Silently rolled out security updates? Maybe. But general purpose auto-updating behavior? Nope. Predicability is a key motivator for enterprises to use Microsoft software.
Convincing businesses to standardize on a particular IE version inside their organizations grants Microsoft a key sales differentiator: "If you use our competitors' software, you'll need to permanently retain an engineering staff to deal with an ever changing platform."
If you're an internet startup, Microsoft's position sounds insane, but consider the stance of tech-ignorant governments and corporations. Yeah, ideally, they should have engineering teams and utilize them to optimize their businesses. Realistically, they don't know how.
If you ask me: the standardizations bodies need to step in here. Let <!DOCTYPE HTML> be the wild west, but declare a deadline for all browsers to work on their HTML 5 implementations. When that deadline passes, all browsers would have a small window of time to release a version which handles <!DOCTYPE HTML5> as a stable, non-changing rendering engine. Then developers could opt into a stable platform, or the wild west. Enterprises could develop internal tools with a fixed doctype and browser venders could pledge support for those rendering engineers. Internet startups could stay on the bleeding edge and play the upkeep game.
I didn't say it was a realistic prospect. What I mean is that this is the biggest flaw of IE. 98% of IE6's crappiness is directly dependent on the fact that it doesn't auto-update. IE6 would never have been such a problem if MS had been able to auto-update it to IE7, 8, 9...
Until that fundamental philosophy flaw is fixed, the rest is just putting lipstick on a Sarah Palin. I won't get excited about IE9 passing ACID3 tests, because all it means is that for a while IE will be an ok browser, but within a year or two it will suck again. I much prefer permanent solutions.
Silently rolled out security updates? Maybe. But general purpose auto-updating behavior? Nope. Predicability is a key motivator for enterprises to use Microsoft software.
Convincing businesses to standardize on a particular IE version inside their organizations grants Microsoft a key sales differentiator: "If you use our competitors' software, you'll need to permanently retain an engineering staff to deal with an ever changing platform."
If you're an internet startup, Microsoft's position sounds insane, but consider the stance of tech-ignorant governments and corporations. Yeah, ideally, they should have engineering teams and utilize them to optimize their businesses. Realistically, they don't know how.
If you ask me: the standardizations bodies need to step in here. Let <!DOCTYPE HTML> be the wild west, but declare a deadline for all browsers to work on their HTML 5 implementations. When that deadline passes, all browsers would have a small window of time to release a version which handles <!DOCTYPE HTML5> as a stable, non-changing rendering engine. Then developers could opt into a stable platform, or the wild west. Enterprises could develop internal tools with a fixed doctype and browser venders could pledge support for those rendering engineers. Internet startups could stay on the bleeding edge and play the upkeep game.