Yesterday Microsoft announced that there would be no more versions of Internet Explorer on the Mac. They actually said that people should use Safari instead. In the discussion of this point on various sites (Tantek, Zeldman) I learned that MS had previously mentioned that there wouldn’t be anymore standalone releases of IE/PC either, that it would all be part of the OS only from now on. Microsoft is effectively leaving the browser market.

But hang on, Microsoft owns the browser market, with over 90% share. So they’re leaving it for dead (ish). There will be no advancement in functionality on the desktops of 90% of the world’s web users until 2005, it seems, when Longhorn is released. By which point the W3C will probably have shed their earthy bounds and evolved into a race of super-beings and we’ll all be living on Mars.

What are we standards-loving hippy web devs to do between now and then? I hate IE 6. I have done for a while now. It’s 18 months old and due for replacement and now I’m being told that I’ve got to put up with the same useless browser engine for the next two years! It’s sad that nobody will upgrade. I guess people will migrate from IE/Mac to Safari pretty solidly, but that’s little consolation against the static edifice that is IE/PC usage. I can’t even get Louise to upgrade, let alone Joe Punter! If 90% of web users suddenly decided to upgrade from IE to Firebird, I would literally cry. Mainly because it’s so unfeasibly unlikely.

The worst thing is the idea that nothing will happen between now and 2005. Nothing at all, in two years, in the internet business. It’s an Ice Age.

Yours, Frustrated of Fulham.