Who to piss off: the IT department at almost every major corporation worldwide who pay us billions of dollars a year, or a bunch of bloggers who run Firefox on Macs and would still hate our bones if we cured cancer tomorrow.

Decisions, decisions.

Why would IT departments be pissed off if IE9 was fully backwards compatible? Honest question.

The entire point of the suggestion is to break compatibility with IE6 so that the rest of the world can stop having to code against it. Breaking compatibility with IE6 has freaking enormous switching costs for some users.

(Let me hum a few bars: you use a $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded. This is hypothetical, but not very hypothetical, if you catch my drift. A forced free upgrade to IE9 would create an organization-wide emergency for that customer, instantly, and it would be a cold day in Hell before they every do business with Microsoft again.)

The entire point of my suggestion is that a newer browser doesn't need to break compatibility with older browsers to allow people to stop supporting them. Backwards compatibility makes it possible for Microsoft to do a forced upgrade without screwing anyone over. Once a significant majority people are using IE9, it doesn't matter if they're still relying on its backwards compatibility for existing websites, new websites can just target IE9's native rendering engine and ignore older versions of IE.

I didn't mention IE6 backwards compatibility, because no one running IE6 is going to upgrade directly to IE9; they don't run on the same OS. Even if IE9 was made a mandatory or automatic upgrade, people relying on IE6 wouldn't have to worry. IE6 would have to be dealt with differently than IE7&8, which is fine, it'll get to insignificant market share soon enough on its own.

The currently existing alternative is just to install Chrome or Firefox for the current web and leave IE6 in place for legacy internal applications. But then browsing the web isn’t seen as a useful part of people’s jobs in most companies.

> $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded.

You can make it entirely realistic by saying the company that made the CRM now has a version that supports Firefox and IE7-8 but it costs $5M to upgrade the license. I've had so many of those cases at my current job.

IE9 does have compatibility modes for IE7 and IE8 already (somewhere on the official IE blog there's a flow chart describing how IE decides what rendering mode to use for a given page; it's terrifying)

My understanding is that IE's entire user-base consists of update-averse users these days - everybody who can stomach the idea of changing browsers is already using Chrome or Firefox.

Not quite. IE8 is making huge gains in market share, but almost entirely at the expense of IE6 and IE7. The overall IE marketshare is holding somewhat steady at 60%. I think what you're seeing is Windows users are perfectly happy to take an upgrade that Microsoft offers, but either afraid to branch out to a non-MS browser or else just don't know how to do so. Windows 7 shipping with IE8 has a lot to do with it, too, as people buy new laptops, etc, and never touch the browser it comes with.

Reference: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/Microsoft-IE-6-Share-Falls-...

I wish Chrome would take more from IE than it is from FF, but it is good to see IE6 drop so much. It's under 5% now.

Note: these are US numbers. If I recall correctly, the global numbers are shaded a little more non-IE.

No they certainly could not. Have you ever worked in a big company before? The end users get their updates from in house sources. Introduction of MS updates is strictly controlled. If they can't quantify what the change will do then it's not going in. Of course security patches get priority and something like a browser version change has broad sweeping effects that are extremely difficult to quantify.

So if MS did what you ask tomorrow, nothing would change in 99% of big corporations.

They campaigned extensively for users to switch to newer version of IE. They don't force it because lots of company still have IT policies of using IE6 (or whichever comes installed with the OS, I suspect).

I forget where I heard it, but in some interview a Microsoft exec claimed no one at MS likes IE6 and they all want to see it die, but that they have signed long running service agreements which basically makes them contractually bound to keep it alive. Now this could all be bullshit, but that appears to be the official line.

Isn't there some old anti-trust thing that doesn't let them push IE updates? That was my recollection.

Edit, security ok, version upgrade not ok.