I started my career 2008 building real estate and stock news websites. Back then, sooooo much of my days were spent making things "IE compatible" using techniques like:
- creating sprite sheets of transparent png corners and sides that one could arrange in a table around an element to create drop-shadows and rounded corners
- putting single pixel, transparent gifs at the end of floated containers because clearfix used a "before" CSS selector that earlier IEs didn't know about.
- writing CSS rules like -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=75)"; to make something semi-transparent...
And so much more. Back then, we were certain we'd open a bottle of champagne once IE is not a requirement anymore.
Today, fortunately, I have a different Job and Microsoft makes different browsers. But looking back, I wouldn't have believed this day to arrive.
Imagine having a piece of software where you have 95% global market dominance, a near complete monopoly. And then decide not to update said software in the slightest (other than security fixes) for 6 straight years. Kind of mind blowing.
that was the point. The entire point of IE was to embrace and extinguish the nascent web. With Netscape being cross-platform and the rise of Java, MS was feeling the threat to their Windows platform. Apple is doing a similar thing with Safari. Their App Store is their money maker. It's the whole reason they force Firefox and Chrome to use standards-lagging and neutered WebKit on iOS.
Google doesn't like the web, either. They control it at both ends. Search and the browser. Every web site today is built to conform to Google's blackbox SEO cargo cult. And Google performs an update regularly to their algorithm. At which point all websites have to do an SEO dance and hope it rains again. Google does this to prevent people from focusing on other search engines. If you always have to update for Google, then there is no time to focus on Bing or other avenues. Chrome also keeps people on Google search.
We don't have an open web today. We have three platforms. We have the Microsoft Windows platform, the Apple App Store platform, and the Google Web Platform.
And Facebook basically learned the lessons AOL failed to, on how to operate a walled garden on the internet.
> And Google performs an update regularly to their algorithm. At which point all websites have to do an SEO dance and hope it rains again. Google does this to prevent people from focusing on other search engines
Now that sounds really far fetched. It's like claiming Apple's developer documentation is so terrible to make sure devs have no time left to develop for other platforms :)
What would you say if Google never changed its algorithm? Surely, that would be evidence of a stagnant monopolist no longer finding it necessary to invest in the product.
>We don't have an open web today. We have three platforms. We have the Microsoft Windows platform, the Apple App Store platform, and the Google Web Platform.
Somewhat related: I had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Fernando Pérez (Jupyter) a while back. He made a very similar point, saying "there are only 3 computers today: Azure, AWS, and GCP". I'm not quite cynical enough believe that Google or MS would ever do something to lock down their cloud services to only their consumer products, I think the scale of this oligopoly can't really be understated, and it seems that we're moving away from personal computers and back to the time-sharing systems from before.
"Google hasn't been a perfect ally to the Web, but Google's incentives do align far better than Apple's ongoing opposition.
Apple can be ruthless because the Web is a competing platform for them—versus Google's situation where the Web is critical to revenue. Both companies are just acting in their own business interests (even if Google's interests happen to align with what I view as "good").
That's why Safari spent a decade Grover Norquisting the Web. No one told them to—and I'd bet most of them even believe they're saving the Web. But Apple's incentives have long been against the Web, and that won't change unless the incentives change.
Of course, even if Google's incentives are more aligned, they're… messy… and certainly not perfect. So, it is smart to maintain informed suspicion of Google's influence over the Web. That stated, I do see Chromium itself as a very strong hedge."
Microsoft's leadership and strategy has evolved under Nadella, at least enough to produce quality products like VSCode, and 'good enough' products like WSL.
I say this as someone who has historically been very anti-Microsoft, that used to do all my work in Linux. Modern Windows with VSCode, running WSL, is something the Microsoft of the IE6 era would never have produced.
I'm using Linux and/or BSD on all my private machines, but from an outsider's perspective Microsoft appears to have undergone some significant changes since Nadella took over. From what I know, if someone had suggested making the .Net runtime open source in, say, 2008, under Ballmer, they would have been treated like a heretic.
There's still plenty to complain about, it's gotten more nuanced.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that Microsoft - and surely many other companies of that size - are like a feudal system internally, with different teams/divisions doing things their own way, not necessarily playing nice with the others if it doesn't suit their own agenda.
MS under Nadella's leadership has grown on two fronts: more friendly to the open source world, while pushing for more advertisement and spyware on their most popular product.
At least Ballmer didn't try to milk me for my data.
Well, VSCode is a bad example. It's open source so if Microsoft decides to ditch it, it can be community maintained until people move to something else. Or another foundation can take over or another company can fork it. Come on, VSCode is a "lightweight" IDE ("lightweight" in terms of features, not in terms of resource demands) and it's one of the better ones.
I remember its first version and my first impression was "WTF". Nowadays it's pretty usable. IE of its era really wasn't. You can switch to anything else if you don't want to use VSCode. IE ... you either couldn't (on a company-issued computer) or you didn't know how (at home). Nadella's Microsoft is a far cry from Ballmer's.
