10 ms·

The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows. The key comment: This release of the IE Developer Channel uses a combina

The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows. The key comment: This release of the IE Developer Channel uses a combination of code changes and App-V Client to virtualize and run alongside IE11. This is pretty huge, because it means that the support requirements for IE can be drastically reduced. That means faster releases without harming backwards compatibility. One IE for the server and OS platform, one IE the application platform (modern apps), and another for the user. Or even instanced per-user IE, or who knows what they could do. It's a big deal that they've gotten IE to the point that it can run in an App-V container, and the result will be a faster development cycle and earlier access to new features in the client, without imposing a huge support matrix on application developers. This could pan out into versioned webview controls and all sorts of things. I hope Microsoft is willing to take this as far as it can go.

yuhong 12y ago
What is funny is while the FAQ says a lot about past release versions of IE not supporting this, it does not say anything about whether future release version of IE (like IE12) will support this.
0x0 12y ago
Hopefully it won't end up in a situation where a lot of apps bundle seriously outdated versions and any given system has a dozen old dlls strewn all over. Didn't that kinda happen with bundled flash players - even Adobe shipped exploitable players for years in other products?
- AaronFriel 12y ago
  Hopefully they do what Firefox tried (and failed) to do: ship a stable, enterprise version and an advanced version. No locking to arbitrary versions, but able to say, support "IE11 and IE Latest" in your product. Hopefully they allow developers to opt into a 30-60 day preview window such that they can remain a bit ahead of their customers.
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    and failed? Mozilla’s ESR releases are definitely a thing.
    - LaikaF 12y ago
      I'm using one right now. Pretty sure they back port security/bug fixes as I have to keep updating it.
      - robin_reala 12y ago
        They do. That’s the support in ESR.
      - JohnTHaller 12y ago
        The Firefox ESR branch is on the same release schedule as the Firefox 'Stable' branch. So, you get a scheduled release every 6 weeks. But ESR just gets the security fixes whereas Stable also gets the new features. When there's an out-of-band security update on Stable (a .1 release), ESR gets that, too. ESR is pegged to specific releases of Stable and operates in parallel for a few releases so there are two different ESRs... the older one and the newer one... so organizations can transition from one browser engine to the next over a couple month timespan and ensure corporate apps work on both. Oddly, some non-organization people want ESR because they think it's updated less often. It's not.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    I would not suggest MS use App-V to do that though.
- untog 12y ago
  We're already there on Android. The only reason we aren't there with Apple is because they release so infrequently.
  - stevejohnson 12y ago
    The new WKWebView seems to solve this problem. It's bundled with the WebKit project, not iOS or OS X.
drivingmenuts 12y ago
> The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows You realize that this is something other browser makers have done since, oh, the invention of the browser? Perhaps it's amazing that Microsoft, of all companies, finally did it, but let's not get carried away declaring a historic moment.
- ljoshua 12y ago
  Everything in context. It is huge for Microsoft specifically because it's previously been so entangled. Progress is good on all fronts. For the very large portion of the world that uses IE by default and will in the future get faster/better upgrades to be more secure and more full-featured, this is great.
  - th0ma5 12y ago
    Entangled is a very kind word, almost sounds accidental, when the anti-trust stuff found it was all very much on purpose.
- vlunkr 12y ago
  Exactly, IE has come a long ways in the past few versions, but it's still behind other modern browsers. It makes me wonder why MS is still pushing it. Why not just bundle another browser with Windows and save themselves some effort?
  - iMark 12y ago
    Probably for the same reason Apple and Google both produce their own browser - it's too important a part of the user experience to delegate responsibility for it to a third party. It's unlikely Google would suddenly turn around and say they're no longer producing Chrome for Windows, for example, but it's not impossible.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      Also, IE, or rather Trident, is a core OS component. Applications rely on it for displaying web pages and HTML. Applications can also be written in HTML and JS, both HTML Applications (since... Windows 98, I think?) and WinRT applications (since Windows 8).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
gtirloni 12y ago
It still required a system reboot after installation (Win7). I'd assume it's not so disentangled yet.
- stinos 12y ago
  That is one of the things that still make me wonder how an installer (or installer maker) decides retart is needed or not. I mean, take Visual Studio for example: it seems an order of magnitude larger and more complicated than a web browser, comes with prerequisites and whatnot and the last 2 or 3 release I installed didn't need a restart.
  - gtirloni 12y ago
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372059(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372059(v=vs.85).as...
- wluu 12y ago
  I didn't need a reboot after the install, but I'm on Win 8.1.
brokenparser 12y ago
> The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows Calling bull. MSIE has never been "entangled" with the OS and this has in fact been proven in court ( http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613g.pdf http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613g.pdf pages 283 through 288 are especially noteworthy). The integration was merely a scam to defeat Netscape. Here's a bunch of standalone versions from 1996 to 2002 (made by MSFT themselves) which can all run side by side: http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie/win32/ http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie/win32/ On the same site, you can find MSIE for HP-UX and Solaris.
- kyberias 12y ago
  I has been, what, 15 years from those court proceedings. Don't you think it is possible the MSIE has been tied to the operating system in subsequent releases: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8?
  - TallGuyShort 12y ago
    Sure it's possible, but then it wouldn't be so amazing that they had un-done it. Microsoft was, in those court proceedings, claiming that being integrated with the OS was a very fundamental part of IE that was not trivially undone.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    AFAIK nothing much has changed since these days, but MS did add a option to remove the Internet Explorer directory in Program Files in Vista and note that HTML Help for example already depended on IE components even back in 1997.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  IE has been a system-level service in Windows for a long time. Naturally, you could boot the kernel without it, but a bunch of included Windows software (by Microsoft, as part of the distribution) and even system libraries rely on parts of IE. Even now, there are weird dependencies on IE components that you wouldn't expect: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web-browser-in-my-compiler/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web... It's quite possible it was all bullshit at the time of the antitrust case, but it's been true for quite a while now. In practice, 'removing' IE from windows at this point would just mean removing iexplore.exe, because literally every native .dll and COM .dll bundled with IE is probably leveraged by some application or component somewhere in the OS. The whole IE object model and programming interface are documented on the web and exposed, so there are programs using them - Valve's Steam game management/storefront app used to use it before they moved to their own embedded version of WebKit.
MichaelGG 12y ago
IE also shipped for Unix and Mac OS. So I doubt the entanglement claim.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  The fact that it's an installable application for other platforms doesn't mean that IE on Windows isn't used by system services... Quicktime is installable on Windows, so would you say Mac OS doesn't use it for anything? Because that's not true either. IE has been used extensively by a bunch of Windows components and software for a really long time. Sometimes in unexpected places: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web-browser-in-my-compiler/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web...

