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Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

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Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#11
The article points out that MS will still provide blocking tools for companies. Corporations are the major source of IE6 browsers and I'm not sure this will have any impact on them. The best we can hope for is that high consumer adoption rates will force many more sites to drop IE6 support which might spur companies to finally test and upgrade.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#13
post #9

This is great news: It means IE8 won't be the next IE6. Of course there are a lot of users still restricted to Windows XP, but their market share is dropping fairly quickly. Of course there will always be large corporate environments where updates are much slower, but I would say these are under 10%, perhaps?

IE8 is the max for XP so until XP goes away it will be the new IE6, which is at 1% in the US. So, yes IE8 will have another decade.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#14

And here I thought that all non-updated IE versions were installed in environments where Sysadmins blocked the updates (and will in the future). It would be interesting to see a number of how many installations this change could really target. Like, how many IE 6 to 8 are actually in the wild. Can't be that much, imho.

The great majority of IE6 installations today are in China [1], and I presume that is a region where _personal_ installs of IE6 still are quite prevalent. Of course, these people could have updated if they wanted, and this change won't affect IE6, so it's still a great challenge to get people to modernize.

[1] http://www.ie6countdown.com/

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#17

The article points out that MS will still provide blocking tools for companies. Corporations are the major source of IE6 browsers and I'm not sure this will have any impact on them. The best we can hope for is that high consumer adoption rates will force many more sites to drop IE6 support which might spur companies to finally test and upgrade.

Furthermore, apparently "future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading".

Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-...

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#18
One thing I've noticed is another niche that doesn't quite fit into the "corporation blocking updates" bucket. VMs. I've used a few services at work that run on auto-started VM images and IE8 is installed on those images. It isn't that someone is blocking updates necessarily, it is just that it takes a human to actually go and update the main VM image and update the browser on it. This seems to make it persist longer than it should because VMs are either updated on some long time horizon or there is not a push to proactively change it if the current situation "just works".

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#20
post #13
post #9

This is great news: It means IE8 won't be the next IE6. Of course there are a lot of users still restricted to Windows XP, but their market share is dropping fairly quickly. Of course there will always be large corporate environments where updates are much slower, but I would say these are under 10%, perhaps?

IE8 is the max for XP so until XP goes away it will be the new IE6, which is at 1% in the US. So, yes IE8 will have another decade.

Is IE8 really that bad with regards to standards ? That's an honest question.
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