I think IE's monopoly is an important component that cannot be ignored when doing comparisons. If Microsoft stopped updating VSCode, 90% is Open Source, and there are multiple good competitors already on the market. So there's minimal captive-ness with VSCode, whereas IE held the browser market captive in outmoded web tech for years, with no real escape for web developers and competitive browsers struggling to make headway.
I strongly remember using Firebug in Firefox (mind-blowing tools, for the time) in ~2008 and having to debug issues in IE, which had the equivalent of a Check Engine Light for debugging.
Firebug and firebug lite were amazing but to keep the record clear it was possible to debug client-side JavaScript (and other script types) using Visual Studio since very early on in IE. It was granted a major pain to setup properly for breakpoints and code highlighting but it was a full fledged debugger and IDE. I remember doing it often. I don’t remember if there was a debugger for IE for mac and early Safari. For me those where where “alert” and “document.write” were my only options.
I had forgotten about those days. The VS debugger slowed down my computer so much though that I often just used alert anyway. Firebug was a huge improvement.
Not owning any Apple products myself, my only option was a free online emulator to try and fix a bug on older iOS systems. It did not support console logs, so I was trying to debug using alert() as far back as yesterday. It didn't help, I only managed to find the issue through xCode on a random Mac.
I won't be able to celebrate for a long time to come. I have to support running an Outlook add-in in Outlook 2016 on Windows, which uses the IE11 rendering engine.
Just in case you haven’t heard: Microsoft recently announced that they won’t hold it against you if you drop support for IE11 in add-ins. Your customers might still complain, though.
Incorrect. For those add-ins, IE11 support was required until recently, and there was a real review process, and it was actually pretty good. They even reported very subtle IE11 visual bugs to us.
I remembered these days as well. There wasn't a lot of resources out their either. Getting everything pixel perfect was the goal. HTML emails were extra tricky since they displayed differently in each client.
Pixel perfect existed in an era where almost everyone had 800x600 screens. Today it's about adapting to many different screen sizes and devices. So when people say pixel perfect today they're 20+ years too late. :P
They didn't take Chrome, they took the engine that powers Chrome, Chromium.
Just like Apple's Safari is built on WebKit. You wouldn't say that other vendors like Sony just took Safari and put their logo on the browser for the browser on PlayStation.
> Windows releases where Internet Explorer will still be available after June 15, 2022, include Windows 7 ESU, Windows 8.1, and all versions of Windows 10 LTSC client, IoT, and Server.
> "The Internet Explorer (IE) 11 desktop application will end support for Windows 10 semi-annual channel starting June 15, 2022," Microsoft says on the IE11 lifecycle page.
> As Microsoft further explains, "for supported operating systems, Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the Windows version on which it is installed."
I've never quite understood this MS policy of "ending support" but continuing support anyway for extended support contract customers or for specific versions, etc.
The way I look at it, MS obviously is actually continuing to support the product, they are just choosing not to make it available to most people. It's still supported, just not for everyone.
I feel that if security patches are still being produced, they should be released as opposed to expecting people to use nothing, or roll their own by getting patches from a third party.
They could be released as "donations" to the public good from the big customers.
As I recall (vaguely) Microsoft did release a few security fixes for Windows XP and Windows 7 after their respective ends-of-lives on a case-by-case basis when the security issue was especially bad.
I am by no means a fan of Microsoft's, but when you release an OS and some applications and provide security fixes for ten years, asking for people who want to continue using that OS/app beyond that point to buy a support contract is not a complete dick move. In the FLOSS world, you may get volunteers who maintain a piece of software as a labor of love, but with something like Windows or IE, someone needs to pay people to do that work.
It might make sense to create something like a foundation to take care of the long term support for software, which would benefit everyone. I'm kind of surprised actually that this has not happened, yet (to my knowledge, at least).
I wonder if it is because customer-specific patches break parts of the software that most users use, to make it easier to fix the bugs the customer cares about.
But more than likely it is because deploying to that 1 customer is always going to be easier that deploying it publically.
The more people using your old software legitimately, the more people you have to tell that the bug they found isn't a security issue worthy of your time. Plus it's a kick in the pants to get organizations who can to upgrade.
There was a time in 1998-99 when Internet Explorer 4 / 5 was actually the best browser by far. Netscape 4 was unstable and had completely botched all the fancy new features: its implementation of CSS (brand new at the time) was so bad that even font sizes didn't work right, its homegrown "layers" API for JavaScript DOM access was awful, and many web developers were wishing they could somehow get away with only supporting IE.
25 years after the release of IE4, I'm just glad both of those browser codebases are now dead.
