11 ms·

Retiring Internet Explorer

249 points by manigandham 7y ago

dedosk 7y ago
> I printed out the source code for the network stack and sat > down with a red pen. Does anyone still do this to get to know new code base?
- jedimastert 7y ago
  I've done it before, although not recently.
- ironmagma 7y ago
  I love doing this. There is something freeing about having a physical copy of the code. For one, it is less daunting because you have a tactile sense of how much there is left to read and digest. But also, you can be more free to take notes in the margin in a way that doesn’t pollute and make the code even more arduous to read (as typing comments in the code would). It would be great to see Github implement a printer friendly view on codebases for this purpose.
- cesarb 7y ago
  I have done this once before too, with a particularly hairy multi-page function from a legacy system. Spreading all the pages over a large meeting room desk allows you to view the whole code at once, instead of being constrained by the physical size of a computer monitor. And there's something hard to describe about being able to physically manipulate the code (rearranging the sheets of paper, scribbling over the code with a pencil, etc). I hope VR one day allows for that kind of experience without wasting lots of paper.
  - lloeki 7y ago
    Probably you would be interested in https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ or Bret Victor fame.
- iSnow 7y ago
  Did this once to make sense of an especially hairy class structure I inherited. Would actually do this again, 4K displays notwithstanding.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    One of my displays is a 4K portrait monitor. It's the single most productivity-enhancing piece of gear I have, especially for web sites. That said, sometimes printed code is still better.
- cookie_monsta 7y ago
  FWIW, many proof readers and editors still prefer to work in hard copy, and there are still some writers out there working on drafts longhand or on old school typewriters. Aside from the mentioned advantages about annotations, I find that working with hard copy produces a different mindset, almost as if your brain recognises that this is still a draft and everything is subject to reconsideration. Counter-intuitively, words on a screen seem more "set in concrete". It also seems that the brain works differently when sat in front of a humming monitor as opposed to literally anywhere else in the world which is where you can edit hard copy. Being that "a fresh set of eyes" is often so valuable in both writing and programming, anything that can get you a fresh perspective is potentially valuable, particularly with such a low buy-in.
_-___________-_ 7y ago
> Burndown List >> Banking, especially in Asia My bank in China requires Windows + IE + a custom ActiveX control to use their Internet banking. As a result, I don't use it. One of my accounts can be used via their mobile app (if you read Chinese or have another phone to use camera translation). My business account cannot be, and I am therefore required to visit a branch along with my official chop (seal / stamp) whenever I want to make a transaction. In every bank branch I've been to, the computers are using ancient versions of Windows and IE. That actually applies to the PSB (a branch of the police) too. I think it might be a while before they get off IE.
- currysausage 7y ago
  How do they not get infected with worms and ransomware the second they browse the internet?
  - Arbalest 7y ago
    The paranoid part of me would suspect that they've already been taken over, and the criminals behind them are actively preventing infection from visible forms of attack so they can maintain access to a valuable resource.
    - IggleSniggle 7y ago
      Ah yes, shadow IT, protecting the worlds computers from other criminals. A thankless job, really, but somebody has to do it
- rahimnathwani 7y ago
  "My bank in China requires Windows + IE + a custom ActiveX control to use their Internet banking. As a result, I don't use it." Why not have a VM just for internet banking? Surely that's easier than taking the chop out of the safe and waiting in line at the branch.
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
Animats 7y ago
Someone needs to tell Microsoft. The Microsoft License Advisor, which has the pricing info for Windows, https://mla.microsoft.com/ https://mla.microsoft.com/ on Firefox pops up a box which reads "Internet Explorer Notification NaN and newer versions. Download latest version of Internet Explorer"
- iSnow 7y ago
  Same for Safari, Chrome, Brave. The NaN is an especially nice touch.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- chaos_a 7y ago
  The javascript comments on that makes it even more hilarious: //shoehorn a iframe to cover our select elemtns for ie6. what a crappy browser.... Clearly whoever made the page hates IE 6
- junar 7y ago
  NaN seems to be the result of a typo in the JS. They tried to concatenate two strings, but added an extra / character, which causes the strings to be coerced to NaN. '<table><tr><td width="40" height="40"><img src="images/35x35_information_icon.gif" /></td>' / + '<td width="415" height="40"> Microsoft License Advisor is optimized for Internet Explorer 7'
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
nerdkid93 7y ago
