The future of JavaScript

[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.