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Comment by AshleysBrain | Hacker News Reader

IE is hardly evergreen. IE11 is curiously not available on Windows 8.0, although it is available on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. They also publish update blockers [1]. Maybe this is why StatCounter still shows a huge IE10 presence [2]. The point of an evergreen browser is to make older browser version shares negligable as quickly as possible, and it doesn't seem that's really happening.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=4072...

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially...

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> IE is hardly evergreen. IE11 is curiously not available on Windows 8.0, although it is available on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1

Windows 8.0 will automatically update to Windows 8.1 so IE10 on Windows 8 will get automatically updated to IE11.

> They also publish update blockers [1]

You say this like it's a bad thing, some users don't want an evergreen browser. The point of the update blocker is to help those users.

What about corporate installations? Is 8.0 -> 8.1 seemless enough or will there be a substantial delay in a standard enterprisey environment and thus creating a new browser isle?

8.0 should (hopefully) be a very short lived release in the wild. There's no reason at all not to upgrade to 8.1, even in a corporate setting, 8.1 is free, and the upgrade process is very smooth.

At one point CheckPoint VPN didn't support 8.1, now it does. One of my customers uses it so I held off upgrading. There could well be other apps with similar issues and big corporates would prefer others discover them.

Hmm, I think 8.0->8.1 actually isn't an auto update. Windows will continue to upsell you to 8.1 but it won't auto update.

It's free, but, yeah, I had to open the Windows Store or whatever and actually make it update. It did not show up in the Windows Update list (not even in the "Suggested Updates").

A large percentage of non-tech-savvy people seem to hate upgrading.

For them, an update just slows them down or leads to confusing changes. What they already have "works fine."

The difference between "auto update" and "an option to update" is huge.

I didn't mean to imply it wasn't a huge difference. Just correcting someone from above..

You can block updates in Chrome and Firefox too. It's a necessary feature for enterprise IT departments that need to test updates before the deploy.

to be fair they don't test updates, rather they test their internal web app lacking standards compliance or cross browser testing.

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