The death of IE cannot happen soon enough. Our organization only supports IE11 now, but even that is still a terrible handbrake on our dev process. So many tickets get reopened because of issues found only in IE, and it limits both the features we add to our application and the general polish/look/feel we can achieve.
erickhill 7y ago
The last great version of IE that I personally used was IE 5.1 for Mac OS 9. It was - at the time - my preferred browser on the platform and really shone brightly. As a web designer, IE - since 6 - has been the bane of my existence. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but it's there.
- iSnow 7y ago
  IE5/Mac was the best browser of the time, hands down. The only galling bug was that it stubbornly cached CSS (at least locally read CSS), so you had to always close and re-start it.
- bitwize 7y ago
  I remember Adobe (then Macromedia) Flash only worked well on IE5 for Mac OS 9. Every other OS/browser combination exhibited problems, especially slower framerates and audio/video desync issues. (When Linux got its own flash player, it was the worst of the lot.) Back then, Flash was a tool by and for designers, and it was only tested well on the platform that all designers used -- Mac. Mac OS X was still too new, a lot of designers didn't trust it yet, and it would take time to update the already existing 90s code base anyway.
- thomasz 7y ago
  IE6 was a very good browser when it came out in 2001. People forget how the landscape looked at that time: Netscape 6 was utter garbage, Firefox was still years away and Opera was a tiny, largely unknown niche browser that did cost money and was plagued by incompatible websites which were optimized for IE. It's just that MS ceased investing more than the absolute minimum into their browser after releasing IE 6 - it took until 2009 until a MS browser passed the Acid2 compatibility test.
__app_dev__ 7y ago
I had to support a really old site that another developer wrote on IE just over a year ago. Luckily I am no longer at that company. Basically 99% of development and sites worked with modern browsers but one needed site required IE6 compat mode. It would have taken months to rewrite and the company didn't want to spend resources on it. At my current job we also have a lot of IBM software that seems to work best in IE although only a few people still use it at work. Doesn't seem like IE will be retiring anytime soon. The article (and site) from this post is very good.
logifail 7y ago
If Microsoft really believes no-one needs IE, why is it still shipping it as part of Windows 10? Specifically, why is it still shipping IE as the only browser as part of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, including LTSC 2019? Yes, that is the version of Windows 10 with an "extended support end date of 9 January 2029"* * https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifec...
- catach 7y ago
  Minimizing their support surface makes a ton of sense for a long-term release, and of course if you just choose one browser for Enterprise you're gonna choose the one people built their internal apps on for the last few decades. I expect it's not not that MS believes no one needs IE, it's that they know they're stuck with it and would really rather not be.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Well, as someone who installed various versios of windows over the last two decades,I can say that the only purpose of IE is a gateway to Chrome or Mozilla websites.Once they get downloaded it never gets opened again.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    ...and ActiveX reliant legacy apps...
- gummydog 7y ago
  Many Enterprises run critical legacy apps that depend on IE and it's ability to emulate lower versions. Many large orgs would require $100's of millions to rewrite all of them. No one will fund exercise that until the proverbial gun is point at them. 2029 sounds about right.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Many large orgs would require $100's of millions to rewrite all of them. My org loaded Chrome on all of the machines for our internal web sites, but according to my logs, almost nobody uses it. They're just too used to clicking on the (e), I guess.
taf2 7y ago
We fully stopped supporting IE11. Refactoring code to use ES6 and reducing code size by 20% is proving a big win for the vast majority of customers. If any customers are still on IE11 - they can run Edge, which now that that is Edgium we have even more code size reduction we can implement to improve load time and user experience.
- dbbk 7y ago
  You can even do differential bundles if you want to go to the effort of setting it up. So IE11 users get one legacy build of your JS client, and modern browsers (with module support) get the simpler modern code.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
No, don't do it. We need more diversity...and security holes
enturn 7y ago
I understand Microsoft needs to continue supporting IE for old websites but my boss a couple days ago used the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy as a reason why we, as website developers, need to support IE11 also. I would like articles saying people shouldn't use IE to also explicity answer the question, "Should website developers support IE?"
- p1necone 7y ago