IE was really done in by Microsoft's "Longhorn" OS project. After Windows XP, Microsoft was planning a very ambitious update that would completely reset core APIs. File systems would be largely replaced by an OS-level database, and the Win32 GUI API would be replaced by an XML-based UI framework codenamed Avalon.
A new Avalon browser would ship with the OS, and thus IE + HTML would become legacy technologies as Microsoft confidently assumed most developers would flock to building their web apps in Avalon instead.
To Microsoft strategists, it seemed that they had succeeded in containing the web: Netscape was dead, Mozilla had almost no users, Apple was shipping their IE in Mac OS X, Google wasn't on Microsoft's radar, and the HTML standard process was stalled. So while a lot of content was being delivered as HTML4, there didn't seem to be any reason left for Microsoft to invest in IE — they'd already nailed the browser, owned the market, and would push Avalon as the next step.
Fortunately, Longhorn failed. Some parts of the project eventually shipped years late as Windows Vista. Avalon became WPF + XAML and still exists in Windows, but the dream of a XAML browser replacing IE was dead.
> There was a time in 1998-99 when Internet Explorer 4 / 5 was actually the best browser by far
Only as a preview for web 3. Netscape, even when crashing, was faster and more user friendly. Error messages in IE were surrealistic. Unfortunately those are today standard in todays browsers.
The obvious reason is that the people with decision-making power actively wanted people to be locked in to Internet Explorer (and so Windows), so Tasman's improved standards-compliance was a negative.
I clicked to laugh at a meme for a second and ended up reading an intriguing action packed drama about anthropomorphized web tech. This is awesome! Thanks for sharing :)
This is so fitting because even if Microsoft is deprecating and giving up on this monstrosity the executable is still sitting there. Serving legacy web apps that should have been abandoned a long time ago...
That's not what that is. "Edge" there doesn't mean Edge the browser, it means "latest"; it predates the Edge browser by many years. It has nothing to do with the Edge upgrade. It switches IE into the latest document mode that it supports. For IE11, it just puts it into IE11 mode.
IE may have been problematic from a tech point of view, but I'll eulogize that IE was important in advancing the web. The OS-integrated browser meant that in 1995, users had a full Internet stack readily available on their home PCs -- the widespread launch of Web 1.0. Later, IE was the pioneer of XMLHttpRequest, the beginning of Web 2.0. For these, we can say thanks, Microsoft! (for everything else, see other comments)
People often forget that in the IE4 days, IE was leagues beyond Netscape. It had far better CSS and JS support, and you could do things that wouldn't be possible in Netscape for years.
That said, it all came to an end after Microsoft "won" and disbanded the IE dev team, resulting in that era of stagnation we all remember.
Being in web development since 2004, I both thought the day would never arrive, and would have arrived a lot sooner than 2022. Tech-wise, there were times when IE was advanced, often in non-standard ways, but it was innovative. There are other ways where it was a major thorn in the side of every web developer and required much extra attention and care. And yet, since about 2014 or 2015, the world of web standards had caught up to and surpassed IE in every area. So here's to a surprisingly bittersweet farewell
Back in the early 2010's, one of our more amusing interview questions for front-end developers was "What is your favorite thing about Internet Explorer?".
We never really used the answer against anyone if they couldn't think of anything, but the advent of XHR and other improvements offered was something a lot of developers had already forgotten about, and it was interesting to see various responses and reactions.
I started doing web development back in Netscape - adding graphics extensions. I think it was 1995.
But I really dug into SPA/AJAX web apps in 2000 - building enterprise stuff. They were all "IE6 apps". IE6 was basically my X-windows. No other browsers were supported, and there as no pushback from customers back then. Only one of those apps made the transition to IE11.
Last year I explained to my current client that our big enterprise reporting app had to move off IE11. And I was really surprised how much pushback on got on that.
I argue that moving it “out of support” doesn't mean anything for what browsers you have to support. Users and businesses still using IE11 aren't exactly those that are on the top of their IT policy game, so I doubt they will be jumping when the browser is “no longer supported by Microsoft.”
You can now brag that the software is out of support.
Which yeah, doesn't mean absolutely anything for existing software that is still working and requires the old version to run. If by any chanche you need to support that configuration, the "official" deprecation simply means "good luck!" and a pat on the back.
Just like XP, I've seen plenty of shops with custom software that still requires XP+IE6+activex that still get active development, because a total rewrite is out of the question when changes are small (and that is totally understandable as well).
The poor folks though will need to containerize and isolate everything from any network though to keep it somewhat safer. If they do that at all.
Heck, I've heard of DOS still being used in industrial applications. If it ain't broken, don't fix it... though I would hope these systems are air-gapped from the rest of the world and not connected to any network.
Official deprecation like this helps companies say “sorry, we don’t support IE11 anymore either, you’ll have to upgrade.” Not all companies will do this, but plenty will.
