

Is IE8 the end of the line for Internet Explorer? - ccraigIW
http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2009/03/is_version_8_th.html

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JunkDNA
I wouldn't be surprised by this. MS is in a real bind in this case. Many of
their cash cow corporate customers are reluctant to upgrade to anything past
IE 6. So MS is essentially putting effort into subsequent browser releases
largely used by the less-profitable part of their user base. Those
corporations are going to cling to IE6 and XP until there is no other option
because they just don't want to go through the upgrade pain.

MS can't really use the browser to force adoption of Windows the way they
wanted to before. They're not in a position (like Apple and the iPhone) where
the browser is critical to their competitive advantage in a new business
space. So really, what are they getting out of it?

~~~
thwarted
_MS can't really use the browser to force adoption of Windows the way they
wanted to before._

Ironically, they brought it on themselves with a combination of such a bad and
non-standard implementation that many corporate sites were, and continue to
be, tied to a broken version of IE, and a painful upgrade path by tying the
browser to the OS. If IE was treated more as an application rather than a
component, and multiple versions of it could be on the same install without
hacks or issues, corporations would be able to ease into an upgrade path, of
both the browser and the OS.

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Hexstream
"If Microsoft intends to pull the plug on IE after version 8, it will need to
articulate a clear legacy migration strategy that allows these shops to
preserve their investments in ActiveX controls and resources.

[...]

Finally, there's the matter of third-party developers using IE's rendering
engine with their own applications. This embedded object is invariably an
ActiveX container for the IE engine that's installed with Windows, so any
attempt to remove IE from the OS -- or to radically change its core
underpinnings -- will need to account for applications that rely on the
existence of an accessible, programmable IE object model."

Can't they just stop producing newer IE versions and offer minimal support
(mostly bug fixes) for the existing ones? This way the internet would have its
better standards-compliance and the corporate intranet apps would have their
compatibility...

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derefr
I wish they would just separate out the backward-compatibility considerations
into a separate browser, which has to be set up individually for each ActiveX-
enabled website it accesses, and doesn't allow the user to leave that site
(or, if it does, opens it in the standard browser instead.) Make it ugly, make
it annoying to use--in short, make it as Enterprise-y as its users. Hopefully
they'll recoil at their own visage and demand a standards-compliant site, that
displays in "the nice browsers" :)

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geuis
People consistently keep falling back on this argument that there are a large
number of sites that MS has to continue supporting because of reliance on
legacy ActiveX-type systems. I just don't see it.

Firefox is only a few years old, yet there isn't a single site I've visited in
recent memory that doesn't work properly. For a browser that "only" has ~25%
of the market, every single site out of thousands I've visited not only work
properly, they tend to break in IE 6/7 and not standards-based browsers.

There has been a mass of work done on the developer side of things across
thousands of public-facing web properties in the last few years to be much
more standards compliant.

Microsoft shouldn't worry about "breaking the internet". They've already done
that. By just releasing updates to their browsers on a regular basis,
orienting around w3c standards, and providing definitive support cut-off dates
for old software, they will easily move the mass of their users forward.

Its very simple, really. If they simply just adopt web standards and stop
supporting their old crap, suppose it breaks some Fortune 500 internal sites.
What are these companies going to do, drop Microsoft and move to other
standards-based solutions? In the end, they end up using modern software
anyway. Microsoft is creating their own problems.

~~~
dimitry
He talks about enterprise web software, not so much public sites/blogs/etc.

~~~
umjames
I know it's not going to happen, but I say if IE updates break existing
enterprise web sites because they are more standards-compliant, then go for
it. Any place that's holding on to IE6 because they're afraid to break IE-only
web sites probably isn't going to update anyway.

The timesheet and employee self-services system where I work are IE-only for
no good reason. The timesheet site is a Java applet, and the employee self-
services system uses XML and Javascript to render content. There's nothing
I've seen on either system that cannot be done using simple web standards. I
guess people who use Macs here (and there are a number of them) have to have
access to a PC to get paid.

As long as we allow enterprises not to be standards-compliant through and
through, we, as web developers, will continue to have IE-related headaches.

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dflock
Oh please God, I really, really hope so.

------
bitwize
IMMINENT DEATH OF MICROSOFT PREDICTED.

Erm, no. IE will live on and bring with it a raft of stuff -- like Silverlight
-- we'll need in order to explore the Microsoft Internet.

~~~
jsdalton
Sounds like you're commenting on the headline without actually reading the
article.

The article is about speculation that future versions of IE will no longer use
the Internet Explorer rendering engine, and instead use either Webkit or an
internally developed rendering engine code named Gazelle. It proceeds to
detail the backwards-compatibility challenges Microsoft faces in this
endeavor.

The article does all of this without once predicting the demise of Microsoft
or its browser product.

