
Microsoft man: "My job is to destroy IE6" - jaybol
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/358276/microsoft-man-my-job-is-to-destroy-ie6
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webdragon
Microsoft obviously knows that the only way to kill IE6 is to say it is
unsupported software and to stop releasing security updates for it. Until that
happens, IT departments will continue to cling to it as part of the default
install of Windows XP.

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johns
Except, that will never happen before the support lifecycle expires. It would
be devastating to their enterprise sales. One reason you buy Microsoft at a
large company is because they promise support for 10 years. If they renege on
that with IE6, it would get too much exposure and enterprise IT departments
would revolt and MS would start losing ground in one of their last
strongholds.

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cookiecaper
Well, isn't that ten year support timeline due for expiration in the next year
or so? I'm going from memory here so please correct me if not.

~~~
superdavid
That would be for the initial release, but not for the service packs
unfortunately. IE6 was still standard (and had some security enhancements) in
XP SP2.

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niyazpk
_Yet, despite such efforts, Microsoft has announced that it won't be bringing
Internet Explorer 9 to Windows XP, leaving users of that operating system
without access to the most modern browser._

~~~
superdavid
You can see they're between a rock and a hard place - they don't want to annoy
business customers by cutting off support for XP, but they don't want to spend
significant resources bringing new software to an incredibly old platform.

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mattmanser
_turning off support for IE6 in a bid to push customers towards later versions
was "unacceptable"_

So not really then.

~~~
superdavid
At least their own new apps (Sharepoint 2010, online versions of Office) won't
run in IE6, so that's pushing people towards newer versions.

The problem is, even if we get rid of IE6 today, IE7 will be the problem
tomorrow, then IE8 the next day. It's not hard to foresee a time when we're
all moaning about how terrible IE9 is (if we're not already).

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thechangelog
Have you looked into IE 9? Everything I've seen leads me to believe that
Microsoft has finally started listening. All that loss of market share has
finally had the right effect.

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swombat
IE6 was everything IE9 is, 10 years ago. IE9 will be everything IE6 is, 10
years from now.

~~~
mseebach
It's orders of magnitude easier to develop something that works cross-browser
today than it was ten years ago, even for quite advanced stuff. Back then, you
basically had to develop two parallel sites (one for IE and one for NS) if you
wanted it to do anything moderately fancy.

~~~
danieldon
You still could easily find you need to, even with IE 8.

Sure, simple box positioning is easier and most of the stock jQuery UI library
works fine, but it's precisely when you try to do anything moderately fancy
that IE can quickly because a major hassle.

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kevinh
Godspeed, Mr. Gavin, Godspeed.

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mjw
IE7 too would be nice while you're at it :)

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BonoboBoner
Cool, then we can start hating IE7! Remember the old days when IE 5.5 was the
most hated browser?

Why wont they just admit defeat and built IE around WebKit?

