Clueless Internet Explorer Team Continues A 2 Year Development Cycle

By | April 13, 2012 | 35 Comments

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 carrier 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.

  • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

    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.

    • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

      Thanks!

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

      • Anonymous

        +1

        • Armin

          Why is Firefox getting all the hate when Chrome is the one who introduced this silly update cycle?

          • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

            It’s probably because was always like that and people got used it it :)

          • Anonymous

            Before, Firefox actually released new versions when it made sense. Then they made this illogical change… Chrome was whacked out from the very beginning. :)

          • apád anyád

            The lack of silent update.

      • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

        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. :-)

        • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

          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])…

          • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

            I tend to use a mixture of Opera Snapshots, Chromium Trunk, Firefox Trunk and Maxthon. :-)

  • http://paulirish.com Paul Irish

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

  • Anonymous

    Windows Phone is incredible? I beg to differ.

    • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

      Did you use it?

      • Anonymous

        Does anyone? (No!) :D

        I rest my case ;)

        • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

          > A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep. – Vernon Howard

          And yes, I do use it.

          • Yoyo

            Probably one of the best replies I seen on internet.

          • Anonymous

            The point is that Windows Phone is a failure, so it is clearly not very good. If it was any good, the market wouldn’t be rejecting it like this.

          • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

            Nokia Lumia 900 spends a week on top of Amazon Best Seller list, Cyan now also sold out there

            Nokia Lumia 900 out of stock at AT&T

            Windows Phone devices selling well in Russia

            Windows Phone takes 8% market share in Norway

            Windows Phone cross 5% OS share in Finland

            :)

          • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

            Can you give the source for the market share percentages?

          • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com
          • http://my.opera.com/rafaelluik Rafael

            Ookay but Norway is 0.8%.

          • Anonymous

            Haha, I’ll wait for the actual sales numbers, thank you very much. And of course if sales actually hold up over time. Wishful thinking and speculation won’t cut it.

            Wasn’t the Lumia 900 the one Nokia basically gave away for free because of a software bug as well?

          • Hiram

            If you actually believe that the phone was heavily subsidised because of a software bug, you are an absolute fucking mongoloid retard. http://www.winsupersite.com/blog/supersite-blog-39/windowsphone75/fixed-nokia-delivers-lumia-900-software-update-days-142829

          • Anonymous
          • Hiram

            Huh, well, it seems that I was the absolute fucking mongoloid retard in this case – they did indeed give it away for free(heavily subsidize) because of a software bug. Be that as it may, I still think that you are completely off in regards to the assumption that the windows phone platform is a failure simply because the market hasn’t adopted it yet. There are plenty possible reasons for why it hasn’t done so: user familiarity with their previous platform, dependence on certain apps not yet available on WP,  not many phone models being available yet, lack of marketing(that is currently being remedied by both Nokia and Microsoft), hell, one could even state the anti-ms zeitgeist as a plausible reason.

          • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

            Same with browsers – the ones with the least amount of market share tend to be the best ones.

          • Anonymous

            That doesn’t even begin to make sense.

          • Hiram

            He’s basically stating that Opera and Maxthon are superior to browsers that have far greater market shares.

          • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

            Here’s an example: Chrome’s market share is big but the browser isn’t really that great while Opera has only a small share but it’s got a brilliant arsenal of features.

    • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

      I don’t own a WP but Windows Phone is probably the only smartphone OS that can run fluently on a single core – Android’s just been getting bigger and bigger with bloat. :-/

      • http://www.favbrowser.com FavBrowser.com

        That’s true, although in some ways it’s a good thing since it pushes hardware, which leads to faster CPUs and GPUs :)

        Personally, I am very excited about the Windows Phone 8, which will support multiple cores, hi res displays, etc. Although all I care about is new version of IE and hardware encryption.

        Microsoft is very secretive about it and there is a good reason

        http://www.reddit.com/r/casualiama/comments/r4q5l/iama_someone_who_leaks_information_about/c4413z0

  • Grrblt

    “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.

    • http://twitter.com/bricky149 Shane Bundy

      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.

  • Martin Suchan

    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.

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