Microsoft throws old versions of Internet Explorer under the bus Microsoft has confirmed that it's ending support for old versions of Internet Explorer, and it's giving you just shy of 18 months to get up to date. Roger Capriotti, director of the IE team, blogged on Thursday that beginning on January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of IE on any supported version of Windows will …
"Iceape isn't a 'spinoff' ... it's Seamonkey with Mozilla's (trademarked) branding removed."
And they were forced to remove that branding because ...
Yes, that's correct, they modified the code. It's a fork of Seamonkey, a spin-off, it's a knock-off, it's not the genuine article.
Speaking as an open source developer who is about 5 minutes away from requiring Debian to stop using a trademark for the same reason. Their buggy, broken packages which apply unauthorized patches are damaging to the reputation of many software projects. That's when they aren't introducing huge security flaws (SSH keys etc).
"Sorry but total fail to any IT professional recommending Chrome."
+1 - Chrome has had vastly more security holes than current IE versions. The last 4 major releases of IE have all been faster then the current version of Chrome at the time. Not to mention that Chrome is spyware by design.
"Not to mention that Chrome is spyware by design."
So is windows.
Now excuse me, I need to search for my private documents on my local network, but have that all reported to Microsoft along with my username, e-mail address and password so that they can include Bing results.
Grand.
It's amazing how quickly we've shifted from the idea that software is a product you buy once (with a service pack or two to fix bugs later) to the idea that it's a service which is constantly kept up-to-date. It works surprisingly well for consumers (e.g. on smartphones), but businesses are taking a while to adapt to this new reality. Hence companies still using Windows XP today.
It's also worth mentioning that software is becoming less of a standalone product and more of a subsidy. Google gives away Android to get users buying from Google Play and viewing AdSense ads. Apple gives away OS X because they make far more money on the Mac hardware. Microsoft loses out in this situation inherently, because they don't have any popular products or services that Windows acts as a subsidy for.
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Google gives away Android to steal data and get users buying from Google Play and viewing AdSense ads
I agree with your sentiment, but technically speaking they're not 'stealing' anything since it's all made clear in their T&Cs, even though of course almost no-one ever reads them!
"Google gives away Android ..."
...because most of it was originally free.
And in any case, one of the frequent gripes about Android is that they *don't* give it away free. Instead, you are frequently left with the version that your product shipped with, bugs and all.
"Believe it or not, once upon a time that you might charge money for that was absurd."
Ah yes, the good old days when total vendor lock-in was just taken for granted as the only conceivable business model, if only because no-one except the original vendor had adequate documentation to write programs.
.....that they didn't wait quite so long. I'm working on a project that has as its mandate to support IE9 and later. For the most part I haven't run into TOO many problems with it. But if I had my way I'd drop support for IE9 and say you need IE10 and later. But alas.....because of the reasons stated in the article with Windows Vista, IE9 still has to stay on our radar, and thus things like <input type=number> just can't get used yet.
Anyone at Microsoft listening.....if you could hustle it up a bit and drop support for IE9....that'd be great...really....just....yeah. :)
mandate to support IE9 and later
IE9? Luxury!
I'm working on a project where the "corporate standard" is IE8. Even if you install IE10, there's a setting in Group Policy that makes it pretend to be IE8, and naturally only a BOFH can change that.
Users are constantly complaining about the slow performance of the web UI. It's fine on IE10, but it runs like cold molasses on IE8.
Likewise. At work I am running Windows 8, which only supports, er, IE10. You need 8.1 to run IE11, and the upgrade is not [currently] available to me. My win 7 machine at home runs IE11 perfectly fine of course. Way to go, Microsoft!
Firefox is my usual browser of choice but I still use IE for a few work related sites
We still get about one person a month demanding we make our service IE6-compatible. Usually an office-drone from a Korean Chaebol or Japanese mega-conglomorate. They really like to eek out every second of life from the terminals in their cubicle farms. We simply send them our standard estimate for custom-development costs to make the whole thing IE6 compatible and they go away. Or get very angry with us.
We have too many other customers asking us for actual features to waste time appeasing a handful of prospective customers who demand we support a many-time-obsolete browser. The service works on IE8, even XP houses have no excuse.
