I would have agreed up to the past September, when Mavericks was released for free. Some big leaps in IE updates are tied to Windows upgrades, which are not free for users.
This has a direct reflect on Safari adoption. NetMarketShare gives these numbers for OSX adoption (which is the same of Safari version adoption):
10.9: 3.75%
10.6: 1.29%
10.8: 1.18%
10.7: 1.05%
So roughly half of OSX users are already using the last Safari version (which was released only 7 months ago), which is absolutely different from the situation you have with IE version adoption.
What would be the situation of IE version adoption, were Win7 a free upgrade for all WinXP/Vista users? I think we can agree that free operating system upgrade does have a measurable impact.
Nonetheless, I agree with the general point that Safari now sits in the middle between IE and Firefox/Chrome, and that's why I have not mentioned it in my original post.
I agree this is a pain, and IMO a bad mistake by Microsoft.
However, Windows XP was released in 2001, replaced (Vista) in 2007, reached end of mainstream support in 2009, and users have been warned it's going away for many, many years.
OSX Mountain Lion was released in 2012, replaced just a few months ago -- but now doesn't seem to be that much better off in terms of receiving updates to its bundled browser than Windows XP is.
Fair point. Microsoft has always been a lot better than Apple at protecting backwards compatibility. It's just a shame that they decided to use IE as a lever to push people toward newer Windows versions rather than doing what's best for the Web platform.
