This doesn't solve everything, as many commenters have already pointed out. There are going to be legacy app-holdouts. There are going to be upgrade skeptics who stay with "what works". There are going to be lazy people, dumb people, and all manner of launch bugs which scare people off.

So let's say that's 50%--A HUGE PERCENTAGE--of IE6+IE7 users. That means 50% less IE6 and IE7. Like we just said: FIFTY PERCENT IS HUGE.

I'm more than happy to lump IE8 in with the Gecko and KHTML browsers as being "good enough" from a developer's perspective. This nudges the web in the right direction, and the specter of NO auto-update was the big pisser on this parade.

I think this is a giant step in the right direction. Let's imagine that IE8 keeps on the good path, with more updates rolled out in the next year. Maybe it pulls close to parity in standards sometime. Auto-update makes all this meaningful.

I'm thrilled. The world's not gonna be perfect overnight. At least now we have a reason to hope it'll get close someday.

A few people in this thread (and elsewhere when the topic of IE6 comes up) bring up the problem of applications that are dependent on IE6 as a reason why many business users cannot upgrade.

I'm curious, does anyone have any actual experience with such applications? Do you use them yourself? Do you work for a company that uses them? Did you develop them? Are you aware of any statistics that cite how prevalent these applications are?

I'm beginning to wonder whether these IE6-dependent applications are widespread in reality, or whether they server more as a rhetorical rejoinder anytime someone brings up the idea of forcing people to upgrade.

It certainly feels more and more to me like progress on web applications is being highjacked by an extremely small minority of enterprise IT departments.

The company I work for uses IE 7 standards for rendering within our application. A lot of things would break if the people using our software upgraded to IE 8.

Our HTML markup is so ugly :(

Actually, there's one simple meta tag ("X-UA-Compatible") you can add to the head of your pages that will make IE8 use the IE7-compatible rendering engine:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/readiness...

IE7 obviously isn't perfect (or even good), but it's also nowhere near as bad as IE6 in terms of supporting standards.

You can also add the HTTP header to the response for these pages so you don't even have to touch the markup, just a configuration file on the Web server.

Sure. The company I current work for, who consider themselves a leader in online optimization, have all of our HR details on a 3rd party IE6 only site (https://www6.intersourcing.com/www/templates/utilities/TreeV...). So anytime I want to view my paycheck I have to fire up VMWare on the Mac.

My last company refused to install IE7 on the corporate images and only allowed people to use IE6. You can imagine that as someone developing internal web-based tools this was quite frustrating.

Generally I am against sneaky upgrades such as Apple's iTunes update that installed Safari, but IE8's standards compliance (though not perfect) is so much better than IE6 that this is a great move for the web as a whole.

Especially because the "upgrade" asks nicely. So instead of silently getting IE8, you get asked "Do you want IE8".

They could have just called it a security patch and made it automatically install for IE6 users ;)

There are too many places that standardized their web apps on IE6 bugs to do that.

Better yet, a sanity patch for designers/developers or an 'evolve already' patch for end-users. Otherwise, I say we all just roll back to lynx then none of this would be a problem.

Isn't it really better at this point to spend the effort identifying and directly assisting developers whose apps are totally IE-dependent? Marketing to users will probably only cause them to break apps that they may really need to do their jobs (and make them hate their IT staff more).

The big players who stand to gain significantly from removing IE6 (which at this point include Microsoft itself), should be doing everything they can to encourage developers to move on, and leaving users alone. Heck, even if Microsoft offered free classes or donated development resources to help de-cruftify IE6-only apps, at this point it would be well worth their investment.

I doubt it's developers making the decisions. They need to reach managers of IT departments who look at their IE6-only apps that work fine and would cost time and money to upgrade to support IE7/8 with no perceivable benefit.

I had two reactions to this:

1.) "Yes! Maybe now I won't have to support IE6."

2.) "Fuck. That means I better fix the IE8 bugs in my software ASAP."

This is somewhat of a shocker. . .all of a sudden this solution will refactor two browsers out of compliance that I've been designing for, well. . ,I guess how ever old IE6 is while factoring in a browser that I have never designed for let alone used yet.

Making it an autoupdate seems like a last-ditch effort by Microsoft to keep people from going to Firefox when they finally need to update, rather than a gift to web developers.

This is going to suck: those corporate IT departments will set Microsoft on fire if they push the automatic upgrade to IE8 really hard ...

Which they're not doing. Any IT department reliant on IE6 has already blocked one upgrade and the same tools are available to them this time around as well. Did you read the article?

Stop downvoting this guy so much. This guy tried to make a joke and failed, but should it really cost him that much karma?

If you disagree, at least tell me why.