The website you need to use is in tune with MS's stance.
A certain banking organization has a web-based service for corporate customers to carry out the usual sort of internet banking functions.
however when setting up for access, we found that IE11 is an unsupported configuration. It probably works, but if you hit a snag the bank's call centre won't help you.
(i know that FF ESR versions are an alternative)
> Leaving only Gecko and Webkit because choice is bad?
Exactly!
IE is the underdog we have to pitty, the fat-kid on sports day we all have to cheer (and giggle at). Without it, we'd have nothing to pick on and ridicule.
What else would we use as bad sign when interviewing someone??
"IE is the underdog we have to pitty,"
I'd rather target a recent IE than an older webkit. The problem is not IE, per se. The problem is that Microsoft don't make their recent improvements to IE available on OSes that they claim to still support. I don't suppose it is even the fault of the IE product managers or developers. I'd be amazed if these decisions were not handed down from Stevie B, in a desparate and demonstrably self-destructive attempt to wring a few more upgrades out of "customers".
It's a disgrace
It's a monumental disgrace that Microsucks continues to be allowed to sell defective O/Ss and software. If anyone else sold such defective products they would be forced out of business by the massive class action lawsuits.
Given that they got away with this 30+ years it's pretty much industry standard now, and there are some good reasons for it too: imagine a smaller shop having to insure for the kind of insane liabilities that go around in the US - you'd never have ANY innovation.
The real disgrace is that companies continued to install it when it went bad - it took total crap like Vista to at least slow that down a bit..
"It's a monumental disgrace that Microsucks continues to be allowed to sell defective O/Ss and software. If anyone else sold such defective products they would be forced out of business by the massive class action lawsuits."
It tends to be far less 'defective' than the competiton these days....
Well, using "-vendor-" prefixes for something that isn't yet standard is standard. It also allows you to try new things without being tied down with IE.
Personally, I use Sass + Bourbon which handles the -vendor prefixes for me.
The problem we're having is people are still using the -vendor prefixes for stuff that's now standard. Either they haven't updated their styles, or they're copy+pasting from stale sites.
Also, Chrome (which uses webkit) is actually the most standards compliant: http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html. That's the main reason we use it for web-development.
But I use FF for personal browsing. IE's just a test platform in a VM.
It all depends on how much of a weasel you can be with the words "run on".
With NHS and similar (gov) contracts you can usually nail the contract into the floor so that it works for you. Given the technical knowledge exhibited by the usual dead-tree botherers and the contractual small print skills of any technical types that, in a brief fit of sanity, might be brought in to look over the technical details, you can get a lot agreed that is in your favour and while stupid things like a minimum of IE6 support may be mandated, a great many NHS terminals have long term support FF or similar installed anyway. It's sometimes not an official policy but the local ICT staff tend to like the easy life and responding to users who find that IE6 just doesn't work on many websites they may require tends to result in alternative browsers being installed and users quickly get the hang of foibles such as "to use the internal system X, you must use Internet Explorer, but for anything else use this alternative instead".
Microsoft should be forced to maintain these browsers in perpetuity as a penance for foisting such utterly appalling code on the world. And they should all wear hair shirts for two days a week.
As an alternative, their company is condemned to insignificance. Seems to be their current strategy.
As soon as my old PC at home running XP has issues caused by EOL it gets Linuxed.
I would dual boot but need another drive.
What is weird is that I found it easy to install and use as a complete newbie, easier to use for a long term windows user than Win 8.
I use Firefox
>> Wow! IE! There's a blast from the past!
Ahh yes, the gool ol' days...
We didn't have to pick from a selection of browsers, or worry about cross-browser testing.
It didn't even matter about it's limitations - ActiveX would run all sorts of code for us! And the crappy rendering made the web a poor platform, keeping us desktop developers in demand.
What ever happened?
Always so many comedians on Microsoft threads. I'm rolling in the aisles. Pass the needle and thread, I've split my sides.
Really though anyone have some caffeine so I can make it to the end of this comment thread? YYAAWWNN
Commence the downvotes you stuck-in-the-muds
(why did I take the time to post this? why did you take the time to repeat yourself once more?)