yuhong 12y ago

What is funny is while the FAQ says a lot about past release versions of IE not supporting this, it does not say anything about whether future release version of IE (like IE12) will support this.

0x0 12y ago

Hopefully it won't end up in a situation where a lot of apps bundle seriously outdated versions and any given system has a dozen old dlls strewn all over. Didn't that kinda happen with bundled flash players - even Adobe shipped exploitable players for years in other products?

AaronFriel 12y ago
Hopefully they do what Firefox tried (and failed) to do: ship a stable, enterprise version and an advanced version. No locking to arbitrary versions, but able to say, support "IE11 and IE Latest" in your product. Hopefully they allow developers to opt into a 30-60 day preview window such that they can remain a bit ahead of their customers.
- robin_reala 12y ago
  and failed? Mozilla’s ESR releases are definitely a thing.
  - LaikaF 12y ago
    I'm using one right now. Pretty sure they back port security/bug fixes as I have to keep updating it.
    - robin_reala 12y ago
      They do. That’s the support in ESR.
    - JohnTHaller 12y ago
      The Firefox ESR branch is on the same release schedule as the Firefox 'Stable' branch. So, you get a scheduled release every 6 weeks. But ESR just gets the security fixes whereas Stable also gets the new features. When there's an out-of-band security update on Stable (a .1 release), ESR gets that, too. ESR is pegged to specific releases of Stable and operates in parallel for a few releases so there are two different ESRs... the older one and the newer one... so organizations can transition from one browser engine to the next over a couple month timespan and ensure corporate apps work on both. Oddly, some non-organization people want ESR because they think it's updated less often. It's not.
- yuhong 12y ago
  I would not suggest MS use App-V to do that though.
untog 12y ago
We're already there on Android. The only reason we aren't there with Apple is because they release so infrequently.
- stevejohnson 12y ago
  The new WKWebView seems to solve this problem. It's bundled with the WebKit project, not iOS or OS X.

