IE8 is going to be the IE6 of today, but way way way worse and for much longer. Talk about legacy code.

While IE6 has been a pain for 5 years, IE8 will be a pain for 15. We will see a HUGE portion of people not upgrading from WinXP.

Really our only solution there is to get them onto a new browser or convince them that this unsuspecting "Chrome Frame" plugin is the right thing to do.

We have to, really.

Why will a huge portion of people not upgrade from XP? It's been at long time since you could buy a computer with it preinstalled (unless you specifically ask for it). Hardware attrition, upgrade cycles, and hopefully the end of the global recession should clear out those machines.

Any computer that came with XP preinstalled that is still around 15 years later is going to be so slow that an outdated browser is going to be the least of its worries.

Many of our customers (non-tech companies in Europe) are still largely on Windows 2000. We're still supporting a handful of systems running NT4.

People don't buy new computers unless they really need to. XP is going to be around for a long, long time.

Not so long as you think… Microsoft licensed XP for free on netbooks to compete with Linux (netbooks cost maybe twice as much as a Windows license). Summer of 2009, I walked into a Verizon store and they were selling netbooks that, swear to God, had IE6 as the default browser. In 2009!

XP installation packages, even updated through the last service pack (SP3), only ever came with IE6. You have to actively download and install IE 7 or 8. Not too surprising if the netbook vendors trying to compete on rock-bottom price didn't want to pay an installation monkey to do that. If you don't know what a browser version is, you're not a lost sale. If you do, you know you can easily upgrade it and you're still not a lost sale.

Is that a fact? I think I installed XP with IE7 straight off the disk once. Maybe it was slip-streamed. Hardly seems like a lot of work for the netbook OEMs to create a slipstreamed install with IE7/8.

With the recent stagnation in CPU speeds, upgrade cycles may slow way down.

A question you have to ask is, "Are people that are still running Windows XP a market for my product?" If your product is software, it seems highly unlikely.

"Software" is rather broad. If you're making shiny .NET stuff for consumers, yeah, you might not want to bother.

But even w3schools shows XP as the most popular OS by far, and only slowly decreasing:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Paul, granted that it's sort of a part of your job to shill for Chrome, and granted that Chrome is a better browser than IE in its current state, but why all the hate for IE8 specifically? Most devs I know who've spent time with the IE lineup would prefer 15 years of IE8 to another 1 year of IE6. End of story, so far as that goes. (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much.)

And the "only" solution is hardly getting them onto a new browser. Moving them to say, Firefox, is only one solution. Another solution would be for MS to produce a standards-compliant browser. IE8 and IE9 are both major steps in this direction. Of course, Chrome itself isn't 100% compliant, and had the advantage of being developed much later in the game, against a well-framed open source stack. And of course, Chrome borrowed all sorts of tricks from IE...

Anyway, there are at least 3 or 4 good solutions for that crowd, only one of which involves Chrome. By the way, I use Chrome and Firefox exclusively. I dislike the piling-on against IE for piling on's sake. To represent IE8 as another IE6 is a little disingenuous, IMO. For what it's worth.

Paul, can you maybe lean on people at Google to create & test a few versions of a Chrome Frame download page that is highly convincing to end users? The Chrome Frame page is kinda sorta developer-centric. There needs to be one well-linked-to page that is only, and convincingly, targeted to everyday bumpkins using IE.

> a Chrome Frame download page that is highly convincing to end users

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only people who should be installing Chrome Frame are IT departments in control of hundreds or thousands of desktops that are forced to maintain IE6 because of legacy/vertical applications.

"End users" should, at least for computers they own, be convinced to install a complete browser like everyone else.

Not sure I follow.

Since sites opt in to Chrome Frame using the same X-UA-Compatible mechanism Microsoft introduced for IE7/8 emulation, it shouldn’t be breaking anything — even (especially!) “legacy/vertical applications.”

Added: Heck, why not one targeted toward IT admins, too :)

Will do.

That's the most annoying thing about the page. If Microsoft really cared about getting people off of IE and onto something modern, they'd also offer alternatives for browsers which ran on XP beyond IE8.

I don't necessarily begrudge MS for not making IE9 run on XP... it can be hard to write code for older platforms, especially when you live entirely in the new one. But other browser makers are making their code work on XP, and they should be promoted as valid choices.

This just feels like a way to browbeat people into upgrading to Windows 7 rather than solving the real problem.

That's why I made a more future-proof version of their "Join the cause" banner code: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/03/05/ie6-final-countdown/

It's a shame their banner looks like the sort of thing you click and have malware installed.