  To me the answer to that question is another question - "what market share does IE11 still have amongst our target users, how fast is it decreasing, and what's the development effort required to support it?"
- Already__Taken 7y ago
  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... It's tough to get much deader before they just rip it out.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  Or you can tax them, as some retailer did in 2012 [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18440979 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18440979
caycep 7y ago
granted, the electronic medical record software that is the bane of my life (Allscripts Pro) requires Internet Explorer. WITH ACTIVE X!!!!
- derefr 7y ago
  The second sentence is not much of a surprise; why would something require IE if not for its ActiveX support? Certainly, some things might render brokenly in other browsers, but ActiveX is the only real "IE-only feature" a site might depend on.
  - unilynx 7y ago
    VBScript and HTA files (HTML Applications) come to mind. HTAs were actually an interesting direction, once used them to ship a simple application (a very visual FTP upload). It was unsandboxed HTML and JS that could access all the ActiveX APIs. A bit like Electron now. Can't image there not being a few niches out there that heavily rely (or relied) on HTAs
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      I must say, supporting HTA can't be that big of a task, assuming the majority of those do not rely on any ActiveX controls. I guess MS could also probably write some replacements for the most popular ActiveX controls, and license them to their customers.
    - badsectoracula 7y ago
      I have a small niche... a calculator that opens fast :-P http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt (yes, running an HTA "calc" is faster than the UWP Windows 10 calculator... and uses less RAM :-/).
      - Jaruzel 7y ago
        That's nice. I once wrote a clone of Active Directory Users & Computers (dsa.msc) as a HTA, as I was working on a contract where I was expected to design stuff for the AD, but they wouldn't let me install the AD tools... If all you have is Notepad, and you know how to write HTAs, the world is your oyster (or something).
Ajedi32 7y ago
> A fascinating set of circumstances led to Internet Explorer’s dominance in Asian markets. First, early browsers had poor support for Unicode and East Asian character sets, forcing website developers to build their own text rendering atop native code plugins (ActiveX). South Korea mandated use of a locally-developed cipher (SEED) for banking transactions, and this cipher was not implemented by browser developers… ActiveX again to the rescue. Finally, since all users were using IE, and were accustomed to installing ActiveX controls, malware started running rampant, so banks and other financial institutions started bundling “security solutions” (aka rootkits) into their ActiveX controls. Every user’s browser was a battlefield with warring native code trying to get the upper hand. Wow. That's... a rather unconventional security architecture.
- stinky613 7y ago
  Reminds me of Sony-BMG installing rootkits to enforce DRM; and Dell and Lenovo pinning their own root certs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/superfish-20-now-dell-breaking-https https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/superfish-20-now-dell-...
- nemonemo 7y ago
  Yep. I still have a Windows machine for banking and gov websites in SK. Things got much better lately thanks to mobile apps and relaxed regulations, but I see Windows-dependency is still strong on some websites.
- kbumsik 7y ago
  I'm Korean so I glad to see someone speaks out this. Actually it was rather inevitable, partially because of the U.S. gov that time. The Korean gov wanted to grow e-commerce/e-banking in 1999 but the American gov did not allow to export cipher higher than 40 bits. As a result the Korean gov had to develop its own 128 bits cipher (SEED). It was even before AES/SSL/TLS were introduced so the whole crypto stack was implemented using ActiveX. I would say it was quite pioneer in 1999 but since then the gov don't even dare to replace the crypto policies. Now we are stuck at this in 2020.
pachico 7y ago
This article is the only reason that night make me try Edge... If I ever use Windows again (which will never happen)... And I was very drunk...
swagtricker 7y ago
Please just take it out back and shoot it.
draw_down 7y ago
Seems like maybe that legendary backwards compatibility isn't always 100% a good thing. Dang.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
We would love to, but I'm sure you, like me, has a SaaS Vendor that still needs IE for a portion of their website that they just can't seem to re-write.
lmiller1990 7y ago
I work in healthcare, our main app runs in an embedded IE10 and this will likely _never_ change. I fully expect to need to support IE for the next 10 years.
forgotmypw 7y ago
I know I'm in the minority on this, but I love the feel of IE, it feels like the most OS-integrated browser I've ever used. Of course, Trident was based off the same layout engine as MS Office, so that makes sense. I still make my sites work in IE, down to IE4, and probably 1-3 too, I just haven't had a chance to test them yet. I think that in the retro-computing world, IE will be one of the longest browsers still in use.