This means current IE users of versions 6-9 either have to keep using unsupported software or do an unplanned and unexpected application upgrade. Which should shake budgets and leave a trail of other projects not done because of this.
And I suppose they'll learn the lesson and stay away from non standard technologies (Microsoft's own interpretation of HTML standards, ActiveX controls, etc) in future application decisions. But for how long?
Same as with economic bubbles, where a new one is formed as soon as the memories from the previous one vanish from the collective memory. How long it will take for people to fall again in the same trap?
And yes, I reckon the alternatives are not perfect either, and were not at the time these decisions were made. But someone keeping for so long using IE6-9 without investing or budgeting for an application upgrade is just a fool.
And no, don't bring the industrial automation example. Anyone purchasing industrial equipment that depends on apps running on proprietary OSs whose expiration date is well before the equipment is amortized is an even bigger fool.
This is Microsoft having their heads well and truly jammed in the sand and don't look outside at the Real World at all.
How many billions of lines of Visual Studio 6 is out there all working perfectly well? And if any of those applications requires a web control, even if it's not visible to the user on the form, then if the developer has any version of IE beyond version 9 then the code breaks.
There is one, and only one documented solution to this problem and that is to use IE9.
This is the development tool from Microsoft using Microsoft's own browser and is about to fall foul of Microsoft's own ruling.
Yes, I know that Microsoft will enable one to get over this hurdle (they say) but is there any use me contacting them if they just turn around and say "Upgrade the world's C++ and VB6 applications. All of it. And then there will be no problem."
They can't fix their own compatability issues so they just ignore them and pretend that there's not a single line of code out there written with Visual Studio 6.
This policy of Microsoft's has all the hallmark of Canute's attempt at tide stemming . All it's going to do is to cut off people in the Real World from their updates.
And I thought that my distaste for this once mighty company couldn't get any lower...
Visual Studio 6?
Seriously? You're complaining because a development tool issued in 1998 for the Win9x platform (which hasn't been supported since forever) is no longer supported? And you complain about the advice being to upgrade code produced in this sixteen year old environment?
Are you trolling?
No, I am not trolling.
I am talking about The Real World. The same world in which you and I live in where there are MILLIONS of lines of code out still functioning.
There is no reason that an application should go out of date because a browser is updated. Why would you want to, say, have to be made to change your car because you bought a new television?
It's one thing to stop supporting a language and I am not saying that the language should be supported. What I am saying is that the language shouldn't be broken because of a browser update. Microsoft say that they will help with upgrade issues from IE9 upwards but we know full well that they can't because they have broken everything.
If you think that the answer is to upgrade the code then who is going to do it? You may be fortunate in that you're working for a company who has the latest in develpment systems and you're constantly giving youself paper cuts on the bleeding edge (I know what it's like I've been there) but sooner or later that code you are writing today is going to be code that's out of date in sixteen years time.
Then you're going to be in the position of having to go back and support that code because no-one is going to pay you to rewrite your code every two years. Imagine a world where no software was more than two years old; after a while there would be no new code written as we'd all be rewriting everything that's ever been written again and again and again.
In the Real World there is code out there, lots of code out there which was written in VB6 and earlier. And it all needs supporting by developers. And they're not asking for the language to be updated they're just asking for the language not to be broken by a mere browser.
So, if C++ is out of date and should be replaced, then I would love to know what you think we should do with C.
No trolling here at all, I'm just looking at what's out there.
" And they're not asking for the language to be updated they're just asking for the language not to be broken by a mere browser."
Which is another lesson in itself: don't rely on a wholly mess of interwinded components without a clean separation of duties. When a web browser is so deeply into the OS (even when it really is not but your dev tools live like it is) you are asking for trouble. Instead, use tools that do one thing and do it well. Unix anyone?
You would have thought with 30% of the world's PC's still on XP, and with IE continually losing market share, that Microsoft would have looked at new ways to keep thier client base content.
But instead all we get is more arrogance, more enforced attempts to get people to upgrade thier OS. People really won't bother - they'll just switch to apps like Firefox is even greater numbers.
Redmond still hasn't learned about Customer Service has it...
