[Groxx]

For the sake of the millions (billions?) of annual man-hours spent supporting every crappy browser in nearly every crappy external web application? Probably. I'd be willing to bet (a lot) that the hours spent working around the not-recent versions of IE are many many many times larger than the amount of time needed to fix every site that relies on a not-recent version of IE.

Enforcing updates would also likely improve IE's market share, as all those not-recent versions are part of the cause of developers migrating towards Firefox / WebKit browsers. How much has this hurt Microsoft? Enough to make it worth losing the stragglers who aren't paying to update anyway?

edit: of course, there's a solution to all this: the ability to specify the particular version of a browser you're targeting, if it matters. Then at least a warning can be thrown, and if multiple renderers are included, they can be used selectively.

[thwarted]

Another solution is for Microsoft to create a version of IE that is an application rather than an operating system extension. One should be able to install multiple versions of IE on the same machine without them conflicting and without it breaking features like Windows Update that depend on tight integration with the browser, even if it means installing as a different user.

The advantages would be twofold. First off, people who need to use a 10 year old version of Internet Explorer because of crappy internal apps could continue to do so, and they could install and use a new version of Internet Explorer for using the real world, modern Internet. Secondly, we'd avoid having to hear about the (legitimate) woes of developers who need to run multiple copies of Windows virtually to do testing, or use third-party hacks to get multiple versions of IE to run on a single copy of Windows.

And I'm suggesting that the above be done for new versions of IE. But it's just as possible for Microsoft to release an application version of IE6 that users more recent versions of Windows could install in order to run those ancient internal web applications. There's benefit here too in terms of showing people that they need to use an old-and-busted version of a program to access their internal stuff vs the new-hotness they'd have to use to access the public Internet. Even rebranding Internet Explorer with a different name would help toward that somewhat (if you could install it along side the ancient version of IE6).

[Groxx]

I really hate the browser-as-embedded, in part because of this reason. And because it has always struck me as a massive security time-bomb, because they're rarely segregated properly. My blood ran cold the first time I discovered I could open a web page via Windows Explorer.

Similarly, I hate that Chrome only allows one installation, with the exception of Canary (windows only). What's the point? Give them a unique ID, and namespace everything! Get clever with hardlinking binaries if nothing's different, but sheesh.

</rant>

That's likely the best solution, yes. I guess we can hope it goes that way eventually, right?