- unilynx 7y ago
  I don't know about IE1 and 3, but for IE2 (the one that shipped with NT4) you need at least, from what I remember: - no name-based virtual hosting (it does HTTP 1.0 but doesn't send Host headers) - avoid redundant whitespace (it's not collapsed) - wrap <style> and <script> contents in , otherwise they will be visible I've had to keep an application's webinterface IE2 compatible ("usable") for longer than I wanted to as the initial configuration (opening up ports and IP addreses) was generally done on the NT4 server in IE itself. (Once initial setup was done, further configuration could be done remotely with a more 'modern' browser, so fortunately only a few pages needed to be usable by IEs that old)
  - forgotmypw 7y ago
    Thanks for the info on the whitespace. I think I have a post-processing solution for that, which may work. I will work to find an NT4 original ISO and get IE2 that way. I've been doing the commenting thing, and found out that Mosaic treats >, not --> as the end of comment token, so I had to remove all > characters from my JS. :D
annoyingnoob 7y ago
IE is still the best way to copy files in/out of SharePoint. Not to be rude, I have no idea why I would want to try Edge on Chromium or Edge for any reason. Chromium needs more competition than Firefox.
mwcampbell 7y ago
> IE9 was a fantastic, best-of-its-time browser, and I’ll forever be proud of it. But as IE9 wound down and the Windows 8 adventure began, it was already clear that its lead would not last against the Chrome juggernaut. This is tangential, but I wonder how Chrome got so far ahead, not in market share but in features and quality, even with IE's 10+ year head start. Did Google just throw more programmers at the problem, or was there more to it? I suspect this has already been discussed to death, so pointers to previous discussions would be good.
- otterley 7y ago
  There were four major benefits that were immediately appealing to users: 1. Significantly faster Javascript execution engine (V8) than MSIE and Firefox 2. Process isolation model improved security posture 3. Multi-platform compatibility (Windows/Mac/Linux) very soon after launch 4. Improved usability: browser history search, autocomplete in address bar, etc. Here's the original announcement (featuring Sundar Pichai, then VP of Product, now CEO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRmrMiOWdfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRmrMiOWdfc
- mynameishere 7y ago
  Don't you remember the weird explanatory comic that came out with Chrome? https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
  - jp_sc 7y ago
    Illustrated by none other than Scott McCloud, how to forget it?
- simula67 7y ago
  They used WebKit for rendering and that cut down some of IE's 10+ year lead. Also, I think they had a fairly good test infrastructure from the beginning ( I think they tested new versions of Chrome against Google's index of top million websites ). Good test infrastructure can give you compounded returns as the project goes on.
- 7y ago
orionblastar 7y ago
I wrote JScript and VBScript for IE 5.X and 6.0 more than 20 years ago. We used ActiveX objects to do things on the client side of intranet applications for a law firm.I wrote a docket calendar that used the date picker control for example. We could only use IE not Netscape and nothing else. Which meant it was not a cross compilable with Linux, OS/2, MacOS etc and people who used those computers where SOL. I tried to talk about JavaScript and Java to make it cross over to the other systems, but I was told it was a Microsoft Shop and we only use MS technologies.
pilif 7y ago
>No. Internet Explorer will remain a supported product until its support lifecycle runs out. which is pretty much going to be "never". IE's support lifecycle says that a version of IE is supported for as long as the version of windows it shipped with is supported. Windows 10 shipped with IE11 and Windows 10 is going to be the last version of Windows ever released, remaining in constant support. Companies on the other hand still force users to use IE11 and they will continue to do so while IE11 is supported (which is forever). We will have to continue to support a browser that came out in the beginning of the last decade for at least another 10 to 15 years.
29athrowaway 7y ago
Computer repair technicians made extra money fixing computers ruined by excessive toolbars, malicious extensions and similar stuff. Today all the malicious garbage moved to e-mail.
needle0 7y ago
The Japanese electronic tax filing system's browser support policy is to support browsers that come preinstalled with the OS, period, actual marketshare be damned. This makes them support IE, Edge and Safari, but not Chrome nor Firefox. (While some newer parts of the system do support them, most of the critical parts still do not. Additionally, since the system still only supports the EdgeHTML Edge, the Chromium Edge automatic rollout is delayed to April specifically for Japan, to avoid confusion during the February-March tax filing season.) The only way to make them stop supporting IE is to have the OS itself stop bundling it - which, like it was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, is probably never going to happen.

