There are two parts to this: subscription pricing and IE updates. For subscription pricing on desktop software, I can only agree: it's generally annoying. However, if you subscribe for the Office365 access and it's concomitant app benefits that are continuously updated, then there's a value proposition. Also, businesses can choose subscriptions preferentially as it appears differently on their balance sheet. So for a general user, particularly one that is change-averse, it's annoying. Businesses less so. Regarding IE, you're way off beam. Changing the name won't fork the number of IE versions to test: it's just window dressing. And regarding the testing: IE is now more compatible than ever before with other browsers, reducing the overall load, and most items are addressable via feature detection rather than incredibly buggy user-agent checks and CSS hacks. I am part of a dev team for a large, enterprise package that supports IE8-11, FF and Chrome. We don't have any IE8-11 user agent checks. We don't have any CSS hacks. We feature detect a couple of things across these versions: placeholder support, CSS animation support, pointer events -- and progressively enhance. There does not need to be a Jenga tower. EDIT to add: I prefer Chrome/FF over IE, but I have no desire for the IE team to go back to their previous ethos where their release cadence was incredibly slow, and they were both buggy and incompatible. The current pace of change is benefiting the whole web.