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I hope the Hotmail team follows through with answering questions. When the IE team offered to answer questions on Reddit, they quit after a few hours. The que

I hope the Hotmail team follows through with answering questions. When the IE team offered to answer questions on Reddit, they quit after a few hours. The questions I had asked was (summarized): Most IE6 usage seems to be from large corps, and much of their resistance to upgrading is due to internal apps which only work correctly on IE6. Why doesn't Microsoft offer a standalone IE6 distro which could be installed alongside IE8/9 and used for the few apps holding back company-wide upgrades?

stevelosh 16y ago
> When the IE team offered to answer questions on Reddit, they quit after a few hours. From the original post: > tl;dr: Hotmail engineers and product managers want to discuss email from 12-3 PST today.
larrik 16y ago
I believe that Microsoft is still insisting that IE6 and Windows are inseparable, due to that being their defense in the DOJ trial.
- sudont 16y ago
  I think the WINE implementation on Linux and OS X says a few things about their defense.
_dan 16y ago
I've often wondered why these companies don't install a non-IE browser as a primary browser, leaving IE6 on the system, then using HTAs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29....) with IE6 to deliver their intranet stuff.
- ShabbyDoo 16y ago
  An interesting question, and one which ought to prompt Microsoft to do more for its corp customers. From reading the link, I presume that an HTA app uses whatever IE version happens to be on the system? Another bad thing for Microsoft is that legacy IE6 apps are slowing corporate adoption of Windows 7. Not only do these apps tie corps to a browser, but they tie them to an OS as well!
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
dflock 16y ago
Companies with these locked down Win2K/XP/ie6 desktops wouldn't install that, because that would be work, which costs money. If they saw ie6 as a problem and were willing to put in any effort whatsoever to fix it, they would have done so long ago.
- ShabbyDoo 16y ago
  I consulted for a company which had well over 10K managed desktops with XP/IE6. They are in the process of upgrading to IE8 and would be delighted if they could just install it in place of IE6 and go on with life. However, the upgrade team identified well over 70 internal apps, some written in-house and some vendor-provided, which required IE6 to function properly. Some suitable strategy must be identified for each: fix, replace, decommission, etc. If they could install a standalone version of IE6 just for these apps, they could upgrade to IE8 now and fix them over time. To those who know something about IE6's "architecture": How hard is such an idea given that you are Microsoft? What if the standalone app could be constrained to work only with known-safe websites so that security upgrades were not so essential?
  - dflock 16y ago
    If you were Microsoft, it would be trivial, provided you hadn't based your legal anti-trust defence on saying this was impossible. If you had, for example, done that, then it's obviously 'impossible'. Also, their revenue model only works if they can keep selling you upgrades all the time - no profit in fixing the old shit. There a lots of pieces of 3rd party software that mess around with IE in ways that MS have claimed are not possible and go part of the way towards what you want: Uninstall IE from Windows: http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html Have multiple stand-alone versions if IE installed: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE, http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage, http://blog.donavon.com/2009/08/run-ie6-ie7-and-ie8-side-by-side-on.html http://blog.donavon.com/2009/08/run-ie6-ie7-and-ie8-side-by-... Virtualise your way out - run different versions of IE in VM's: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=... Once you can run multiple versions of IE on the same machine, and you're controlling which browsers are installed, redirecting traffic to one or the other is just matter of a simple browser plugin on both that has a black/whitelist and redirects to the appropriate browser. Done. Ms could get an intern to code this up, if they actually wanted to.

stevelosh 16y ago

> When the IE team offered to answer questions on Reddit, they quit after a few hours. From the original post: > tl;dr: Hotmail engineers and product managers want to discuss email from 12-3 PST today.

larrik 16y ago

I believe that Microsoft is still insisting that IE6 and Windows are inseparable, due to that being their defense in the DOJ trial.

sudont 16y ago
I think the WINE implementation on Linux and OS X says a few things about their defense.

_dan 16y ago

I've often wondered why these companies don't install a non-IE browser as a primary browser, leaving IE6 on the system, then using HTAs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496%28VS.85%29....) with IE6 to deliver their intranet stuff.

ShabbyDoo 16y ago
An interesting question, and one which ought to prompt Microsoft to do more for its corp customers. From reading the link, I presume that an HTA app uses whatever IE version happens to be on the system? Another bad thing for Microsoft is that legacy IE6 apps are slowing corporate adoption of Windows 7. Not only do these apps tie corps to a browser, but they tie them to an OS as well!

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

dflock 16y ago

Companies with these locked down Win2K/XP/ie6 desktops wouldn't install that, because that would be work, which costs money. If they saw ie6 as a problem and were willing to put in any effort whatsoever to fix it, they would have done so long ago.

ShabbyDoo 16y ago
I consulted for a company which had well over 10K managed desktops with XP/IE6. They are in the process of upgrading to IE8 and would be delighted if they could just install it in place of IE6 and go on with life. However, the upgrade team identified well over 70 internal apps, some written in-house and some vendor-provided, which required IE6 to function properly. Some suitable strategy must be identified for each: fix, replace, decommission, etc. If they could install a standalone version of IE6 just for these apps, they could upgrade to IE8 now and fix them over time. To those who know something about IE6's "architecture": How hard is such an idea given that you are Microsoft? What if the standalone app could be constrained to work only with known-safe websites so that security upgrades were not so essential?
- dflock 16y ago
  If you were Microsoft, it would be trivial, provided you hadn't based your legal anti-trust defence on saying this was impossible. If you had, for example, done that, then it's obviously 'impossible'. Also, their revenue model only works if they can keep selling you upgrades all the time - no profit in fixing the old shit. There a lots of pieces of 3rd party software that mess around with IE in ways that MS have claimed are not possible and go part of the way towards what you want: Uninstall IE from Windows: http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html Have multiple stand-alone versions if IE installed: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE, http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage, http://blog.donavon.com/2009/08/run-ie6-ie7-and-ie8-side-by-side-on.html http://blog.donavon.com/2009/08/run-ie6-ie7-and-ie8-side-by-... Virtualise your way out - run different versions of IE in VM's: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=... Once you can run multiple versions of IE on the same machine, and you're controlling which browsers are installed, redirecting traffic to one or the other is just matter of a simple browser plugin on both that has a black/whitelist and redirects to the appropriate browser. Done. Ms could get an intern to code this up, if they actually wanted to.