IE to Start Automatic Upgrades across Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 | Hacker News Reader

IE to Start Automatic Upgrades across Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7

windowsteamblog.com

51 pointsrobin_reala20 comments

Microsoft should just start to bundle IE with new solitaire games, so that people would be forced to upgrade IE to get the new games. That should kill IE6 in a few hours.

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but this has just made my christmas and new year. If this has a genuine impact, and means people are running IE8 in the worst case, then I will be a very a happy dev.

Patiently waits to see browser usage trends once this rolls out...

I was thinking the same thing. On government contracts we're still required to support IE6 even though we can't seem to find an actual computer running IE6.

This move.. which as far as i can tell would be to make IE upgrades opt-out instead of opt-in, could be a seriously great one. It just might go a long way to killing off IE6 and IE7, leaving IE 8 as the only non-current version requiring support.

It's great to fantasize about no IE or the latest IE on XP, but in the real world this is a very positive move.

Does this mean that IE9 will be available on Win XP?

It would be great, but I doubt that Microsoft will do something like that. Most likely Win XP users will get "only" security updates an service packs for IE7, Vista users for IE8 and only Win7 users will get the latest IE.

That being said, I can't see this as a big leap forward, since large majority of users will not get the latest browser update.

No it doesn't nor does it mean that safari 5 will be available for OSX 10.1 (another OS released around the same time).

What large majority of users still use XP? I'd be surprised if winxp was 50% let alone 80%. It's official there are more 7 installs than Xp so no majority let alone a large one.

If you want updates upgrade to win7, xp is over 10 years old. Ie8 already runs fine on xp.

I'm in FDA and XP is currently the requirement for us. Anything newer takes a request for exemption which is a lot of paperwork that will quite possibly be denied.

Most of the machines in the office here (about forty or so) are XP. We're not a large government bureaucracy, just a small-medium business.

I'd be surprised if a great deal of other businesses are in the same situation. Outside of technology companies I haven't seen many running Windows 7; there isn't a strong enough business case for most people yet.

What about 'pirated' copies of Windows? I presume they're not getting updates at the moment.

(All the same, this is still a good thing.)

So IE9 runs on Windows XP?

"Today we are sharing our plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC." First sentence of the article seems pretty clear to me, the latest IE that your PC can run will be installed. Not sure why the confusion.

I wonder why they decided to be so non-specific in this article. It would have been more clear to say "Users on XP will be upgraded to IE 8, users on Vista and 7 will be upgraded to IE 9 and later as new versions are released" or something of the sort. Instead, they spent a lot of time talking about why what they're doing is so great, and a lot less time talking about exactly what they are doing.

Because it's a press release. Users will be upgraded to the latest version available on their system. What more do you want?

First off, IE9 doesn't run on XP. So what does this really mean? Does it mean we'll be writing hacks for 5 browsers instead of 10 now? Not good enough. This sounds real good but I get the feeling they'll make updating so convoluted or the opt-out process too easy to the point where it barely has any effect. Lame sauce.

Sounds like the signal to hundreds of millions of Windows users to turn off automatic updates.

What? Why? What would their motivation be for clinging to IE6 or 7? I can see large corporations with awful, unsupported "enterprise" applications that only work with a specific browser not upgrading but end-users shouldn't care at this point.

Many of them think they care, and believe they have some reason to not upgrade. When you're running IE 6 or 7 MS frequently directs you to a 'time to upgrade, here's IE 8/9' page so they've been reminded plenty already.

The reasons I've heard from users include that they:

- fear it will make their computer unstable

- believe their hardware can't handle it

- are comfortable with IE 6/7 and fear change

- don't understand the extent to which the newer versions are faster/more secure/more capable

- 'son/daughter/hubby/wife/computer tech told me not to change anything'

> 'son/daughter/hubby/wife/computer tech told me not to change anything'

It's a lot better when they do follow that advice, than when they don't.

Sometimes the person dispensing the advice isn't right. I've heard this from people who were running IE 7, after all. Using IE 7 is a big enough problem in itself.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take using a large enterprise application to get locked in to a specific browser. Even something as innocuous as Intuit QuickBooks relies on version-specific browser code for some of its features to work properly.

The small business I was briefly working at maintained its entire financial history in this proprietary application. :(

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