Defaulting to legacy Internet Explorer just to keep that one, weird app working? Knock it off Oddly enough, for the second time this week, Microsoft has been spotted telling the world that its software is, er, not very good. While Redmond's marketing orifice suggested Office 2019 was old and busted compared to its 365 brother, deep within Microsoft's Experiences and Devices Group, principal program manager Chris …
If MS were serious about getting people to stop using IE they would have backported Edge to Windows 7 and removed IE from 10.
But it is all about money, MS will continue to support IE just like they will continue to produce stand alone versions of Office for some considerable time to come, because big businesses demand it. If a corporation with thousands of clients that currently uses IE and can't use cloudy office versions, were to suddenly find that the latest MS products don't support these legacy techs, they may think twice about upgrading or god forbid actually switch to Linux.
My HP 1920 switches GUI works fine in IE but doesn't work in Firefox (never tried in Chrome as I don't want it near any of my machines). Firefox made its best to kill old sites but sometimes those "sites" are your devices interface, and cannot be upgraded easily. That's also true for some older Dell iDRAC application on older servers we still use for development and test. You can't upgrade hw at the same pace they deliver new browser versions - and not everybody needs a browser just for Facebook or Amazon.
The lack of backward compatibility, and the need to keep some old "portable" version at hand is becoming uncomfortable.
"iDRAC allows access to a virtual KVM and other features which is difficult to emulate in a telnet shell..."
Anything newer than a PowerEdge 2850 has IPMI Serial-Over-Lan support that works far better than a virtual KVM. Text only, fully standards compliant, no browser interface needed. Comes with all those features found in your DRAC web UI and more. Just once check-mark to enabled it on Dell servers.
I've used serial-over-LAN many times, mostly on older SuperMicro servers. It has a lot of issues, though:
1. Usually can't access the BIOS.
2. Hand-off to the OS is dodgy.
3. Configuring serial terminals is nearly a lost art for some reason; the bits to make it work are certainly all there, but you won't find many cookbook explanations -- especially now that initd is disappearing.
4. The actual wire protocol is only sort of standardized, and ipmitool does not give useful error messages.
5. There are some odd pitfalls. e.g., you *must* make sure you don't have kernel logging to console; otherwise if you have a lot of kernel messages the kernel will grind to a halt as it waits for them all to be sent at 9600 baud.
In most cases having a graphical representation of the console is just easier. Everything happens the way the OS expects, that way.
Serial-over-lan works perfectly to access the BIOS with any decent server. I do it on a regular basis, back to those 2950s. Plus ipmi allows you to change several settings from the command-line without entering the BIOS.
Windows has had serial-over-lan support since 2003. Microsoft calls it "Emergency Management Services". It's enough to get your booting or networking issue sorted out, then you switch over to RDP, remote MMC, or whatever.
It'd be a faff, but likely there's not a huge amount stopping it from working with Firefox (unless there's ActiveX in there, in which case... good luck!), so it would likely be _possible_ to front-end it with a proxy that'll tweak things a bit. I know pretty much everyone except me hates XSLT, but, may I suggest using XSLT?! :D
In my experience a lot of these issues are caused by devices that use Java applets as clients. With all the security restrictions that have been (rightly) put on applets, it's often nearly impossible to get them to run in a modern browser. Compounding this is that most machines either don't ship with software signed with good certificates, or those certificates have long since expired.
"I have to use Intranet Exploder to launch some dodgy Oracle application"
Yep all those hotels that run Opera PMS are forced to use Internet Explorer. Even the new hosted versions won't run on Edge. Many hotels will never upgrade their on premise installations unless somehow they're forced to for compliance, even then it'll need IE. This is software where they're inputting customer card details into the browser!
Don't know about the Hosted version but Opera PMS doesn't really run in the browser as such. It's a java app that is delivered by the browser and IE happens to be the only one to support it, at least natively.
So your security problem of running it in IE, is amplified by the fact that you are running it in Java of some version. Interestingly Oracle will also state that you must turn Java Updates off for some of their software to ensure compatibility. Seriously - Oracle saying that you must stick on the same version of Java that was installed at the time of installation for their client software, even though it has security issues all the time and it could be used be many other applications!
Now add a bunch of Java programmers eagerly studying the release notes for each and every Java sub-sub-release version, demanding from the system administrators to either install this new version *RIGHT NOW*, because it has a feature they want to use, or to keep the old version, because some feature has changed/disappeared.
In the end you'll have a dozen different JDKs (a JRE might not have all the features they use in their programs) plus the "system" JREs on a production server.
There are still plenty of Java applications we can't get rid of "real soon now", and IE is the only supported browser with Java support. And Silverlight...
My absolute favorite of course was an Israeli-made VoIP gateway (~15 years ago) that worked *only* with the MS Java client, not Sun Java. What A Brilliant Decision!
At work I've dedicated IE in my laptop to our company O365 only. Edge had some problems with O365 CRM modules or some such. Fro everything else I use Firefox. I often need to login to customers' O365 portals for admin work while our own CRM is open and you can't easily use a single browser for multiple O365 logins at the same time.