249 points by manigandham 7y ago

> I printed out the source code for the network stack and sat > down with a red pen. Does anyone still do this to get to know new code base?

jedimastert 7y ago
I've done it before, although not recently.
ironmagma 7y ago
I love doing this. There is something freeing about having a physical copy of the code. For one, it is less daunting because you have a tactile sense of how much there is left to read and digest. But also, you can be more free to take notes in the margin in a way that doesn’t pollute and make the code even more arduous to read (as typing comments in the code would). It would be great to see Github implement a printer friendly view on codebases for this purpose.
cesarb 7y ago
I have done this once before too, with a particularly hairy multi-page function from a legacy system. Spreading all the pages over a large meeting room desk allows you to view the whole code at once, instead of being constrained by the physical size of a computer monitor. And there's something hard to describe about being able to physically manipulate the code (rearranging the sheets of paper, scribbling over the code with a pencil, etc). I hope VR one day allows for that kind of experience without wasting lots of paper.
- lloeki 7y ago
  Probably you would be interested in https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ or Bret Victor fame.
iSnow 7y ago
Did this once to make sense of an especially hairy class structure I inherited. Would actually do this again, 4K displays notwithstanding.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  One of my displays is a 4K portrait monitor. It's the single most productivity-enhancing piece of gear I have, especially for web sites. That said, sometimes printed code is still better.
cookie_monsta 7y ago
FWIW, many proof readers and editors still prefer to work in hard copy, and there are still some writers out there working on drafts longhand or on old school typewriters. Aside from the mentioned advantages about annotations, I find that working with hard copy produces a different mindset, almost as if your brain recognises that this is still a draft and everything is subject to reconsideration. Counter-intuitively, words on a screen seem more "set in concrete". It also seems that the brain works differently when sat in front of a humming monitor as opposed to literally anywhere else in the world which is where you can edit hard copy. Being that "a fresh set of eyes" is often so valuable in both writing and programming, anything that can get you a fresh perspective is potentially valuable, particularly with such a low buy-in.

_-___________-_ 7y ago

> Burndown List >> Banking, especially in Asia My bank in China requires Windows + IE + a custom ActiveX control to use their Internet banking. As a result, I don't use it. One of my accounts can be used via their mobile app (if you read Chinese or have another phone to use camera translation). My business account cannot be, and I am therefore required to visit a branch along with my official chop (seal / stamp) whenever I want to make a transaction. In every bank branch I've been to, the computers are using ancient versions of Windows and IE. That actually applies to the PSB (a branch of the police) too. I think it might be a while before they get off IE.

currysausage 7y ago
How do they not get infected with worms and ransomware the second they browse the internet?
- Arbalest 7y ago
  The paranoid part of me would suspect that they've already been taken over, and the criminals behind them are actively preventing infection from visible forms of attack so they can maintain access to a valuable resource.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    Ah yes, shadow IT, protecting the worlds computers from other criminals. A thankless job, really, but somebody has to do it
rahimnathwani 7y ago
"My bank in China requires Windows + IE + a custom ActiveX control to use their Internet banking. As a result, I don't use it." Why not have a VM just for internet banking? Surely that's easier than taking the chop out of the safe and waiting in line at the branch.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago

Animats 7y ago

Someone needs to tell Microsoft. The Microsoft License Advisor, which has the pricing info for Windows, https://mla.microsoft.com/ https://mla.microsoft.com/ on Firefox pops up a box which reads "Internet Explorer Notification NaN and newer versions. Download latest version of Internet Explorer"

iSnow 7y ago
Same for Safari, Chrome, Brave. The NaN is an especially nice touch.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
chaos_a 7y ago
The javascript comments on that makes it even more hilarious: //shoehorn a iframe to cover our select elemtns for ie6. what a crappy browser.... Clearly whoever made the page hates IE 6
junar 7y ago
NaN seems to be the result of a typo in the JS. They tried to concatenate two strings, but added an extra / character, which causes the strings to be coerced to NaN. '<table><tr><td width="40" height="40"><img src="images/35x35_information_icon.gif" /></td>' / + '<td width="415" height="40"> Microsoft License Advisor is optimized for Internet Explorer 7'
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

nerdkid93 7y ago

The death of IE cannot happen soon enough. Our organization only supports IE11 now, but even that is still a terrible handbrake on our dev process. So many tickets get reopened because of issues found only in IE, and it limits both the features we add to our application and the general polish/look/feel we can achieve.

