|
I would love this as much as any other web designer or developer, but sadly, it's just not feasible. The biggest problem with upgrades is that lots of companies rely on specific versions of specific browsers for in-house websites and web apps. Expiration dates essentially amount to browser makers saying 'too bad, fix your software'. This would be amusing, but realistically, Microsoft would never do such a thing, and without Microsoft on board, not much will change. The best compromise I can think of is for browser vendors to decouple updates of web-technology support (HTML, CSS, JS, Canvas, etc.) from updates of user-facing features, the things that get advertised when an full point upgrade is released, and start pushing out HTML, CSS and JS upgrades automatically, in the background. Once the first round of such browsers were widely adopted, browser upgrades would cease to be an issue at all. Upgrade averse users could keep their old versions with familiar interfaces and still have cutting edge standards support. This leaves the problem of getting the first round of upgrades through, but that could be solved by building in backwards compatibility for all currently popular version of a browser. This would be a pain, but would only have to happen once. If Microsoft, for example, gave IE9 full backwards compatibility with IE8, 7 and 6, and made future rendering updates automatic, there would be very little excuse left for any company to stick with an older version of IE. |