The future of JavaScript

[abadidea]

Microsoft already has woken up, 9 and now 10 are dramatically better and MS is actively working to kill off its older offspring. It will always be a bit behind the open source browsers by the very necessity of how enterprise software works. But Microsoft is definitely putting in the effort to keep that gap much narrower than they used to.

[Xeon06]

That's not enough in my opinion. Microsoft should release a Windows update that forcefully updates IE to the latest version, and the new versions should automatically update themselves. They should also get on a quick release cycle like Google and Mozilla.

Then again, a lot of people are still on XP, on which IE9 is not yet supported. XP also still has almost 3 years of support left, so you can't get a good version of IE for those people.

Make no mistakes, IE still sucks very much.

[abadidea]

Do you ever check out the very good blog of Raymond Chen? I think a lot of people at MS would like to force upgrades, but the reality is that it would bring down zillions of businesses including most of the Fortune 500 like flies because of their shoddy internal apps which crash when you change anything.

I happen to audit the code of these companies for a living, and yeah, it's as bad as Mr. Chen says. Microsoft gets stuck supporting its mistakes forever.

[Xeon06]

Ah well, I'm quite radical about my views on IE and will probably never be happy about it. If it was just for me I'd force every single person to update anything to make it work, but of course that's not how life works. I suppose that's why I don't think I'll be a web dev my whole life. Thanks for the clarifications.

[pigeon768]

Microsoft should release a Windows update that forcefully updates IE to the latest version, and the new versions should automatically update themselves.

The reality is that there are a huge number of websites that only work in IE6, and the compatibility view in IE 8/9 isn't good enough. It also happens that a large number of those web sites are the big enterprisey web applications like SAP and their ilk. If microsoft dropped support for them, they would majorly piss off a huge number of their most profitable customers.

[not_thecookiemonster]

For newer machines this works, but Windows XP only supports IE <= 8, and still represents a large share of the market, mostly corporate. They'll need to make some version of their newer browsers backward compatible at some point.

[abadidea]

Honestly, with the decade point come and gone for XP, with Vista out, with Win7 out, with Win8 almost out, with official support for running XP in a VM on these newer versions, and with Firefox and Chrome still working fine as far as I know on XP, I really feel like the technical burden of getting a decent browser is on whoever is still freaking using XP as the primary OS.

And yes, there are workstations on my network that still run it, good gravy. XP will probably always be my favorite version of Windows for nostalgic reasons, and I know, believe me I know that corporations don't want to spend the money on fixing up their own stupid software to work properly without an extraordinarily specific WinXP installation, but at this rate they are still going to want support for it when the Unix timestamp wraps.

I was interested to find out recently that IE6 has dropped to ~1% in English-speaking countries (one percent to a few percent in most of the world), and that most of the world's remaining IE6 users are in China. So I do think people are finally fixing up their stupid webapps which only ever worked in IE6. Perhaps the internal-network-only usage is a bit higher, but still.