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> The biggest problem I have with IE is disjointed updates. They don't care enough to fix the one thing they need to fix. And don't tell me they're doing automatic updates now, they need to go back and fix all versions. Including on Windows XP.

Their claim is that it's impossible to provide modern IE for older versions of Windows, because IE is so deeply tied into the OS it requires features and libraries that are intimately tied to newer versions and don't/can't exist on (say) XP.

(Not saying I endorse that as a reasonable position, just explaining why they do things the way they do.)

That's not a reason - it's an excuse. Every other major browser works fine across Windows versions and MS claims they can't? It's a marketing decision. Microsoft is an OS company so tying their latest and greatest browser to an OS upgrade is compelling.

The question of how intimately Windows and IE are tied together is a longstanding one, and in fact was a central issue in the antitrust case against MS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp...). The question was discussed at length in Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings of fact (http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm):

In contrast to other operating system vendors, Microsoft both refused to license its operating system without a browser and imposed restrictions — at first contractual and later technical — on OEMs' and end users' ability to remove its browser from its operating system. As its internal contemporaneous documents and licensing practices reveal, Microsoft decided to bind Internet Explorer to Windows in order to prevent Navigator from weakening the applications barrier to entry, rather than for any pro-competitive purpose...

Microsoft's executives believed that the incentives that its contractual restrictions placed on OEMs would not be sufficient in themselves to reverse the direction of Navigator's usage share. Consequently, in late 1995 or early 1996, Microsoft set out to bind Internet Explorer more tightly to Windows 95 as a technical matter. The intent was to make it more difficult for anyone, including systems administrators and users, to remove Internet Explorer from Windows 95 and to simultaneously complicate the experience of using Navigator with Windows 95. As Brad Chase wrote to his superiors near the end of 1995, "We will bind the shell to the Internet Explorer, so that running any other browser is a jolting experience." ...

Starting with Windows 95 OSR 2, Microsoft placed many of the routines that are used by Internet Explorer, including browsing-specific routines, into the same files that support the 32-bit Windows APIs. Microsoft's primary motivation for this action was to ensure that the deletion of any file containing browsing-specific routines would also delete vital operating system routines and thus cripple Windows 95.

So while it was originally a marketing decision -- the two were tied together specifically to put competitors at a disadvantage -- the implementation of that decision was not just marketing. It was implemented technically too, to the point where removing IE from a copy of Windows would break the OS. So regardless of the motivation behind the decision, the fact remains that the two things are tangled up with each other quite deeply.

Microsoft could have gone back at a later point and un-tangled them, but that would have been a huge project, and there was no real motivation for them to do so -- the settlement agreement that ended the antitrust case didn't require them to, and the market wasn't rejecting Windows with IE tied into it. So it stayed tangled up.

The big irony is that by tying the OS and browser together to get an advantage over their competitors, they ended up disadvantaging themselves. Those competitors can now turn out new versions of their browsers at a fast clip, because they're not tied to any release schedule other than their own. IE is tied to Windows' release schedule, however, so it improves at a glacial pace compared to other browsers, making it less competitive over time.

The other major Browsers on Windows do not solve, work-with, nor integrate with the metric-tons worth of enterprise and business issues, needs, and past + current solutions. Nor do they take backward compatibility issues seriously.

This is probably 50% of the game which makes Microsoft money with the Enterprise.

You're thinking of the Consumer market.

>Every other major Browser on Windows does not solve, work-with, nor integrates with the metric-tons worth of enterprise and business issues, needs, and past + current solutions. Nor do they take backward compatibility issues seriously.

the life would so much happier without all that enterprise software crap that works only on IE. "Works only with IE" is like a hallmark of usability/quality/performance one can expect from the hallmarked application. And is not just correlation, it is usually a strong causation as the real reason behind it is that the application was most probably produced by mediocre at best team using some enterprise framework treated like a black box.

>This is probably 50% of the game which makes Microsoft money with the Enterprise.

absolutely. I'm always fascinated by how user-candy MS ecosystem looks to an Enterprise on the first date (vs. say Linux) and how bad things become almost immediately once they move in together.

Supposedly the performance in IE 10/11 comes from not having XP compatibility layers.

Their claim is that it's impossible to provide modern IE for older versions of Windows, because IE is so deeply tied into the OS it requires features and libraries that are intimately tied to newer versions and don't/can't exist on (say) XP.

One of the core reasons is that new IEs uses security support from the OS, like low privileges, that didn't exist in old Windows OSES.

So why not un-tie it from the OS? If Chrome, FF, & Safari can do all that they do without deep os integration, why not IE? someone said "One of the core reasons is that new IEs uses security support from the OS, like low privileges, that didn't exist in old Windows OSES" well I don't believe IE11 is any more secure than chrome or firefox, and they don't need that so why does IE?