erickhill 7y ago

The last great version of IE that I personally used was IE 5.1 for Mac OS 9. It was - at the time - my preferred browser on the platform and really shone brightly. As a web designer, IE - since 6 - has been the bane of my existence. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but it's there.

iSnow 7y ago
IE5/Mac was the best browser of the time, hands down. The only galling bug was that it stubbornly cached CSS (at least locally read CSS), so you had to always close and re-start it.
bitwize 7y ago
I remember Adobe (then Macromedia) Flash only worked well on IE5 for Mac OS 9. Every other OS/browser combination exhibited problems, especially slower framerates and audio/video desync issues. (When Linux got its own flash player, it was the worst of the lot.) Back then, Flash was a tool by and for designers, and it was only tested well on the platform that all designers used -- Mac. Mac OS X was still too new, a lot of designers didn't trust it yet, and it would take time to update the already existing 90s code base anyway.
thomasz 7y ago
IE6 was a very good browser when it came out in 2001. People forget how the landscape looked at that time: Netscape 6 was utter garbage, Firefox was still years away and Opera was a tiny, largely unknown niche browser that did cost money and was plagued by incompatible websites which were optimized for IE. It's just that MS ceased investing more than the absolute minimum into their browser after releasing IE 6 - it took until 2009 until a MS browser passed the Acid2 compatibility test.

__app_dev__ 7y ago

I had to support a really old site that another developer wrote on IE just over a year ago. Luckily I am no longer at that company. Basically 99% of development and sites worked with modern browsers but one needed site required IE6 compat mode. It would have taken months to rewrite and the company didn't want to spend resources on it. At my current job we also have a lot of IBM software that seems to work best in IE although only a few people still use it at work. Doesn't seem like IE will be retiring anytime soon. The article (and site) from this post is very good.

logifail 7y ago

If Microsoft really believes no-one needs IE, why is it still shipping it as part of Windows 10? Specifically, why is it still shipping IE as the only browser as part of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, including LTSC 2019? Yes, that is the version of Windows 10 with an "extended support end date of 9 January 2029"* * https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifec...

catach 7y ago
Minimizing their support surface makes a ton of sense for a long-term release, and of course if you just choose one browser for Enterprise you're gonna choose the one people built their internal apps on for the last few decades. I expect it's not not that MS believes no one needs IE, it's that they know they're stuck with it and would really rather not be.
cosmodisk 7y ago
Well, as someone who installed various versios of windows over the last two decades,I can say that the only purpose of IE is a gateway to Chrome or Mozilla websites.Once they get downloaded it never gets opened again.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  ...and ActiveX reliant legacy apps...
gummydog 7y ago
Many Enterprises run critical legacy apps that depend on IE and it's ability to emulate lower versions. Many large orgs would require $100's of millions to rewrite all of them. No one will fund exercise that until the proverbial gun is point at them. 2029 sounds about right.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Many large orgs would require $100's of millions to rewrite all of them. My org loaded Chrome on all of the machines for our internal web sites, but according to my logs, almost nobody uses it. They're just too used to clicking on the (e), I guess.

taf2 7y ago

We fully stopped supporting IE11. Refactoring code to use ES6 and reducing code size by 20% is proving a big win for the vast majority of customers. If any customers are still on IE11 - they can run Edge, which now that that is Edgium we have even more code size reduction we can implement to improve load time and user experience.

dbbk 7y ago
You can even do differential bundles if you want to go to the effort of setting it up. So IE11 users get one legacy build of your JS client, and modern browsers (with module support) get the simpler modern code.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

No, don't do it. We need more diversity...and security holes

enturn 7y ago

I understand Microsoft needs to continue supporting IE for old websites but my boss a couple days ago used the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy as a reason why we, as website developers, need to support IE11 also. I would like articles saying people shouldn't use IE to also explicity answer the question, "Should website developers support IE?"

