IE9 always playing catchup

I blogged about whether IE9 will save us from IE6 when the IE9 beta was released. I just read a blog by Alex Russell – IE 8 is the new IE6 which echoes some of the same points that I made.

With Internet Explorer, Microsoft seem to be always playing catchup – not only with the fact that their latest version is usually a bit behind, but also because only a small number of people upgrade to the latest version. This time round only a subset of IE users are even able to upgrade, due to lack of XP support.

Hopefully with the current trends towards HTML5 and native web people will be encouraged to upgrade, despite the obstacles put in the way.