IE6 SP1 Will Be Last Standalone Version

mokiejovis writes "Program manager Brian Countryman stated that "as part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation." See the Microsoft TechNet article." Several of the people submitting this story have come up with elaborate theories about why: killing competition, etc. etc. I think the truth is just that Microsoft intends to integrate DRM very tightly with their OS and browser, and they're aren't going to try to backport that to, say, Win98, so they just aren't going to release new versions of their browser for old, DRM-less operating systems. In the future server-side browser detection may be more about detecting whether the browser supports the DRM your "web service" uses than what version of Javascript or CSS the browser supports.

Comments

Re:So how exactly has IE evolved in the last 5 yea

[Timesprout]

Mozilla took the last 4 years to rehash a more stable but slower version of netscape 4.X with tabs, phoenix is basically just the browser component of Mozilla. They have not exactly revolutionised they world with innovation over said period.