8 ms·
IE is a 'compatibility solution', to be used selectively, warns Microsoft exec
- pjc50 8y agoIt's a profound irony that one of the companies whose web strategy is now badly affected by Microsoft's early-2000s monopolisation incompatibility efforts is .. Microsoft. It's as if Fairchild hadn't been able to move their HQ off their Superfund site and were stuck there complaining about the cost of employee gas masks.
- skc 8y agoI think what's ironic is everyone claiming Microsoft was going to ruin the web back in the day and ended up supporting the very parties that actually did end up ruining the web.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI’m not sure that’s a fair assessment. Old IE really did hold back technological progress for a long time. Who knows where we’d be today if not for that.
- eli 8y agoThey did a lot of things that weren't approved by a standards committee but many of them were genuinely progressive. You can draw a straight line from IE4's DHTML to today's modern web apps.
- bulletsvshumans 8y agoIt's worth remembering that Microsoft had an explicit strategy to abuse standards in order to undermine competitors [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- cpach 8y agoI believe a lot of good things has come from Microsoft. But their business practices and extremely dominant position during the late 90s and early 00s was quite unpleasant IMHO. It’s a totally different story now that Satya Nadella is CEO. I have a lot of respect for him and all the good news that has kept coming after he took the helm. I would go as far as to say that he saved Microsoft from eating itself.
- eli 8y agoAgree on all points.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoI disagree profoundly, but that's because I work with Windows every day and Nadella has helped turn it into a horrible garbage fire of a product with no QA, user-hostile features, and a bunch of crap nobody asked for. Say what you will about Balmer, but Windows was a better product under him.
- cpach 8y agoI hear ya. Windows 10 has it’s fair share of rough edges, that’s for sure. Personally I prefer MacOS X whenever I can choose freely. When it comes to Windows though, the two main thing that makes me prefer Win 10 over Win 7 are these: a) WSL. For those not familiar with it let’s you run Linux binary executables (in ELF format) natively on W10. (And also on Windows Server 2019.) All (or nearly all?) packages from Ubuntu are available. Super neat, IMHO. b) Lots of handy Powershell cmdlets that are not available in W7. Let’s you configure printers, ACLs, etc via Powershell. So for all its warts I wouldn’t want to revert to W7.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoUndoubtedly a lot of the base components of Windows are better now, it's just that they're buried under a lot of crap, like the crappy new control panels that are slower and have fewer options, or the start menu that breaks if you sneeze too close to it and contains ads, or the forced updates that break stuff all the time.
- pjc50 8y agoDHTML: yes, with reservations. ActiveX: no, a security nightmare and intended to tie users to Microsoft. It's still tying some corporate intranet users to IE6 compatibility.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoBut ActiveX is not enabled by default except for trusted zones. It is effectively not a problem.
- craftyguy 8y ago>But ActiveX is not enabled by default except for trusted zones. That (historically) was not always the case...
- anthony_doan 8y ago> Old IE really did hold back technological progress for a long time. Seriously, IE5 or whatever was pre-installed on every Window OS and killed Netscape. It took years until Netscape release Mozilla. I lived through this era. Microsoft back then was in the mindset that they were the gate keeper of PC through their OS. They did not want web applications that are OS agnostic. I think the currently strategy right now for most company with the advent of web is wall garden + ecosystem. Give the user base enough tools, software and hardware, to depend on that it'll make it hard to leave.
- e12e 8y agoAlso, don't forget Microsoft Frontpage...
- alexandernst 8y agoWho are those parties that actually did end up ruining the web?
- sheeshkebab 8y agoI think they mean Facebook, google, amazon...
- bunderbunder 8y agoAlso ironic, 15 years ago what we were worried about all the content our browsers couldn't handle. Now the problem is all the content our browsers can't not handle.
- acdha 8y agoYou're presenting that as an exclusive choice when the correct answer is both. Microsoft absolutely was trying to subvert the web — they correctly perceived Netscape as a huge threat to Windows’ platform dominance — and they made numerous decisions to accomplish that, and then had roughly a decade where they were able to single-handedly stymie progress. Had the iPhone not been a hit, it probably would have worked, too — I supported web standards and Mozilla through that period but it really took executives having Mobile Safari in their pockets to get support for prioritizing compatibility with anything other than IE.
- 21 8y agoAll aboard the Chrome train.
- killyp 8y agoFirefox my dude. Has plugin support (uBlock) on mobile.
- ignoramous 8y agouMatrix is the best at blocking all sorts of content. One can selectively enable and save preferences per website, and that is helpful since uMatrix tends to break websites using CDNs.
- isostatic 8y agoQuite, Any browser that doesn't use chromium is the correct choice. Monopolies are bad, and it's hilarious that people are celebrating one of the demise of one most destructive monopolies of the computing age with "just use $new_monpololistic_product, it will be different this time"
- klyrs 8y agoI'm screaming on the inside. And using chrome because my phone doesn't have enough storage for another browser / I can't remove it. Which is baffling: I find myself in a situation that Microsoft was fined for
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoA lot of the same people decrying the Chrome monopoly never the less push for more and more bloat in the web standard, thus helping to enforce that monopoly by ensuring that hardly anyone has the resources to make a reasonable competitor.
- fnordsensei 8y agoTime to deprecate the web and start from scratch.
- userbinator 8y agoThere are many people for whom the UI is the only reason they continue to use IE, so I wish MS would just take whatever new rendering engine they now have and give it the same UI that IE always had --- they would certainly win back a large portion of the userbase who are irritated by the combination of either the familiar and comfortable UI with sites that don't always work, or sites that work but an annoying dumbed-down UI. Edge was from the beginning looking too much like a horrible Chrome clone (which it is sort of turning into now...) Not happy with the browser situation in general these days...
