Thursday, September 23, 2004

MS is holding a gun to our heads...

... and, according to CNet's News.Com, this gun is called "IE patches". Apparently, Microsoft has decided to no longer issue IE updates for Windows versions older than XP. If true, this will be a major blow to over 200,000,000 users of older Windows products.

I checked the Microsoft website and couldn't find a press release or other documentation about this, so I hope it's a false rumor. If anyone can point to information either confirming or denying this, please let me know.

Update 2004/09/23 14:58 Just to be clear, this is only about new security features, not about security patches. So the XP SP2 improvements, for example, won't be backported. As far as I know, security patches for existing features will still continue.

2 comments:

J said...

Well, here is Microsoft's official Press page, with recent Microsoft news. I don't see anything mentioned about it. I think it is true. Microsoft would do something like that. Users will migrate to other broswers, such as Mozilla, which is the best browser out at this time, IMHO.

DavidJBianco said...

Yeah, I saw that web page, but as you mentioned, there's no sign of any announcement about this policy there. My guess is that they will retract this in a couple of weeks, once their big business partners complain. Otherwise, maybe it will be a boost for Mozilla, Opera, Firefox or one of the other free browsers.