colinramsay.co.uk

Internet Explorer Updates

02 Feb 2004

Every so often, Messenger will prompt me to download an updated version before it will let me continue. This generally isn't a problem - the patch is small and it's entirely automatic. This begs the question - why not for IE? Surely this is a logical progression? It makes so much more sense to forcibly make the client incrementally upgrade - you can be sure you're supporting the same version, everyone has the same capabilities...

I suppose IE is a much bigger app than MSN, so that might make it less practical. But it could have another advantage - MS engineers will think more about their updates, make them small and make them count; make them right. I'd love to find out why this hasn't been implemented.

Just think about it - no more unpatched security problems, constantly updated CSS.

This is something that's struck me lately - even if Microsoft unleashed a new version of IE now, everyone else will be stuck in the CSS dark ages until they update to the new version. But if MS makes a big fuss of SP2, makes everyone upgrade and then forces them to update IE regularly after that, we could be looking at rolling updates of IE's CSS capabilities and a revolution in the way we design.

With Whidbey looking to produce valid XHTML, I suspect that MS will be conforming to the W3C specs a little more closely. A development such as this could be the means to do that.

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