How will Internet Explorer users react to being pushed to IE9?

Microsoft is preparing a scheme to automatically push the latest version of Internet Explorer to users' systems. This can be seen as Microsoft following in Google's footsteps, as part of the thinking behind Chrome was to ensure people stay on the current version.

Internet Explorer 8 (also known as IE 8) is the latest but not quite the greatest web browser from Microsoft. It offers several enhancements over its predecessor that includes improvements in RSS, Cascading Style Sheets, and Ajax support.

Is Microsoft using Internet Explorer 9 as a tool for force users to upgrade from Windows XP?

I use Ubuntu 12.10. When I want to register for a service in some website, a messagebox appears saying "Please use Internet Explorer to use this item". The webdesigner assumes all users use Ms windows! Is there any way this bypass this false assumption in Ubuntu?

I have Wine installed but I couldn't find it's explorer.

Microsoft is hard at work on its Internet Explorer 9 browser, following a period in which open source browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have steadily been eating IE's lunch. Judging from this blog post from Microsoft, there is some serious work going on under the hood of Internet Explorer 9 to make it competitive...

Microsoft's three-day conference for web designers and developers -- MIX -- has just begun in Las Vegas. After a rather odd yo-yo-based introductory fanfare, details about Microsoft's upcoming products have already started to emerge.

Today, the Google Apps team announced that it will no longer support Internet Explorer 8 (and lower). Thank goodness. This will affect everyone using Google Apps: businesses, educational and government institutions.

Even though Microsoft itself would prefer to change this, many users still rely on older versions of Internet Explorer. For developers, this means spending hours on testing their web apps to ensure they work on IE8 and IE7, for example.