What is more believable is that spell check in the browser is somewhat of an edge case relative to general browser usage (i.e. web consumption) which Microsoft was historically able to address by allowing plug-ins. They rolled it into the development of their plug-inless browser and rolled their plug-inless browser into their not quite so backward compatible OS release.
I suspect that the corporate interests have long known that IE is not a sales critical feature.
Why would the IE team be more resource constrained than the Firefox team, who managed to add a spellchecker years ago? I'll admit that I've not gone looking, but I've not ever heard of anyone using one of these third party IE spellcheckers - it's just been a feature which I expect a decent browser to have that IE clearly lacked. Surely that perception hurts them more than the cost of a few developer-months to take one of their existing spellcheckers and drop it into IE?
My guess is that the real reason for this is that Windows 8 will add a native spellcheck API (technically Vista already did, as part of WPF, but that generally isn't used by consumer applications for various reasons), and in the meantime to avoid future confusion they don't want to implement it separately in IE.
IE9 has made some nice improvements, but I also ask myself why it still lags behind in so many ways.
For example, if I were writing this comment in IE9, I would not be able to see what spelling errors I made. It's 2011, and IE still does not have spell checking on text elements.
The IE9 GUI has also become unresponsive for me for double digit seconds several times.
There are literally dozens of little annoyances like these.
How these glaring issues continue to exist really is a good question. I think some of the other posts on this subject probably hit the nail on the head: Microsoft doesn't want the browser too good (since replacing native apps with web apps helps out competing operating systems), but at the same time, can't allow their browser to get too far behind, because with or without Microsoft's blessing, the web has made huge market advances.
Thus, they kind of catch up, making their browser just barely good enough for most people, but always fairly mediocre. It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of.
But if that's the case, isn't that likely because they have internal applications that are IE only? It seems more like a marketing thing--Overcome people's inhibitions by letting them feel like they "only" installed a plugin and are still running IE.
Maybe there is no reason to use Firefox for the business?
IE actually saved me some time the other day. A client is using TinyMCE and wanted spell-check enabled. I thought this required a PHP script on the server (which is not going to happen, our infrastructure is not set up to run PHP), and that I was going to have to port that script to Perl. Turns out it can use IE's built-in spell-checker instead. Since the client only uses IE, the problem was solved.
This does not make up for the thousands of hours I've spent on things that work great in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but immediately kill all scripts in IE. (The error messages are crap, and the debugging tools don't work. Nice!)
It used to be that many companies were stuck with IE because they bought complex products that only support IE (and an older version of IE at that) to manage their business with. Fortunately a lot of the worst of that stuff has gone away. But it's still out there (though in many cases the employees use IE only to talk to BogusLegacyProduct and use Chrome for everything else).
The IE team is resource constrained because it's not in Microsoft's interests to build a good browser. If it was in their business interests, like XBox, then they could throw tens of billions of dollars at it. But it's not, so no spellchecker and no WebGL and no IE9 for XP.
I only checked the new features list compared to IE9 so that's why I missed spell check and sync. But it is still a huge stretch to call IE10 a good browser compared to it's competitors considering spell checking is more than half a decade old and bookmark sync has been around for more than a year, and it doesn't even have the other features on my list. It hasn't even caught up with feature leaders like Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.
right on. just like non IE was still unkown to most users until recently! in fact, even today you see the ocasional reddit post asking why they should not be using IE.
Yeah as an enterprise web developer, I definitely have met my share of frustrating requirements to support ancient versions of IE. But that's definitely an interesting choice that I don't think I fault Microsoft for making - if you own the platform, why not extend your control into other popular apps running on the platform (word processors, databases, browsers, etc.). Pretty logical step to make imo, though their underhanded tactics were probably also to blame for the US Supreme Court monopoly case.
Hmm conspiracy theory... Nope, Microsoft is a for-profit company with a huge platform that might be slipping into irrelevance.
They're playing the cards they have at any given time - when it means supporting standards, they do that. And when they're totally dominant, they tend to set the standards.
I'm not even suggesting it might be intentional - the IE team and the MS top management don't necessarily have the same long-term goals is all.
Maybe the IE team would even love to go cross platform and compete as a browser and not as a part of a larger platform.
The companies that have draconian policies requiring a specific version of IE are also probably the same organizations that want to run their own mail, sharepoint, etc. So it probably doesn't have a dramatic impact.
I thought so too, and it fits with what I've seen in large, charge-adverse companies. In fact, today I told a user that our site won't look its best or run quickly in IE7, which he's stuck with at $BigCo client site.
In my current experience, there are very few IE6 installations left in these corporates. There are some IE7, and a whole lot of IE8.
Should the headline read "Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone ... except most of them" ?
I suspect that the corporate interests have long known that IE is not a sales critical feature.
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