- mxuribe 8y agoI wonder in these cases if an IE-looking/IE-behaving theme for firefox would do the trick; sort of best of both worlds?
- Laforet 8y agoWhen firefox switched to web extensions a lot of the UI modding methods were no longer supported. I doubt this would be a viable route.
- cm2187 8y agoFor me the only use I have for IE is as a .net control to be able to access and manipulate the DOM in .net, for small web scrapping toy projects. I doubt the new Edge will be integrated as well as IE was (if integrated at all), so I will miss that when it is gone.
- mlevental 8y agointeresting. how do you do this?
- cm2187 8y agoAdd a WebBrowser control (which is just a wrapper around IE), navigate to the page of your choice, then you can access the DOM with methods like webBrowser1.Document.GetElementById("someid") you can trigger javascript events or fill a form like: webBrowser1.Document.GetElementById("someid").SetAttribute("value", "login") webBrowser1.Document.GetElementById("someid").InvokeMember("click") There are ways to embed Edge or Chrome in a .net application but you can't access or manipulate the DOM (or you have to inject some javascript, which is not as neat as being to manipulate it directly in .net).
- skybrian 8y agoClickbait title. He didn't write "not a browser." The original blog post is pretty reasonable: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/The-perils-of-using-Internet-Explorer-as-your-default-browser/ba-p/331732 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/T...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoNor is he any sort of “security chief”
- obenn 8y agoIt’s worth it to not he’s not using this as an opportunity to push Edge, and in the article even recommends people to use any modern browser they choose.
- kbumsik 8y agoIMHO, MS should have rebranded Edge as IE and the current IE's name should have been "Legacy Internet Browser" or something like that at the beginning. If one of their chief would say not to use IE, why MS would make it a virtually default browser at the beginning? (to be clear, most of South Korean websites were marked incompatible with Edge and forced users open those websites on IE when launching Windows 10.) MS was not brave enough so they did terrible marketing stretagy around Edge. It is sad we lost one of few modern web engine.
- smadurange 8y agoIndeed. I for one was very excited about Edge and desperately wanted a new browser engine.
- basch 8y agoThe same company that renamed Lync to Skype and then immediately replaced it with Teams.
- thewhitetulip 8y agoHow ironic that I read this at work in IE because I don't have any other browser
- raxxorrax 8y agoThere are portable versions of all major browsers. So if it is admin rights stopping you...
- acdha 8y agoAt security-conscious organizations they will report unapproved binaries or block execution of anything which isn't on a whitelist.
- christophilus 8y agoI find it ironic that security-conscious organizations run outdated and insecure browsers.
- acdha 8y agoMe too, but welcome to enterprise IT. There's a certain logic in some cases where it's also just tightly locked down so you avoid people hitting un-whitelisted parts of the internet.
- raxxorrax 8y agoFine. Than this solution is only applicable in enterprises where people actually work.
- acdha 8y agoNot everyone works the way you do. Some people have greater threats and compliance requirements and they are often making trade offs which are reasonable for that environment.
- wim 8y agoPeople won't be able to "browse" a lot using IE much longer anyway. Slack, for example, seems to drop all IE support next month, and I don't think we'll have to wait as long as with IE6 this time before most apps drop support.
- alexandernst 8y agoAt our company we have a complete IE-no-no rule. No matter how much the client is willing to pay us.
- chrismorgan 8y ago> "As you can see, by going with the 'technical debt by default' approach, we ended up in a scenario whereby if you create a brand-new webpage today, run it in the local intranet zone, and don't add any additional markup, you will end up using a 1999 implementation of web standards by default. Yikes." Meanwhile, Outlook and Windows Mail are even worse than this, using the MSO renderer and editor (essentially: Word) in all versions except Outlook 2003 (in which version they switched to the IE renderer and editor, but then regressed to MSO in the next release for terrible reasons). That MSO menace is unconditionally stuck in a buggy and incomplete implementation of 1997 web standards. (As an outsider, I say that it appears to have been treated entirely as a black box for the last two decades; I am aware of no changes beyond supporting high-DPI displays, if you wish to count that.) And this is what they are still actively advocating for email. I wish they would apply this same reasoning to the MSO renderer. I hate it and the decision to go back to it in Outlook 2007 with a passion exceeded by little in the tech industry. With it they have singlehandedly manufactured jobs for tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of software developers and hacks, and held back the entire email space with their stranglehold by at least a decade. It’s that bad.
- kgwxd 8y agoOne upside to that is people don't try to get too fancy with HTML emails. IMO, email would be much better off if it had never supported HTML. Things are getting worse with the current trend of supporting emoji in the subject. My gmail web inbox looks like a GeoCities page.
- bane 8y agoLots of shade being thrown at Microsoft, I don't think it's wrong to do that, but I also think that the real problem is being completely ignored -- corporate IT departments that demanded (still demand) IE due to some kind of "security policy". A few of the places I've worked at had very strong policies about what software was installed on the corporate boxes, and IE was almost universally pushed due to "security reasons" even when it was widely known to be significantly less secure than any concurrent competing browser. The thing I think about here is that the reason these enterprise websites are broken is not that they're compatible with IE, but that IE wasn't compatible with web standards, and thus sites were hacked at to fit within IE's brokenness. And now the entire world has moved to better conformance with web standards and organizations are stuck with what was an unsecure web browser years ago, and is getting even more unsecure going forward. Corporate IT Security departments of old get the blame in my book. If they had simply said "nope, IE is not secure, it is not permitted on our systems" the world would literally be a better place. Instead they sent a strong demand signal that Microsoft simply fulfilled.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoIt isn't really about bugs in the application, it's that IE has fine-grained security controls and they are easily configured via GPO.