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Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

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Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#71

Post by RyanMcGreal »

dasmoth wrote: post #70
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #59

I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time. I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't ca…

IE seems no worse than Safari in this respect. Maybe better actually -- those who can't update their OS for some reason remain stuck with Safari 6.1

Try installing IE9+ on Windows XP.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#72

Post by sjf »

Has the Irish domain registry lifted its rules on .ie domains? It used to be that you only register them for Irish businesses, even getting yourname.ie was not straight forward. It's a little disturbing to see this domain.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#73

Post by dasmoth »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #71
dasmoth wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE seems no worse than Safari in this respect. Maybe better actually -- those who can't update their OS for some reason remain stuck with Safari 6.1

Try installing IE9+ on Windows XP.

I agree this is a pain, and IMO a bad mistake by Microsoft.

However, Windows XP was released in 2001, replaced (Vista) in 2007, reached end of mainstream support in 2009, and users have been warned it's going away for many, many years.

OSX Mountain Lion was released in 2012, replaced just a few months ago -- but now doesn't seem to be that much better off in terms of receiving updates to its bundled browser than Windows XP is.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#74

Post by wil421 »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #60
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #59

I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time. I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't ca…

I'd argue that IE is primarily used in corporate settings, when silently upgrading software is a big no-no. Everything has to be tested by the IT/IS department and rolled out in a controlled fashion.

>I'd argue that IE is primarily used in corporate settings

I wouldnt make that distinction. While its probably true that some corporate users are still stuck on XP. Most non techy people I know (which is almost everyone) just buy a new laptop open it up and start using IE. They will probably never upgrade unless the computer tells them or does it automatically.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#75

Post by RyanMcGreal »

dasmoth wrote: post #73
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try installing IE9+ on Windows XP.

I agree this is a pain, and IMO a bad mistake by Microsoft. However, Windows XP was released in 2001, replaced (Vista) in 2007, reached end of mainstream support in 2009, and users have been warned it's going away for many, many years. OSX Mountain Lion was released in 2012, replaced just a few months ago -- but now doesn't seem to be that much better off in terms of receiving updates to its bundled browser than Wind…

Fair point. Microsoft has always been a lot better than Apple at protecting backwards compatibility. It's just a shame that they decided to use IE as a lever to push people toward newer Windows versions rather than doing what's best for the Web platform.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#77

Post by SEMW »

BilalBudhani wrote: post #11
McGlockenshire wrote: post #4

None of the things listed as "not currently planned" are big surprises, though seeing WebRTC there is very disappointing. I've never seen "Object RTC" before, is it a competing effort, or a restandardization effort?

"MathML" is listed as "not currently planned".

Honest question: now that mathjax has a high-quality pure-HTML/CSS output engine, does anyone still care about browser MathML support?

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#79

Post by giovannibajo1 »

dasmoth wrote: post #70
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #59

I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time. I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't ca…

IE seems no worse than Safari in this respect. Maybe better actually -- those who can't update their OS for some reason remain stuck with Safari 6.1

I would have agreed up to the past September, when Mavericks was released for free. Some big leaps in IE updates are tied to Windows upgrades, which are not free for users.

This has a direct reflect on Safari adoption. NetMarketShare gives these numbers for OSX adoption (which is the same of Safari version adoption):

10.9: 3.75% 10.6: 1.29% 10.8: 1.18% 10.7: 1.05%

So roughly half of OSX users are already using the last Safari version (which was released only 7 months ago), which is absolutely different from the situation you have with IE version adoption.

What would be the situation of IE version adoption, were Win7 a free upgrade for all WinXP/Vista users? I think we can agree that free operating system upgrade does have a measurable impact.

Nonetheless, I agree with the general point that Safari now sits in the middle between IE and Firefox/Chrome, and that's why I have not mentioned it in my original post.

Re: Status IE – IE's feature status and plans

#80

Post by giovannibajo1 »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #60
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #59

I would like to know from the IE team if there's a specific plan to fix the browser update issue, that is the fact that IE is by far the slower browser when it comes to user upgrades. It's exciting to see features in IE1x+, but we all know that those will be a tiny fraction of users for a long time. I think that gaining consensus in developers' mindset goes through forcing updates like Chrome and Firefox do; don't ca…

I'd argue that IE is primarily used in corporate settings, when silently upgrading software is a big no-no. Everything has to be tested by the IT/IS department and rolled out in a controlled fashion.

Last time I managed to find a study showing daily browser market share, I noticed that the drop for old IE versions during the weekend was significant but below 50%. So over half of those users are not corporate users.

I don't like citing numbers without a source, but I couldn't find one in 5 minutes Googling. If somebody has a link that shows fairly recent daily IE usage share, we can double check my recall.

I would also like to add that one technical solution for the "IE in enterprise" problem would be allowing parallel IE version installations. IE already allows to go into old version emulation mode, but it's not 100% faithful (I don't know the details).

If it was 100% faithful, sysadmin could simply update IE to the latest version for normal browsing (or even let it auto-update, since I'm sure no sysadmin believe that he/she can QA IE better than MS for general Internet usage), and forcing compatibility (through GPO) for Intranet sites that are broken in newer version.

But since it's not 100% faithful, the technical solution would be allowing to install an auto-updating IE in parallel to IE8, and then configure a policy to automatically switch to IE8 for Intranet sites (Chrome Enterprise does a similar thing; you can configure a GPO so that the user is automatically brought to IE when he/she browses to specific websites, e.g.: Intranet).

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