p1necone 7y ago
To me the answer to that question is another question - "what market share does IE11 still have amongst our target users, how fast is it decreasing, and what's the development effort required to support it?"
Already__Taken 7y ago
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... It's tough to get much deader before they just rip it out.
lifthrasiir 7y ago
Or you can tax them, as some retailer did in 2012 [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18440979 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18440979

caycep 7y ago

granted, the electronic medical record software that is the bane of my life (Allscripts Pro) requires Internet Explorer. WITH ACTIVE X!!!!

derefr 7y ago
The second sentence is not much of a surprise; why would something require IE if not for its ActiveX support? Certainly, some things might render brokenly in other browsers, but ActiveX is the only real "IE-only feature" a site might depend on.
- unilynx 7y ago
  VBScript and HTA files (HTML Applications) come to mind. HTAs were actually an interesting direction, once used them to ship a simple application (a very visual FTP upload). It was unsandboxed HTML and JS that could access all the ActiveX APIs. A bit like Electron now. Can't image there not being a few niches out there that heavily rely (or relied) on HTAs
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    I must say, supporting HTA can't be that big of a task, assuming the majority of those do not rely on any ActiveX controls. I guess MS could also probably write some replacements for the most popular ActiveX controls, and license them to their customers.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    I have a small niche... a calculator that opens fast :-P http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt (yes, running an HTA "calc" is faster than the UWP Windows 10 calculator... and uses less RAM :-/).
    - Jaruzel 7y ago
      That's nice. I once wrote a clone of Active Directory Users & Computers (dsa.msc) as a HTA, as I was working on a contract where I was expected to design stuff for the AD, but they wouldn't let me install the AD tools... If all you have is Notepad, and you know how to write HTAs, the world is your oyster (or something).

Ajedi32 7y ago

> A fascinating set of circumstances led to Internet Explorer’s dominance in Asian markets. First, early browsers had poor support for Unicode and East Asian character sets, forcing website developers to build their own text rendering atop native code plugins (ActiveX). South Korea mandated use of a locally-developed cipher (SEED) for banking transactions, and this cipher was not implemented by browser developers… ActiveX again to the rescue. Finally, since all users were using IE, and were accustomed to installing ActiveX controls, malware started running rampant, so banks and other financial institutions started bundling “security solutions” (aka rootkits) into their ActiveX controls. Every user’s browser was a battlefield with warring native code trying to get the upper hand. Wow. That's... a rather unconventional security architecture.

stinky613 7y ago
Reminds me of Sony-BMG installing rootkits to enforce DRM; and Dell and Lenovo pinning their own root certs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/superfish-20-now-dell-breaking-https https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/superfish-20-now-dell-...
nemonemo 7y ago
Yep. I still have a Windows machine for banking and gov websites in SK. Things got much better lately thanks to mobile apps and relaxed regulations, but I see Windows-dependency is still strong on some websites.
kbumsik 7y ago
I'm Korean so I glad to see someone speaks out this. Actually it was rather inevitable, partially because of the U.S. gov that time. The Korean gov wanted to grow e-commerce/e-banking in 1999 but the American gov did not allow to export cipher higher than 40 bits. As a result the Korean gov had to develop its own 128 bits cipher (SEED). It was even before AES/SSL/TLS were introduced so the whole crypto stack was implemented using ActiveX. I would say it was quite pioneer in 1999 but since then the gov don't even dare to replace the crypto policies. Now we are stuck at this in 2020.

pachico 7y ago

This article is the only reason that night make me try Edge... If I ever use Windows again (which will never happen)... And I was very drunk...

swagtricker 7y ago

Please just take it out back and shoot it.

draw_down 7y ago

Seems like maybe that legendary backwards compatibility isn't always 100% a good thing. Dang.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

We would love to, but I'm sure you, like me, has a SaaS Vendor that still needs IE for a portion of their website that they just can't seem to re-write.

lmiller1990 7y ago

I work in healthcare, our main app runs in an embedded IE10 and this will likely _never_ change. I fully expect to need to support IE for the next 10 years.

forgotmypw 7y ago

I know I'm in the minority on this, but I love the feel of IE, it feels like the most OS-integrated browser I've ever used. Of course, Trident was based off the same layout engine as MS Office, so that makes sense. I still make my sites work in IE, down to IE4, and probably 1-3 too, I just haven't had a chance to test them yet. I think that in the retro-computing world, IE will be one of the longest browsers still in use.

