Clueless Internet Explorer Team Continues A 2 Year Development Cycle

By | April 13, 2012


Clueless Internet Explorer Team Continues A 2 Year Development Cycle

It doesn’t exactly help to compete when you release updates only once in two years and according to the recently published roadmap, things aren’t about to change.

Clueless Internet Explorer Team Continues A 2 Year Development Cycle

Having already lost a huge chunk of the market share, it looks like Microsoft is not yet ready to make compromises, at least until IE becomes irrelevant.

In addition to that, Windows Phone, a new and incredible operating system from Microsoft with a worthless web browser, uses same rendering engine, which is now very much dated.

What’s the worst part? For a new OS, which struggles to gain momentum and needs to stay competitive, users will have to wait nearly 2 years to see new and critical features added, such as: password manager, find in page (removed from WP 7.5), etc.

Anyway, we know that a lot of corporations rely on the Internet Explorer web browser and when it comes to updates, things aren’t as fast as they should be. Therefore, in order not to upset the enterprise market, they sacrifice the consumer market and still go with a 2 year updates.

As you might remember, after switching to the fast Firefox development cycle, Mozilla has been criticized for the very same reason and yet they came up with a solution, which is: a new Firefox version every 30 weeks.

However, when it comes to Microsoft, it looks like their close to 100,000 people team is clueless and IE will end up like Windows Mobile, which went something like this:

– iPhone? Nah, it’s a poor business machine, Windows Mobile is for business. Business people use Windows Mobile.

Well, that did not end well, did it?

[Picture Sources: Gizmodo, ZDnet]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (35)

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  1. Shane Bundy says:

    This is the best rant article I’ve read on this site.
    I mean that in a good way.

    You do have a point with this article, V, but let’s face it – Google, Mozilla, Opera (maybe others) are for the consumers while Microsoft is for the business. Apple, I’m not so sure.

    IE10 is looking great but every 2 years is silly, even Safari’s 1 year is silly. Instead of every 6 weeks why not have 4 releases a year? It’s fast enough to keep everyone up-to-date while corporations don’t have to worry so much about software updates.

    Off-topic: My college is still stuck on Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 since they use “scripts” to update software, but obviously they don’t work.

    • Thanks!

      I think Opera has best release cycle but not sure if it would work for IE

      • Anonymous says:

        +1

      • Shane Bundy says:

        I love Opera’s release cycle – pre-release, alpha, post-alpha snapshots, beta, post-beta snapshots, RCs then Final. Many have said Opera have been rushing releases but with Opera 12 they’re making sure it matures right. :-)

        • Rafael says:

          Opera is the best of both worlds.
          We have a lot of snapshots to check the latest improvements and the users who need stable versions had 11.51, .52, 11.60, .61, .62 full of fixes up until now while waiting for 12.

          But IE is VERY important in business, it can’t have room for fails.
          A fail could affect a lot of users and imagine in enterprises how it’d harm. Also it’s aways shipped with the next Windows version, which is very important to be as bug-free as it can be for the same reason.
          (However it doesn’t prevents IE of being a sh*t! lol – seriously, IE 9 keeps crashing some sites people use where I work and give that message to recover the tab that crashed. It isn’t understandable as no other browser does that in these situations [except Chrome would perhaps])…

  2. Paul Irish says:

    What is the source of that roadmap? I didn’t spot it.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Windows Phone is incredible? I beg to differ.

  4. Grrblt says:

    “As you might remember, after switching to the fast Firefox development cycle, Mozilla has been criticized for the very same reason and yet they came up with a solution, which is: a new Firefox version every 30 weeks.”

    Surely you mean every 30 days.

    • Shane Bundy says:

      Mozilla have 2 versions available: the normal release (every 42 days) and the Enterprise Support Release (every 30 weeks.)

      They’re the only one with a quick release schedule that have bothered to come up with a solution to this long-standing problem.

  5. Martin Suchan says:

    Well, when talking about the 5th browser, even Safari 5.1 is quite behind Chrome/Firefox/Opera (IE10 is faster and more standard compliant than Safari 5.1) But as far as I know Safari 5.2 / Mountain Lion looks again promising and IE10 will be then again the last one around.