I know the business model used to be "release a new version of IE, make compatible for only the new version of windows, force everyone to buy a new windows license." and that worked back when there was no competition. but trying to do that in todays market means most savvy users will just use a browser that updates without needing an OS update (or any user action, for that matter).

Really, why doesn't IE just start doing an iterative auto-release cycle like ff or chrome?

Because the availability of IE is part of the Windows platform -- a Windows program gets to assume that IE is installed and the various APIs provided by IE are available.

If Microsoft wants older Windows software to work, it has to ensure that when an app written against IE4 invokes the WebBrowser control in IE11 it still behaves as expected.

IE doesn't need Windows so much as Windows needs IE.

OS X solves that by using a separate version of Webkit for their webviews that's independent from Safari.

This is also the case in Windows (now) but only for Metro style applications. Those compiled for Windows 8 use the IE10 control and for 8.1, the IE11 control.

The problem is dependency on DirectWrite/Direct2D etc that any app can depend on.

Corporate customers who have their shitty intranet apps tied to a specific version of IE for one.

I thought that the claim was the XP and Vista are no longer supported versions and nobody need write new software for them.

No longer in mainstream support.

Interesting to note that Apple does the same thing with Safari.

IE11 has crazy regressions in keyframe animations and transitions. Stuff that worked fine in IE10 and every other browser on the planet now requires voodoo like using settimeout to delay for a magical number of ms before setting certain style properties.

IE11 has been, in my experience, the largest source of awful, browser-specific hackery since the Galaxy S2 or Blackberry mobile browsers.

You might think that, if you've worked with IE10, it's going to be smooth sailing. It's not. IE11 is a regression in comparison.

The browser quirks aren't things like "Oh, you need a vendor prefix here." They are things like, "no matter what, keyframe animations will never work at all in the presence of the Facebook API, and transition animations will work sometimes (but not always!) because reasons, and sometimes (but not always!) animated elements will reset back to their original position after the animation completes."

Because of these browser-specific quirks, you'll be spending a fair amount of time in the IE11 developer tools, which are very nearly unchanged since interns wrote them in IE7. Worse, they frequently crash and take the browser down with it. Or, they get out of sync with the browser, and "Inspect Element" stops working until you restart the browser. You'll be restarting IE and staring at the "Searching for solutions..." dialog quite a bit.

When the tools DO work, you'll find they've added a bunch of new stuff like the "UI Responsiveness Wizard", but that's a poor consolation prize for losing the great debugging features of other browsers, like "Break on attribute modification" and "stabililty."

And, after spending days poring through JS, trying to find any sort of IE11-specific bug or behavior on these complex sites that work in very nearly every other browser, including IE10 and an array of mobile browsers going back to Android 2, you'll find that adding random timeouts will start fixing some of these weird behaviors.

I've been mired in IE11 support for the past several months. It's been a nightmare.

Oh my lord. Thanks for breaking the fragile new trust I had in Microsoft's improved embracing of the web.. They actually made it so that you now have to test and optimize for every IE version out there.

The IE vision of embracing the web is being incredibly dogmatic about "you shouldn't have to do anything special for IE" while simultaneously introducing a slew of IE-specific awful.

This is what drives me crazy with MS. They really improved IE this time around and actually fixed my biggest beef, which is the lack of decent web developer tools.

So yeah, they fixed that, then once I started using the tools, I suddenly realized they completely stripped out the Document Mode/Browser Mode so now you have to figure out some other way of testing old versions.

Oh, but wait! Browser Mode is now back in, not in an update mind you, but only available in Windows 8.1. Seriously, WTF!?

For my taste, the Web Developer Tools haven't improved at all. What have you found that is an improvement?

I think the big thing is they're very similar to Firebug and Chrome's developer tools now. Before it took an act of congress to change CSS, HTML and debug JS. Now, it's very similar to other browser's.

You can see the differences in the UI here: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/the-new-ie11-f12-tools/

Even looking at the side-by-side shots of DOM Explorer, I have a hard time telling which one is new and which one is old.

The parts that are most important to my work have largely gone unchanged, and the debugging tools I use most from Chrome and Firebug are nowhere to be found.

I'm a Microsoft engineer that worked on animations in IE10. Unfortunately, we're not aware of the IE11 regressions you experienced. Could you please share a test page that demonstrates the issue?

You can reach me at stevebe@microsoft.com.

That's part of what's frustrating about the larger move away from version sniffing (e.g. jQuery no longer supporting it) and IE playing games with its User Agent string. I'm in favor of it in theory, but in practice there are a handful of things where you simply need to know the browser vendor or version in order to provide a usable page.

they need to go back and fix all versions. Including on Windows XP.

Closest that I have is this but that is because it turned to be a security issue: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2013/07/how-i-found-cve-2013-13...

I'd prefer to see MSIE market share continue to decline to less than 20%. The would warrant not having to make any specific browser hacks to get it to work.