The single reason enterprises with Windows networks prefer Internet Explorer over Firefox and other browsers: Group Policy.

For those of you who might be new to Group Policy, here is a quick background. Let’s first assume you use an Active Directory environment to administer the computers in your corporate network. If that is the case, Group Policy provides a wide set of policy settings to manage IE8 after you have deployed it to your users' computers. These settings are locked down and cannot be changed by users, as they are always written to a secure tree in the registry.

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Opinion: Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?

There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.

XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.

So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.

On Monday, Microsoft announced from their IEBlog that they were reversing their decision for how Internet Explorer 8 would be compatible with Web pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 as well as Internet standards. You may recall that earlier this year Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 in "Standards Mode" would actually be rendering pages in Internet Explorer 7's "Standards Mode". If you really wanted to have IE8 follow the latest standards then you would need to insert a special <meta> tag to your pages.

While developers and users expressed opinions on both sides of the issue, I think it would be fair to say a large number of people were not happy with this decision. In my own comments, I stated that "this is just plain crazy" of a move by Microsoft as it held onto ideas of the past and not the present. In a March 3, 2008 post, Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8, the IE team explains what you can expect with IE8 compatibility based on their changed decision.

"In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
post, he highlighted our responsibility to deliver both
interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and
backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different
versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with
the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7
but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an
interoperable way) much easier. Continuing Dean’s theme, I’d like to
talk about some steps we are taking in IE8 to achieve these goals."

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"HTML
frames (FRAMESETs and IFRAMEs) are a feature of all modern web browsers
that enable content from multiple pages to be displayed within a single
view. Historically, frames were primarily used to enable partial page
updates, where page navigation was contained in one frame, and page
content was contained in another. Over time, use of frames expanded to
include advertising, mashup, and AJAX scenarios. Today, the majority of popular websites use IFRAMEs for myriad reasons.

From a security point of view, frames can help increase
the security of web applications by creating isolation between content
delivered from different sources."

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"Firefox
continues to bite into Internet Explorer's market share. But users and
analysts say that Mozilla hasn't changed its laissez-faire attitude
about trying to get IT managers to formally adopt the open-source
browser."

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Absolutely disappointing. Everyone is waiting to hear what the new features will be in the next version of Internet Explorer 8 will have...and still no information out in the open. Microsoft, knows it has a trust issue with its customers...yet they have yet to learn that trust is built on good communication. This is what Microsoft's IEBloggers have to say:

Of course, some people care about other aspects of IE8 much more
than they care about the name. As I’ve walked different people through
the plan, I’ve gotten “Does it have feature X?” “When is the beta?”
“When does it release” and even the more thoughtful “What are you
trying to accomplish with this release?”

You will hear a lot more from us soon on this blog and in
other places. In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for
inaction.

Asa Dotzler, probably said it best, "What your silence for the last 18 months of IE 8 development tells the
Web developers of the world that you don't give a sh*t what they've got
to say about it." However, I like what commenter "Dave" had to say about the announcement of the next IE being IE8:

After taking five years to come out with the current Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft offered a mea culpa and said it was aiming for a new release every 12 to 18 months. But so far there has been little information about Internet Explorer 8, and no public schedule for releasing preliminary and final versions."

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Story found via arcanology.com