Interesting perspectives. Let's see.

>I still don't understand why people think this crazy rush to get new browser versions out as rapidly as every couple of months is a good thing.

Because the alternative system involves way too much pain in upgrading for users, apparently. Three monolithic releases in an entire decade is a better plan, you think? The technologies involved with the web move too quickly to still be thinking about IE 6 and IE 7 in 2011.

>While Microsoft's release cycle is perhaps longer than I would choose, at least they have some stability as a result. We may have hated IE6, but we did so only after several years of it being clearly the best browser in town, which people often forget. In any case, at least its quirks and foibles were well understood, and workarounds were widely documented and used basically successfully. Ditto for IE7, and anything from IE8 onwards is pretty decent as far as web standards go.

All I can assume from that statement is that you're not a javascript or CSS developer. IE 6 was the best because Netscape had their 'air supply cut off' and was not really in the game in 2001. IE 6 and 7 continue to cause problems for me, personally, and if I was the only one, we would not be having this discussion.

>For all the anti-IE criticism, the Web developed from a novelty to a routine part of daily life on Microsoft's watch, and about half the people in the world still use IE to get stuff done, despite all the possible alternatives available to them.

Yes, after MS beat down the company who pioneered bringing browser technology to the masses, the web grew while IE was the most popular browser. Yes, about half of the world uses IE - mainly people who don't understand what a browser is, and click the big E on their desktop. Including software with other software that has monopoly level market saturation is successful, can you believe it?

> I'd rather the Chrome and Firefox teams caught up with basics that most people actually care about: Firefox 4 still doesn't do sensible tab isolation years after IE and Chrome did, while Chrome still doesn't seem to have an ad blocker worth anything, for example.

IE doesn't even have a spell check, much less an ad blocker. How about Web GL? If I recall from the Reddit threads from the IE team, Microsoft insists they can't put IE9 on XP mainly due to hardware acceleration. For 2D only?

>Please note that none of this means they can't issue security or performance updates as necessary. But Microsoft do that too, they just don't feel the need to slap a big "this is a shiny new version!" sticker on it every time.

How many significant updates to IE 8 have there been? How often was Chrome or Firefox improved during that time, noticeably? Waiting until MS releases a new version of Windows and everyone buys a new computer in order to run it has left web developers with a lot of problems.

>the vast, vast majority of the world's IT infrastructure still lives in the desktop software era, and most web-based or mobile-based software sucks on technical, usability and basic functionality grounds.

Some people are still using DOS, but that's not really the point. I expect at some point, the enterprises who haven't already figured it out will realize that developing or purchasing inflexible, monolithic software that is upgraded with great pain and expense every five years is not ideal. Hundreds of millions of people are using internet based software (and I'm not talking about Google Apps - I mean applications such as this site) each day, and they work. Meanwhile, I can't open an IT magazine without seeing the word 'cloud' 8,000 times, so... we'll see what happens to the world of desktop software, hmm?

IE is a deplorable web browser in the opinion of the vast majority of web developers I've ever encountered. it's the only one that you have to fire up virtual machines to test on three or four different versions even when using Windows. The development models of webkit and Mozilla have resulted in far superior software, and that's really all one can say. It's time for MS to either get serious about releasing a top quality browser, or go away.