unilynx 7y ago
I don't know about IE1 and 3, but for IE2 (the one that shipped with NT4) you need at least, from what I remember: - no name-based virtual hosting (it does HTTP 1.0 but doesn't send Host headers) - avoid redundant whitespace (it's not collapsed) - wrap <style> and <script> contents in , otherwise they will be visible I've had to keep an application's webinterface IE2 compatible ("usable") for longer than I wanted to as the initial configuration (opening up ports and IP addreses) was generally done on the NT4 server in IE itself. (Once initial setup was done, further configuration could be done remotely with a more 'modern' browser, so fortunately only a few pages needed to be usable by IEs that old)
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  Thanks for the info on the whitespace. I think I have a post-processing solution for that, which may work. I will work to find an NT4 original ISO and get IE2 that way. I've been doing the commenting thing, and found out that Mosaic treats >, not --> as the end of comment token, so I had to remove all > characters from my JS. :D

annoyingnoob 7y ago

IE is still the best way to copy files in/out of SharePoint. Not to be rude, I have no idea why I would want to try Edge on Chromium or Edge for any reason. Chromium needs more competition than Firefox.

mwcampbell 7y ago

> IE9 was a fantastic, best-of-its-time browser, and I’ll forever be proud of it. But as IE9 wound down and the Windows 8 adventure began, it was already clear that its lead would not last against the Chrome juggernaut. This is tangential, but I wonder how Chrome got so far ahead, not in market share but in features and quality, even with IE's 10+ year head start. Did Google just throw more programmers at the problem, or was there more to it? I suspect this has already been discussed to death, so pointers to previous discussions would be good.

otterley 7y ago
There were four major benefits that were immediately appealing to users: 1. Significantly faster Javascript execution engine (V8) than MSIE and Firefox 2. Process isolation model improved security posture 3. Multi-platform compatibility (Windows/Mac/Linux) very soon after launch 4. Improved usability: browser history search, autocomplete in address bar, etc. Here's the original announcement (featuring Sundar Pichai, then VP of Product, now CEO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRmrMiOWdfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRmrMiOWdfc
mynameishere 7y ago
Don't you remember the weird explanatory comic that came out with Chrome? https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
- jp_sc 7y ago
  Illustrated by none other than Scott McCloud, how to forget it?
simula67 7y ago
They used WebKit for rendering and that cut down some of IE's 10+ year lead. Also, I think they had a fairly good test infrastructure from the beginning ( I think they tested new versions of Chrome against Google's index of top million websites ). Good test infrastructure can give you compounded returns as the project goes on.
7y ago

orionblastar 7y ago

I wrote JScript and VBScript for IE 5.X and 6.0 more than 20 years ago. We used ActiveX objects to do things on the client side of intranet applications for a law firm.I wrote a docket calendar that used the date picker control for example. We could only use IE not Netscape and nothing else. Which meant it was not a cross compilable with Linux, OS/2, MacOS etc and people who used those computers where SOL. I tried to talk about JavaScript and Java to make it cross over to the other systems, but I was told it was a Microsoft Shop and we only use MS technologies.

pilif 7y ago

>No. Internet Explorer will remain a supported product until its support lifecycle runs out. which is pretty much going to be "never". IE's support lifecycle says that a version of IE is supported for as long as the version of windows it shipped with is supported. Windows 10 shipped with IE11 and Windows 10 is going to be the last version of Windows ever released, remaining in constant support. Companies on the other hand still force users to use IE11 and they will continue to do so while IE11 is supported (which is forever). We will have to continue to support a browser that came out in the beginning of the last decade for at least another 10 to 15 years.

29athrowaway 7y ago

Computer repair technicians made extra money fixing computers ruined by excessive toolbars, malicious extensions and similar stuff. Today all the malicious garbage moved to e-mail.

needle0 7y ago

The Japanese electronic tax filing system's browser support policy is to support browsers that come preinstalled with the OS, period, actual marketshare be damned. This makes them support IE, Edge and Safari, but not Chrome nor Firefox. (While some newer parts of the system do support them, most of the critical parts still do not. Additionally, since the system still only supports the EdgeHTML Edge, the Chromium Edge automatic rollout is delayed to April specifically for Japan, to avoid confusion during the February-March tax filing season.) The only way to make them stop supporting IE is to have the OS itself stop bundling it - which, like it was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, is probably never going to happen.