A couple of weeks back and edge update forced many many many users to Edge earlier than expected, if your tried to launch iexplorer.exe it would go to edge instead
IEMode in Edge also works very well
So if these companies are getting windows updates at all, or edge updates at all is somewhat not optional
I have a friend who works for a VA Hospital and they've switched as of yesterday. So we know the DOD/VA is at least switching off old IE8/IE10 Apps.
The funny part is the app they use still works, you're just forced to run it in compatibility mode on Edge (Holy, I forgot this existed) but their user profiles have limited access so they can't right-click, properties, unless they have admin priv.
New browser, same old 2009 problems. Obviously this is not the browsers fault, it's just insane to hear about shops like this that still hold on to legacy apps FOREVER.
A big reason for why this is in my opinion, is not that they don't want to get an update, it's because of corporate politics. Someone has to be the manager that goes "boss, I want to spend money and resources to update an essential service and doing so will increase security and productivity." What is heard "<underling> boss, I want to spend money".
Bosses never want to spend a cent, because of the "shareholders". They also don't want to say "yes" to something because if there is an issue, it is then their fault even if it was worth doing. They would rather kick the can down the road until the wheels come flying off the car.
That could be some of it, by my experience when it comes to IT, we have a terrible track record for explaining why the BUSINESS should want to spend the money, not why IT wants to spend the money
IT: Well IE is end of life so we need to Spend X to upgrade
That is an IT reason, not a Business Reason.
It needs to be put into a BUSINESS reason, and I admit I am terrible at that as well
Is this Groundhog Day? How many more times will IE be declared dead? Official support is irrelevant if the browser is still stubbornly used by users. Most websites have moved on more than 5 years ago.
This news is meaningless. This confirms it:
> For supported operating systems, Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the Windows version on which it is installed.
There are two things that differentiate this from other announcements: They're disabling certain versions of IE and redirecting users to Edge [1] and the global usage of IE is far, far, lower than it was even a couple of years ago.
In conservative IT businesses like hospitals this date is a deal breaker: No more security updates. In consequence IT will switch it off immediately. Guess why edge has an IE Mode.
That's not what conservative means. My conservative hospital client recently downgraded to Windows 7! If you pay MS enough you get security updates no problem. Not to mention that even the less conservative are probably on Windows 10 LTSC where IE11 will keep running
All versions of Windows Server are (for now) unaffected, i.e., Internet Explorer 11 continues to run [1].
There is also "Internet Explorer Mode" in Edge, which uses iexplore.exe under the hood.
Additionally, if somebody were _really_ desperate to launch iexplore.exe itself, then there are unsupported means to do so.
For example, via manually modifying the registry key "NotifyDisableIEOptions" under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\
My favourite hack though, which should not be used by anyone ever, is launching via the COM object interface, which bypasses the registry key check [2]. I have personally verified that this works(!)
If one is desperate, there is also the option of the classic Webview control in Visual Studio (or even the old VB6 version) which with little bit of UI added around it, can substitute for the real IE for certain enterprise legacy webapps.
A bit more effort, can also lock the control to only browse to the intended web service, and launch the default browser for any external links.
There's kind of a market for this type of solution in the legacy enterprise app space I think.
At my office we use this software called Application Lifecycle Management that still requires Internet Explorer. Apparently they made some kind of containerized IE launcher for it. I suppose that was easier than porting it to a modern browser.
I support an EMR running on AIX that is accessed through a Java Web applet that only works with Internet Explorer. Since you cannot install Java in any other modern browser, IE mode works on Windows 10 but not 11. The menus and setting you need to configure just do not exist in Edge and without the full Internet Options menu from IE, the site cannot load.
The vendor allegedly has an update coming soon to allow other browsers to work.
If there are legacy systems that would be too expensive to tear down and modernise, then some form of regulatory fine should be implemented to stop this. There is no excuse for running IE anywhere these days, especially now after this news which puts the final nail in the coffin.
It’s a liability. The problem with security measures is that there is no immediate reward, but a few years down the line and you get ransomware’d you would want to have replaced legacy systems with modernised software and hardware. You need to weigh the cost of modernisation versus getting embarrassingly pwned.
A fine is a bad idea since companies should be able to take risk freely as long as this risk isn't socialized. I don't get fined for leaving my door unlocked, because it is my prerogative whether I take that risk. If risky behaviour affects others, then fines would be appropriate (e.g. managing customer data)
We frequently encounter legacy industrial automation applications that use IE inside an ActiveX container. There are a few third-party apps that attempt to bundle Chrome or Edge inside an ActiveX object, but we've had limited success.
HP Alm seemed to require IE where I work in the past 6 months. I told the person asking me to use HP Alm that I had no way of installing IE, with insinuations that the ask was BS.
Probably outdated version or not a hard requirement...
We have one third party app that requires IE. I opened Visual Studio, dropped a WebBrowser control onto a form, and voila: I've got IE again, even on Windows 11. I pushed the app out and it works great. I figure we've got years until this breaks again.