drivingmenuts 12y ago

> The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows You realize that this is something other browser makers have done since, oh, the invention of the browser? Perhaps it's amazing that Microsoft, of all companies, finally did it, but let's not get carried away declaring a historic moment.

ljoshua 12y ago
Everything in context. It is huge for Microsoft specifically because it's previously been so entangled. Progress is good on all fronts. For the very large portion of the world that uses IE by default and will in the future get faster/better upgrades to be more secure and more full-featured, this is great.
- th0ma5 12y ago
  Entangled is a very kind word, almost sounds accidental, when the anti-trust stuff found it was all very much on purpose.
vlunkr 12y ago
Exactly, IE has come a long ways in the past few versions, but it's still behind other modern browsers. It makes me wonder why MS is still pushing it. Why not just bundle another browser with Windows and save themselves some effort?
- iMark 12y ago
  Probably for the same reason Apple and Google both produce their own browser - it's too important a part of the user experience to delegate responsibility for it to a third party. It's unlikely Google would suddenly turn around and say they're no longer producing Chrome for Windows, for example, but it's not impossible.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Also, IE, or rather Trident, is a core OS component. Applications rely on it for displaying web pages and HTML. Applications can also be written in HTML and JS, both HTML Applications (since... Windows 98, I think?) and WinRT applications (since Windows 8).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gtirloni 12y ago

It still required a system reboot after installation (Win7). I'd assume it's not so disentangled yet.

stinos 12y ago
That is one of the things that still make me wonder how an installer (or installer maker) decides retart is needed or not. I mean, take Visual Studio for example: it seems an order of magnitude larger and more complicated than a web browser, comes with prerequisites and whatnot and the last 2 or 3 release I installed didn't need a restart.
- gtirloni 12y ago
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372059(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372059(v=vs.85).as...
wluu 12y ago
I didn't need a reboot after the install, but I'm on Win 8.1.

brokenparser 12y ago

> The really amazing thing here is that they've disentangled IE from the base Windows Calling bull. MSIE has never been "entangled" with the OS and this has in fact been proven in court ( http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613g.pdf http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613g.pdf pages 283 through 288 are especially noteworthy). The integration was merely a scam to defeat Netscape. Here's a bunch of standalone versions from 1996 to 2002 (made by MSFT themselves) which can all run side by side: http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie/win32/ http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie/win32/ On the same site, you can find MSIE for HP-UX and Solaris.

kyberias 12y ago
I has been, what, 15 years from those court proceedings. Don't you think it is possible the MSIE has been tied to the operating system in subsequent releases: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8?
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  Sure it's possible, but then it wouldn't be so amazing that they had un-done it. Microsoft was, in those court proceedings, claiming that being integrated with the OS was a very fundamental part of IE that was not trivially undone.
- yuhong 12y ago
  AFAIK nothing much has changed since these days, but MS did add a option to remove the Internet Explorer directory in Program Files in Vista and note that HTML Help for example already depended on IE components even back in 1997.
kevingadd 12y ago
IE has been a system-level service in Windows for a long time. Naturally, you could boot the kernel without it, but a bunch of included Windows software (by Microsoft, as part of the distribution) and even system libraries rely on parts of IE. Even now, there are weird dependencies on IE components that you wouldn't expect: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web-browser-in-my-compiler/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web... It's quite possible it was all bullshit at the time of the antitrust case, but it's been true for quite a while now. In practice, 'removing' IE from windows at this point would just mean removing iexplore.exe, because literally every native .dll and COM .dll bundled with IE is probably leveraged by some application or component somewhere in the OS. The whole IE object model and programming interface are documented on the web and exposed, so there are programs using them - Valve's Steam game management/storefront app used to use it before they moved to their own embedded version of WebKit.

MichaelGG 12y ago

IE also shipped for Unix and Mac OS. So I doubt the entanglement claim.

kevingadd 12y ago
The fact that it's an installable application for other platforms doesn't mean that IE on Windows isn't used by system services... Quicktime is installable on Windows, so would you say Mac OS doesn't use it for anything? Because that's not true either. IE has been used extensively by a bunch of Windows components and software for a really long time. Sometimes in unexpected places: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web-browser-in-my-compiler/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/you-got-your-web...