There are still plenty of Java applications we can't get rid of "real soon now", and IE is the only supported browser with Java support. And Silverlight...
MS should end support for IE. The organisations who have avoided paying up to fix their cranky old crapware would squeal mightily (whilst many of us laughed), but they'd finally have to grasp the nettle, and put in a more sensible solution. And if their hand was forced, the companies concererned would find a fix real soon, IMHO.
Better still, MS should exit all browser activity, and can Edge, and whatever legacy and skunkworks browsers they're still farting around with. They've never been competent in this area, and the damage done by their attempt to own the internet by monopolising the browser market must run into many, many billions of dollars.
"The organisations who have avoided paying up to fix their cranky old crapware would squeal mightily (whilst many of us laughed), but they'd finally have to grasp the nettle, and put in a more sensible solution. And if their hand was forced, the companies concererned would find a fix real soon, IMHO."
Assuming they still exist...or don't just vanish like a ghost the moment anyone tries to force their hand.
Three sites I have to use at my employers (two intranet, one third party) MUST use IE to function correctly. Any other browser can be used to access any other intranet/internet site
However, all users with a Win10 machine are active discouraged from using Edge. At All. Go figure.
Money.
I work for a company maintaining IE only software.
To rewrite it would be expensive.
Customers keep paying for the IE only version.
Every now and then some manager wants to make it newer and better, but they never commit the resources to make it happen, they always end up just changing the logo or colour scheme, etc
Can't upvote that enough. It is about money and changing over user sites, databases, etc. is expensive which the boards tend not to agree to. Then there's issue of compatibility, etc. once things are upgraded.
From this: "meaning admins had to think a bit harder about their old intranets, and consider bringing legacy web apps up to date for more modern browsers rather than simply flinging a wildcard at the compatibility list." It implies that admins are the problem not manglement. Like admins have that kind of power to push upgrades and spend money because 'MS said so..". MS seems to be more clueless by the day.
Who is this advice reaching? Techies that already know this..
The number of times I've seen someone just browsing my internal apps on IE because some file at some point was opened by IE and the user simply takes no notice, yet keeps complaining that some webpage is broken.
Or "oh I don't know my login" when I open it in <modern browser> on their machine, after which they go and open IE which has a million passwords saved. Essentially I've lost hope.
Quick check: can it correctly render http://www.registry.hm/?
My latest version of Vivaldi can't!
Sorry, but this reads suspiciously like MS bewailing the fact that thanks to it's own actions in the browser wars, it's now condemned to carry - like a someone in a Greek legend - a load of extra weight around to remain current.
Oh, my aching sides.
I can't be the only person working for a company that while ensuring it's customer-facing websites were multi-browser functional, had to then drop to IE to run the company intranet ?
Nope. Mine went even better - they provide staff with a Win10 based laptop with Edge as the default, but when I complain about various internal systems not working properly, our internal helldesk (eventually) tell me that they only support IE11 as a browser...
If we treated our customers the same way we treat our staff...
Came here to say exactly this.
Is this the same company that intentionally abused its dominance of the OS market to push IE and kill off its nearest rival- and in doing gave IE the vast majority of the browser market, one that remained a near-monoculture for a decade?
The same company that intentionally loaded that browser with proprietary crap that locked those using such features in to IE? (Which wasn't an issue at the time because it (apparently) made little sense to worry about other browsers or actual standards when the very non-standard IE was what almost everyone used).
And are we talking about the same company that- having achieved this de facto monopoly through anticompetitive means- sat on its arse and allowed it to stagnate for several years, allowing IE6- and the aforementioned problems- to become entrenched? The company that only changed and started paying attention to actual standards- very slowly at first- when it started facing actual competition in the browser market?
In short, the business that engineered all this bullshit for its own benefit fifteen to twenty years ago is now getting tetchy that it still has to support all the legacy cruft it intentionally locked people into?
Fuck. Right. Off.
One of the problems I’ve noticed is the number of Microsoft programs which just reference IE settings and possibly the browser. For example when trying to activate office from inside an office app, it uses IE for the login page (you don’t see IE actually load).
I’ve seen other Microsoft apps just start IE no matter what the default browser is set as.
I work for a US state government. The State Auditor's office recently changed to a giant ERP system and along the way instituted centralized time keeping for all state employees. The system, as installed, is Java based, but also requires Flash (strike 2). We were able to keep our folks running along using Firefox until last year, when Mozilla declared Java software non grata. We (our small agency) backpedaled our folks to IE as the last "current" browser that runs Java. Then things broke again and we were told only versions of Java 171 or older were would work properly. So now we're fighting Java version creep, and reminding users that IE is the only browser for time sheeting.
To their credit/detriment, the Auditor's office attempted to move to a non-Java cloud-based version of the timekeeping software in November 2018, but the attempt apparently failed and we were instructed to carry on with the old system. They tried again in January of this year, again failing. Each upgrade attempt required a week where the system was unavailable for use.
Travesty.