I support an enterprise Java app that uses SWT, and some clients may still be using IE for the embedded i-frames, depending on their OS. But I think we have a way of overriding the registry and forcing the IE version, if it comes to that.
FWIW I don’t think this changes anything, as those same usages often run on out-of-support versions of Windows too that are never updated. It usually doesn’t matter - if it works, then it works.
I used it to authenticate against some webdav intranet sites hosted on Sharepoint Online. Formerly on a SSO standard windows AD integrated system you needed to open internet explorer once. It did some arcane voodoo in the background you didn't need to do anything with it, just close it again. But if you did that you could connect to Sharepoint sites through the file explorer via webdav. This process needed to be repeated every other week when the arcane voodoo authentication needed to be refreshed.
Probably getting you a kerberos ticket (which would subsequently be available to other services like explorer). Hitting it with another browser (which need to be configured to use Kerberos) probably led to an NTLM auth in response to the Negotiate header. NTLM isn’t a global credential and doesn’t get a kerberos ticket.
Both Firefox and Chrome can get the kerberos ticket themselves, but it is necessary to whitelist sites that can use spnego. For Firefox, the settings are separate for ntlm and spnego, so one can be disabled and the other whitelisted.
Interestingly, Edge for Linux doesn't support spnego at all.
This is mostly true, however there’s a major caveat with chrome: your ticket can’t be too large. Too many group memberships and kerberos fails in chrome.
The lack of support for spnego in edge for linux isn’t entirely surprising though I am curious what the excuse is.
the software I'm working on still supports IE, but after years of pushing for it, in 2020 management let us start work on supporting Chrome/Edge. Though we'll have to see how our automated testing suite will be impacted by those redirections (FTA: "opening Internet Explorer will progressively redirect users to Microsoft Edge with IE mode."), because we're still testing with IE, though that's also planned to be phased out this summer.
not dreading it, but we do have a couple of older photocopiers (with no fw updates) that won't let us do things like add emails to the address book without IE
I’ve still been using IE11 up to now by default (for the websites it still renders adequately, with Firefox as a fallback — there’s a “Open current page in Firefox” add-in), for the following reasons:
- crisper and higher-contrast font rendering on low-DPI monitors
- Ctrl+N/Ctrl+K clone the current tab into a new window/tab including its history, letting you “fork” the tab and effectively navigate a history tree. Edit: And, maybe more importantly, opening a link in new window/tab also clones the history.
- generally good keyboard usage, e.g. for the history tab (you can for example always blindly hit Ctrl+H, Home, Enter to go to the last visited page, something which is more fiddly in other browsers)
- larger viewport height than possible on Chrome/Firefox/Edge (after hiding the toolbar and status bar, configuring tabs to be on the address bar, etc.)
On a similar note IE and legacy Edge (non-chromium) had/still have unparalleled snappy scrolling (on touchpads). I really wish I had never used those browsers because nothing today compares to it. UWP apps have decent scrolling, but these old browsers were something else (apparently they took every touchpad movement for scrolling or something, I'm not sure what that means. If anyone from MS would like to chime in I'd be grateful!)
Curiously enough, IE is also the only one that allows properly selecting and copying CSS-generated content (i.e. both quotation marks added via "quotes:" as well as general free-form text added via "content:").
Firefox does some semi-functional hack for handling quotation marks, but gives up on "content:", while Chrome and all other Blink-based browsers don't handle that kind of text at all and just skip it entirely. (No idea about Safari, but given its shared rendering engine history with Chrome it presumably doesn't handle it, either.)
> - Ctrl+N/Ctrl+K clone the current tab into a new window/tab including its history, letting you “fork” the tab and effectively navigate a history tree.
You can do this in Firefox by middle (or Control) clicking the Reload button.
Unfortunately there is no keyboard shortcut, and no option to open it in a new window (which is what I usually want). Also, what I initially forgot to mention, opening a link in new window/tab in IE also clones the history.
I posted this as a reply to a comment here but I felt it would be better to ask as a separate comment -
Does anyone (especially from MS) know why later versions of IE and pre-chromium Edge were so good and snappy with scrolling? The level of accuracy and speed was incredible (on touchpads at least) - it was probably the last time I had an interaction on a computer that made me go "wow".
I agree the input lag and scroll curves in later IE was some of the best I’ve seen. Firefox was as good for a time but is now (slightly) worse after changing to a more chrome-like curve
They really went all out on input lag reduction for Windows 8 touch interfaces. I remember some videos from the time where they showed off such low input lag that scrolling and drawing almost perfectly tracked finger movement. Perhaps not so impressive today with iOS as a benchmark, but Windows is still king for desktop input lag
From a previous thread (lost link):
"For supported operating systems, Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the Windows version on which it is installed."
The large enterprise outfit I work for has 8% IE11 usage still, almost all of which is in Korea. Our customers there go out of their way to not use Edge on their machines.