"My perfectly legal Windows 7 VM is stuck on IE 9 because Microsoft wants to install some kind of spyware to let me use IE 10 or IE 11."
Get over it, dude. If you use a computer with a non open source OS, you handed over the keys to the kingdom on the day you installed the OS. Since we're talking Windows, MS could have built in spyware in the original release, or they could have slipped some in as a security fix under Windows Update (if you've applied *any* updates since installation, which I hope you have). Whatever *named* package you are worrying about, if it is from Microsoft then it doesn't increase your risk of being spied on, even if it says "Microsoft Shafter for Windows" on the tin.
As already pointed out, any closed OS can and most probable will spy on you. Open ones may do as well (looking at you Canonical with your Amazon search...)
Why do you want to use a Windows VM on the internet at all if you are so concerned? Most of my XP VMs are there to run only stuff locally that is not supported now and they just don't get external networking as I can transfer files in/out with mapped drives, etc.
I carry around a USB stick with Chrome 500kb-ish installer.
Just in case.
Or, an old portable Chrome. To download and install a non-portable Chrome.
Or even I use my cellphone to download it and use it as a pendrive. I resort to IE only when my smartphone and usb sticks are unavailable.
IE isn't a bad browser any more. It hasn't been in a long time. That comment about web devs hating IE9 in the article - I sure as shit didn't. It wasn't exactly bleeding edge but it was far superior to all of its predecessors. IE in Win8.1 is a perfectly fast, stable browser, burdened with the reputation of some versions ago.
IE10/11 seem to be quite acceptable, though lacking in the range of useful plugins you get for FF & Chrome.
But why can't MS make IE11 for all supported versions of Windows? Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc all seem to manage that trick with a fraction of MS' budget.
Yes, I know that was a rhetorical question as MS are run by marketing droids who still believe they can dictate how the PC industry will go...
XP users need Firefox and Noscript anyway. as well as a firewall, so no direct 3G dongle, Only use mobile dongle with a WiFi point or ethernet router that has a firewall.
I hope future IE
a) By default has Active X disabled, and if enabled only works on private IP ranges.
b) is standards compliant
I really struggle to find sympathy for you guys complaining about having to maintain software that works on IE8 or IE9. The product I'm forced to work on most of the time has to maintain compatibility with IE6 due to the fact an important customer still runs Win XP original release (FSM knows why they won't apply service packs). The sales guys would actually like me to try and maintain support for IE5 but I told them what they could do with that particular thought. I have to admit though lately I've been accidentally breaking things and claiming it's just not possible on IE6, I think the message is finally getting through.
Easy fix.
A forcing EU-directive that prohibits Microsoft from blocking the newest IE on older Windows.
That, plus silent update set to on by default in IE..
And don't say its too hard, or impossible.
The latest Firefox works just fine at least as far back as Win XP.
And they don't have a tiny fraction of the resources of MS to make that work.
Alternatively force MS to deactivate older IE completely, or to present a "browser-choice" download-page only.
If they cant/wont put IE on that page, tough shit!
Having one single company flooding the web with obsolete, bug-ridden, insecure browsers, is clearly not acceptable.
In what has no doubt 'percolated' down from Redmond/Soho in the coffee froth, I had to quote the following from a MSFT TAM in our organisation regarding the sad demise of the above said:
"Microsoft has a history of helping people get stuff done, and have focused our efforts on delivering digital work and life experiences that are reinvented for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, empowering every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more."
I mean W...T...F ? If there were a place in the space-time continuum that were further from the truth about Max Clifford, this surely has to be it??? My anxious media-studies intern couldn't master this on Charlie, so how do they get to this through the nightmare that is MSFT in Web 2.0?
Firefox: 2003
Safari: 2003
Chrome: 2008
IE8: 2009 (first attempt at Firefox compliance)
2014 -2003 = 11
=> Microsoft, having spent the best part of the last decade releasing browsers that rendered sites differently than rivals like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
2009-2003 = 6
=> Microsoft was a late convert to the "web-standards" religion, not realeasing IE8 until 6 years after new rivals FF and Safari started taking market share with superior user interfaces
Standards are a comercial weapon. History is re-written by the winners.
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