The real problem is that while there will be a new and better Chrome and in a month and a half, and similar for Firefox, we'll have this build of IE10 for 2 years or maybe more.
How they compare at the start of the cycle is not typical, how they compare at the midpoint will be more average, how they compare at the end (where IE7 or IE8 is now) is the worst case.
The question is how often. Adopting the firefox 2/3 model (albeit less nagging a-la-chrome) is a great step forward from the IE6 one we have had up to now, but they really need to match the rapid release schedules of mozilla and google today. At a minimum quarterly updates (features/engine updates, not just security fixes) to stop hindering the web.
Less naggy? I find Firefox to be one of the most naggy browsers about upgrades. Or have they changed this recently? With Chrome you just see a notification on the settings menu, and a restart brings you up to the next version. I really hope IE adopts this model.
I'm pretty sure recent versions of Firefox (say, since the early teens) have had nagless updates.
I find myself having to manually check the About dialog for updates now, because they're about the only reason I ever restart my browser, and if I don't manually check occasionally I'd have no way of knowing an updated existed.
> "With automatic updates enabled through Windows Update, customers can receive IE9 and future versions of Internet Explorer seamlessly without any "update fatigue" issues."
How often will these updates come out?
And what about the usual tying of browsers to OS. IE 10 will come out for Windows 7 ... which means that people running XP (or Vista) won't get it. So IE9 will still be in play for a while, and by the time this fades into irrelevance like IE6...
Will IE11 be Windows 8 only? What about IE12? Or is there going to be an IE10.1 with new features in only six months time. We don't know. It does not dispel the (currently correct) perception that for the foreseeable future, some version of IE will be the boat-anchor holding the web back.
Yeah, at first I thought, that's impressive that they can catch up so far, even if they fall back again. But then I thought about how much further ahead Firefox and Chrome would be if they'd effectively abandoned their users a couple of years ago and hid in some research lab to plan the next big version. That's a whole lot less testing, bug-fixing, releasing and reworking etc.
Completely agree. IE10 can't even beat Chrome when it's launching once every 2 years. This means Chrome will simply expand the performance gap during this 2 year period.
Now if only Chrome for Android had version/feature parity with Chrome for desktop, because it's a full 5 versions behind right now - and it shows. It's not even competitive anymore on mobile because of this huge development gap. Google needs to take Chrome for Android as seriously as they take Chrome for desktop, if not more so.
How they compare at the start of the cycle is not typical, how they compare at the midpoint will be more average, how they compare at the end (where IE7 or IE8 is now) is the worst case.