The question is why? I want to put on my tin foil hat and speculate about Korean knowledge of Edge 0-days (maybe North Korea is known to hoard those for some reason) but then again if you have edge 0-days it's probably trivial to get IE11 ones.
Ctrl+F is your friend: "For certain versions of Windows currently in-support and used in critical environments, we will continue to support Internet Explorer on those versions until they go out of support. These include all currently in-support Windows 10 LTSC releases (including IoT) and all Windows Server versions, as well as Windows 10 China Government Edition, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7 with Extended Security Updates (ESUs). Future versions of these editions will not include Internet Explorer."
> The Windows 10 China Government Edition is based on Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, which already includes many of the security, identity, deployment, and manageability features governments and enterprises need. The China Government Edition will use these manageability features to remove features that are not needed by Chinese government employees like OneDrive, to manage all telemetry and updates, and to enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms within its computer systems.
I love how their new hardware announcement is just tacked onto the end of the announcement of Windows 10 China Government Edition.
Why would you even announce something like this in a cute PR blog post? Only thing I could think of is it's to impress shareholders with the fact that they're trusted by a rich and powerful government organization. Maybe that's a good enough reason alone.
LOL. That's the first time I've heard of that. I thought I had access to all Windows 10 versions, but that one's not on my access list. Includes its own special encryption algorithms. Oh boy!
im speculating that in a wild twist of events, MS announces the revival of Netscape Navigator, just to keep all the web developers on their toes and make sure they get enough practice working with cross browser compatability
Internet Explorer had dominant market share, non-standardized features, and powerful corporate backing.
Chrome has dominant market share, non-standardized features, and powerful corporate backing.
Safari doesn't have the newest standards always, but mostly sticks to the standards from what I know. The major difference seems to be a lot of devs liking Chrome.
They both have some parallels to IE in their own ways. Chrome for the reasons you mentioned, safari because:
-Coupled to OS updates, meaning that people on older versions of the OS will also have an older browser, with worse standards support (thankfully apples upgrade policies aren't as bad as android manufacturers, or this would be way worse)
-lagging behind on standard features with less frequent, big updates that still often end up missing crucial things (my prime example is how long it took them to support webp, which they thankfully finally support now, but there's plenty of others)
Does anyone know when the forced redirect from IE to Edge actually lands, particularly in Windows 10? In particular, does anyone know when it will affect users that open IE by entering "iexplore URL" in the Run dialog? Is anyone seeing this behavior yet? I'm not.
Would the web have been a different place if IE had gone a different way instead of its current bullshit? I mean, I wonder what effect this would have on the current state of the web if it complied with general standards.
Seeing a timeline animation of browser share made me both nostalgic about the browser wars days and how IE took over after (and for a time was the best), and also sad about what happened to Firefox, which was so exciting in those early days becoming very much a standard but falling to the wayside as Chrome snuck up. It's just sad where it ended up today as an also ran for some/holdout for others (I still insist my parents use it etc) with difficult marketing and who knows what level of development behind the scenes. Sigh.
Slightly tangential, but does this mean that Wine prefixes will no longer need to include Internet Explorer? If you ever go digging through a Wine prefix's Program Files, there are a handful of default Windows applications, including IE and Windows Media Player. I've never been really sure why my Steam library is filled with a dozen copies of IE, but I'm curious if they will still be added.
Ironically, Wine has better support for older programs than Windows itself. Therefore, why would they remove backwards compat and get rid of a major selling point?
Well, there's Internet Explorer as the complete browser, but there's also the rendering engine behind it that's still needed to power the web browser controls used by all sorts of applications. If I'm understanding things right by default Wine emulates it using Gecko, but you can still install the original Microsoft DLLs for maximum compatibility.
Likewise on Windows itself, Microsoft will have to continue shipping IE's rendering engine for backwards compatibility with all those programs using the old web view control (as well as Edge's hidden IE11-mode).
I didn't realize that it was still alive, and that some devs were still maintaining it. I am wondering if there were still apps out there in the corp world that would only work with ie11, even if just for blocking other agents.
When Microsoft decided to cede the browser to Chrome with Edge it was clear they don't believe a browser to be an important part of their current strategy.
If they had wanted to stop IE but keep competing they would have made Edge a Gecko-based browser and worked on it.
I think that Gecko is more dead than IE 11, 3% of people use it, versus 0.3% using IE11, but those Gecko people will move to chrome, while the 0.3% people using IE11 will never move due to enterprise reasons.
Having lived through the MS/IE6 era of being the monopoly web browser, and effectively determined and held back web standards for a long time, it's bittersweet that we now have Google/Chrome era.
At least it's not hard wired into the OS and we're not going through another era of mega-corp hard wiring browsers into their OSes any more.
Do you remember how we got into the IE6 situation?
