No future stand-alone IE?

31 May 2003

I spotted an interested article linked from zlog about the future of Internet Explorer.

Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?
A: as part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

Go read the article in full.

What on earth are Microsoft trying to do? I can’t work out their strategy. They obviously are trying to force people into revenue-generating upgrades, but at the same time are trying to ram their new technologies down everyone’s throat and forcing adoption. Knowing the reality of OS upgrades as they must (in that people often simply cannot be forced to upgrade easily due to a long list of possible factors) surely their two goals are at loggerheads?

It’s easy to get people to update their browser to a version of IE that supports the latest twist in Microsoft’s evil plan, but you just can’t force people to upgrade their OS - they just won’t do it.

So to continue using Windows 2000 (a reasonably good OS) into the future and still be able to access web sites using up-to-date technologies, the ordinary man in the street basically has to switch browsers.

I don’t get it.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Nathan Pitman: I think this is big news for web developers and designers. As Drew rightly points out users will not upgrade an OS unless they absolutely have to. I recently downloaded Mozilla Firebird and was pleasantly surprised, maybe this is just the opportunity it needs...
§ Rachel: Firebird is great :)

I use Konqueror on my Linux box but for doze have tended to stick to IE .. because .. well ... it’s there. However, Firebird is lightweight and quick to launch and doesn’t come with a load of irritating extras that I don’t need. I like it :)
§ Nathan Pitman: And you get tabbed browsing. :)

All in the <head>