as well. There's no real technical reason hampering them, just a lack of incentive and plenty of excuses.

And the ROI point is moot because it's already been pointed out that all of the other big browsers still support XP.

Every 3 years its the same bullshit, MS release a new version of Windows and suddenly all their new software cannot run on their older versions of Windows - as if this new OS magically changes the way how Trident works. As someone who's hacked his way around some of Windows internals, I don't buy MSs marketing, it's just a ploy to sell more copies of their latest OS.

The are doing both of those things.

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