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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

as a web dev, the main thing i'm looking forward to is its "evergreen-ness" for all the web's consumers not on Chrome or FF.

now only Safari left to make a similar commitment and shorten the release cycles...

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For what it's worth, recent versions of IE are already evergreen and auto-update by default.

The real culprit behind us still having to support IE8 for some clients is your average enterprise IT department. They'll find ways to lock down updates on any browser. Just as some IT departments have auto updates locked down on Chrome/Firefox already, they'll probably demand a way to do that with Microsoft's browsers too (or find a way to block the updates without Microsoft's support).

I ask every enterprise I walk into what the patch management strategy is. There's always herds of testing, that often takes months. Recommendation? Patch first, deal with compatibility later. In most cases (note, not all) being hacked is more expensive than a temporary, self-imposed denial of service.

Edit: Thing I forgot to add is that an aggressive patch management strategy just so happens to do great things for technical debt.

The thing that makes my life difficult is that even if you (and I) choose not to work directly with/for those laggard companies, their locked down userbase is still on the web and impacts the requirements of sites I build for completely unrelated clients.

Side question: what is the difference between “evengreen” and “auto-updating”? Does the former mean something else or more than the latter?

I'm not sure if there is a difference. I was using the terms interchangeably (maybe incorrectly?).

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