4 ms·
I am still pretty confused as to why a company so big as Microsoft keeps shipping a browser that scores a weak forth place in terms of these things. It also do
by Drakim 14y ago
I am still pretty confused as to why a company so big as Microsoft keeps shipping a browser that scores a weak forth place in terms of these things.
It also doesn't boost my confidence that they aren't releasing the newer Internet Explorer versions on older versions of Windows (where browsers such as Firefox and Chrome run just fine) making it harder to get a larger part of their userbase to upgrade to the newest (while it's rare to find people who use old versions of Chrome).
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoThey do release new versions on older versions, but only those which are still supported. XP isn't, so that's how it is.
- null_ptr 14y agoYou think Vista will get IE10? Doubt it, part of this is also to motivate people to upgrade their OS.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoOh, no. I should really say Microsoft only make new versions work with the previous version of Windows and the current, as that's what they actually do. But Microsoft doesn't want to ever upgrade IE on XP, they want XP to die.
- yuhong 14y agoMore precisely, in mainstream support.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoYes. Truth of course is that it is only backported to the previous version though. Vista sadly won't see IE10.
- yuhong 14y agoAgain because Vista entered extended support in April 2012.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoOh. I didn't know that.
- yuhong 14y agoAFAIK the standard is 5 years of mainstream support plus 5 years of extended support. The 5 years of mainstream support will get extended if the next version is not released in time (generally to two years after the next version's release).
- rprasad 14y agoBecause unlike Firefox or Chrome, Microsoft has thousands of enterprise customers who use IE to host intranet applications that depend on specific behaviors of the browser. Thus, Microsoft is essentially required to freeze development on a browser prior to its release to ensure stability of behavior (not the same thing as debugging) and to take steps to ensure that the new version can properly emulate the behavior of older versions (i.e., incompatibility mode and the previous browser modes). Firefox and Chrome don't even try to cater to enterprise users, so they can focus on releasing new versions every few weeks even if those new versions break websites or addons (which happens quite frequently with both Firefox and Chrome).