IE was actually very innovative, did stuff like AJAX before everyone else and the developers adopted the ways of IE. Websites did not work well on other browsers, every website had a disclaimer at the bottom: Works best in IE.
Now I see similar situation with Chrome and gives me goosebumps. Some people say that Safari is the new IE but I think they got it wrong, I think the new IE is Google Chrome.
IE become bad when Microsoft dropped the ball and made it into a browser with a reputation to crash all the time and bring down Windows with it.
IE6 was hated by the developers because it had the largest userbase but had non-standart features, which meant that CSS and HTML and JS had to be written in a way to accommodate IE and Mozilla.
Today Chrome is very good but if Google takes something from the Microsoft playbook, we will be screwed. Some already say that Chrome is not what it used to be and Google no longer abides by the "do no evil" motto. They are even notorious to favour their own services, i.e. if you sign in into a Google website, Chrome treats that website differently than the rest, assumes that session as the browser account.
I don't see the issue with Chrome. The new IE it's obviously Safari and it's in the worst way possible since in iOS you're actually forced to use it. Apple is also being accused of breaking their own browser to force you using their AppStore. Don't see Google doing that.
Apple forces you to use the rendering engine, not the browser. You can download Chrome to your iPhone.
Anyway, that's not the point. IE wasn't bad because it was a shitty browser. It was bad because it had features that other browsers did not have and it was very popular because it was very innovative and it was heavily marketed. This resulted in websites being made for IE only, which resulted in a lockdown of huge userbase that even Microsoft couldn't get rid of once decided to get rid of IE.
Safari is nothing like that and there's no Safari lockdown. On the other hand, Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share, forcing web developers to make everything for Chrome. That's exactly like IE.
If anything, Apple's refusal to allow the Chrome engine into iOS is the only thing that keeps us from complete lockdown into Chrome.
I don't agree with you and as a developer I find way more issues with Safari than with Chrome/Firefox/Edge.
Also, what matters in a browser it's the engine. If it's always WebKit and you find a issue or something else in iOS you can switch the browser but the result will always be the same since Chrome and Firefox are forced to use WebKit.
Chrome's engine it's Chromium which is open-source and used by other browsers like Microsoft Edge for example, so I don't see as much of an issue with Google Chrome, since you're not actually forced to use it.
> Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share
Even Firefox has it's own non-standard features and I don't see people complaining about it.
Okay, check out Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Exterminate strategy and I hope you understand what's the problem of having a dominant platform that does it's own thing instead of abiding by the standards. Now Chrome is in the "Extend" stage and obviously you don't feel any pain but if Google chooses to take another step, then you will feel it.
Maybe they never will do it but I simply don't want Google has the option to go to the next step.
Google obviously has to gain by doing that, but not as much as Microsoft had. I mean, IE could run basically on one platform, which was Windows, so it makes sense Microsoft forced people to create dependency on IE.
I'm more concerned about Apple nowadays, they're doing everything to keep people locked down on their own ecosystem.
It's not obvious to me, Google has everything to gain by going evil. Google has power to choose how privacy will be managed, they can choose to kill Facebook(not that I'm fan of FB, but still).
Apple makes a lot of money but Apple is an underdog with it's tiny market share. Apple can and does evil stuff but it's nothing compared to the potential of Google.
What you fear from Google it's what Apple's already doing. With their new iOS 15 privacy settings they are hurting Facebook (and other companies that rely on your data pretty bad). I mean, I don't feel sorry for Facebook or whatever company profits from your private data, but you can see how damage Apple can already do.
> a browser with a reputation to crash all the time and bring down Windows with it
IE post-dates the addition of process isolation to Windows - IE never brought down Windows because it ran as a normal process. When people say IE was integrated into Windows they just mean applications like the shell used it as a component, it wasn't actually in the kernel.
IE6 also had the infamous ActiveX plugin architecture, which was a security hell, but were way better than Java Applets. Several pages with the "Works in IE" used ActiveX plugins
Why does there only need to be one web villain? We've unbundled IE's horrors.
Safari is now the browser that resists web standards and an open internet for its parent company's personal gain. See: PWAs, webgl, webview.
And Chrome is now the thousand pound gorilla forcing standards nobody wants, for its parent company's personal gain. See: manifest v3, cookie security.
Resisting web standards is alright, if people make standards compliant websites it will simply mean that Safari users will miss out some stuff.
The problem starts when you implement alternative standards and you have a market share to make people code for your standard. In this situation, your users don't suffer but everyone else suffer, that's what I call villain.
Check Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Exterminate strategy. This is the evil thing, making browser that doesn't adopt some web standards is not evil.
The market forces work the other way. If Safari can't do something, like say if it can't work with webgl 2.0 until four and a half years after every other major browser adds support, devs will avoid using it and middleware will have to maintain support for webgl 1.0 longer. This slows down adoption of web standards and affects everyone.
