Great that they abandoned the “intranet apps still depend on IE6” talking point. XP still won't move past IE8, however.
Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
41–50 of 175 posts
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#42Great! Now they just need to switch their entire browser codebase over to Webkit and sanity will be restored to the web.
Wrong. An all-Webkit web would be just as bad as an all-IE web. IE and Mozilla serve to keep WebKit honest. Plus, there's no sense in condemning them based on IE6 when IE9 has come so far.
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#43Finally! I have been waiting for this news for a very long time. I wish Microsoft would also push something like Chrome Tab to those users who opt out of the update, so a website can set some special http header/meta tag and then the website gets rendered with lasted version of the rendering engine.
That sounds bee-yoo-tee-ful.
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#44Great! Now they just need to switch their entire browser codebase over to Webkit and sanity will be restored to the web.
Wrong. An all-Webkit web would be just as bad as an all-IE web. IE and Mozilla serve to keep WebKit honest. Plus, there's no sense in condemning them based on IE6 when IE9 has come so far.
In what way, since IE5.5 and XHR, has IE driven innovation in browsers? Serious question.
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that it will be a big issue since the major reason for end users to still have IE6 around is inertia.
The major reason for end users to still have IE6 around is that they use proprietary applications which were written with IE6 in mind, and they see no good reason to spend money to upgrade these applications (if the vendor is even still interested in doing so) if it still works. So, as long as there is a way to opt out, I imagine there are a lot of corporate folks who will do so.
I think these are best addressed with the X-UA-Compatible header, and various other ways to trigger the use of an older IE engine. Otherwise, users are offered a choice between broken legacy internal apps, or breakage on most of the rest of the web.
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#46And 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.
>> Sysadmins blocked the updates There's something about this that really bothers me, maybe someone can better clarify. Why are admins enforcing a policy that leaves the company target to just about every possible security hole that has been fixed in the past 20 years? Is there a valid reason for this that I'm unaware of?
Large corporations run lots of browser-based applications. To upgrade these applications, or even to regression test them - even in virtual environments - costs money. Any money they spend on IT comes out of their profits, or is added onto their prices. Would you pay an extra 5 bucks to buy your car insurance from a company that has ditched IE6?
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is IE8 really that bad with regards to standards ? That's an honest question.
With regards to the HTML5 and CSS3 level standards that Firefox, Chrome and IE10 are going to be supporting by the end of 2012? Yes. Compared to these, the IE8 JavaScript engine is quite slow too. it's worth looking a few years ahead if IE8 will have another decade of popularity, which isn't impossible. Even without that longevity, the hindrance of the installed base of IE7 and 8 will grow over the next couple of yea…
> the IE8 JavaScript engine is quite slow too
I would go with very slow. Faster than IE6, but not by nearly as much as more modern browsers are faster than it. DOM manipulation is very slow compared to more modern browsers (recent versions of Chrome, FF, Opera, ..., even IE9) too. DOM changes being slow is what you'll notice more with most code.
As an aside: make sure you set X-UA-Compatible (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325%28VS.85%29....) otherwise you'll have no idea if people looking at your stuff in IE8 are using compatability mode or not.
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#48And 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.
>> Sysadmins blocked the updates There's something about this that really bothers me, maybe someone can better clarify. Why are admins enforcing a policy that leaves the company target to just about every possible security hole that has been fixed in the past 20 years? Is there a valid reason for this that I'm unaware of?
There are quite a lot of companies that have applications that rely on IE6. I, personally, know of a few financial institutions that can't update. This might not be necessarily related to their systems not being able to work with a newer version, though. Some office drones are just incapable of doing there job if the color of a button changes. I kid you not.
Other companies have a long(!) cycle when evaluating new software releases. I have heard of an insurance provider that rolled out IE7 just this year.
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong. An all-Webkit web would be just as bad as an all-IE web. IE and Mozilla serve to keep WebKit honest. Plus, there's no sense in condemning them based on IE6 when IE9 has come so far.
In what way, since IE5.5 and XHR, has IE driven innovation in browsers? Serious question.
For one thing, they were the first major browser to properly separate the run-time for pages in different tabs. They were months ahead of Chrome, and Firefox and Opera still haven't caught up several years later.
Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone
#50The 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.
The is a common claim, but has anyone actually researched this? Is there any evidence that this is still true? It's my understanding that most of the IE6 market share is in Asia, where many people are running pirated versions of XP.