The only property that benefits from dragging your heels on webgl 2.0 adoption is the App Store, which could see its influence and revenue easily be cannibalized by progressive web apps using modern gpu rendering. And would you look at that, those are exactly the two web standards Safari has dragged its heels on.
Sure, it will have an effect but Apple's market share is tiny. If there was something great to be done with the stuff that Apple is dragging their feet to implement, we would have it on other platforms and Apple will actually be forced to act on it.
There's many ways to measure market share and when you look at monetizable users, Apple platforms have an outsized amount of big spenders compares to Android or web platforms. As I already said, this gives them considerable influence in what does and doesn't get adopted by developers. This is the opposite of how you claim it works.
We're going to have to agree to disagree because your argument you've made twice now without adaptation is a bit absurd. If Safari doesn't implement it it must not be important? I am now conscious of my original comment being inexplicably downvoted and I'm worried I might be banging my head against Apple fanboys instead of having a discussion about corporate influence over web standards. There is considerable evidence for this and I've given it in this thread.
I'm not sure which is worse. The problem with Chrome is that Google isn't content with the web being a document platform. They want it to be this all-encompassing OS-like amalgamation of worst technologies possible that's never complete. This endless feature creep with WebUSB, WebMIDI, WebBluetooth, WebNFC... No, it's not "cool" that I'm for some reason able to install a beta version of Android on my phone using a macro in a hypertext document.
In the IE era, if you wanted a "web application", you simply used Flash. There was a clear separation between the document and the application. It was nice. I miss it.
Say what you will (I am a sole firefox user for a decade +), at least chrome keeps improving and having development. Now that the web is more of a "VM in a window for applications", it's _not_ like the IE era of no updates, buggy crap, un-debuggable, etc.
Yes and no, Chrome does what's good for google with no regard for most of the rest. To make it worse google goes out of their way to break compatibility with other browsers when it comes to their stuff. It's really no different and in many ways just as bad. The only major difference is google's incentives do align with innovation for web; insofar as it furthers advertising revenue for google.
The situation with Safari is nothing like what we had back in the IE6 days. It was like developing for multiple platforms, not just a multiple browsers.
Thats not to say Safari isn’t dragging it’s heals, but it looks like Apple are finally ramping up development speed. I gather they have been expanding the Safari dev team, and the latest announcements at WWDC look really good.
I actually use Safari as my primary browser, I prefer it (as a user) to Chrome. Although for debugging Chrome dev tools are better, I probably open it 2-3 times a day to check stuff, but never leave it running.
In at least one way, it's worse. You have a large percentage of users (everyone on iOS) who is stuck using a single rendering engine (Safari's) and locked out of installing another one. Although you can install Firefox, Chrome, etc on iOS, it's still Safari's webkit engine underneath.
It's not as bad in some aspects, but the iOS ecosystem is essentially another platform. My current client has an app that's built on Ionic, and the sheer amount of bullshit I've had to deal with, specific to Mobile Safari, is insane.
In a lot of ways it's worse, Microsoft never banned the competition. It's utterly outrageous that Apple has been able to get away with such clear anti-competitive behaviour for this long.
There's only one reason Web Apps are not currently viable on mobile, and unless you're down in the trenches building these apps these issues are invisible.
Firefox was also clearly a better user experience at the time, which made it much easier to convince people to switch.
I switched back to Firefox a while ago for ideological reasons, but the majority of people are not going to switch to something that is more or less the same, just without their bookmarks, passwords and history.
All the standards required to render the modern web are too complex to be implemented from scratch in a reasonable amount of time by a reasonably sized team.
- A GDPR-style mandate to make cloud apps secure by certifying all libraries and upstream authors that run your stack, down to the OS,
- Thus cloud providers providing “Debian, only for amateur purposes, PII forbidden”,
- And “Amazon Linux, certified GDPR III, all upstream identified.”
That would be the end of free software. But at the same time, it would be the only reasonable move from EU, it drives me crazy that websites all use random NPM modules, half of them written by Russians we’re at war with.
Windows Server should be retired next, arguably, if MS would focus on making UI and Dev tools for Linux instead of Windows and nothing else, it will be better off.
Have you seen Microsoft's latest work on UIs? They're less responsive, less readable, less discoverable, and less functional than anything that came out of the IE era.
Not that GNOME is any better, suffering as it does from the same tabletitis disease that has infected today's UI designers.
- creating sprite sheets of transparent png corners and sides that one could arrange in a table around an element to create drop-shadows and rounded corners
- putting single pixel, transparent gifs at the end of floated containers because clearfix used a "before" CSS selector that earlier IEs didn't know about.
- writing CSS rules like -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=75)"; to make something semi-transparent...
And so much more. Back then, we were certain we'd open a bottle of champagne once IE is not a requirement anymore.
Today, fortunately, I have a different Job and Microsoft makes different browsers. But looking back, I wouldn't have believed this day to arrive.