back to article Citrix warns that Windows 10's Edge browser borks Receiver

“When you point your finger cos your plan fell through”, sang rock dinosaurs Dire Straits in their 1980 tune Solid Rock, “you got three more fingers pointing back at you.” Perhaps folks down Citrix way are listening to that tune today after posting a piece about how Edge, Microsoft's new browser, makes it hard to run its …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IE11

    My Windows 10 has got IE11 on it so I just use that for things which require ActiveX.

    Hopefully more and more firms will kick the ActiveX habit over the coming months.

    So, we just told our users to use IE11 for Citrix..... for now.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Hopefully more and more firms will kick the ActiveX habit over the coming months.

        O-levels for me mate.

        I was just in a hopeful mood as I haven't had much contact with users today :-)

    2. Kurt 4

      Re: IE11

      Yup. The little work required that the reg is referring to must be having to type internet explorer in the search box and click on it.

      Of course installing Firefox is out of the question as it now requires two clicks to make it default instead of one. According to Firefox it's too difficult for users to click twice instead of once.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    I do dispair at these massive companies...

    ...that seem to bitch AFTER a product has been launched. It's like they never knew it was coming,never had access to the beta programmes; begging the question, how badly are these companies development teams run?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I do dispair at these massive companies...

      agree with you. You see it time and time again, Sh1ttricks have had PLENTY of time to sort this out. Maybe an idea would have been some of their Dev's to subscribed to the insider program like the rest of us did!

      And I'd add Java to the list of banes!

    2. thames

      Re: I do dispair at these massive companies...

      @Lost all faith... - "how badly are these companies development teams run?"

      It may have had nothing to do with the development teams. In fact I would be surprised if it had anything to do with the development teams.

      More likely the problem is in the financial/marketing/management process. Developers - "We need to get rid of Active-X because it will be obsolete in a couple of years". Word down from upon high - "Your request is denied because you cannot prove to our satisfaction that this will provide the synergies to drive the target ROI, EBITDA, and AOYNFIOX (we heard that last one at a management seminar last week so we added to the list)".

      It's even worse if that part of the product line is outsourced to someone in India. The Indian shop are not going to lift a finger unless the meter is running ("not in the original contract? not our problem mate unless you pay extra"), and the product manager at the customer may not have a clue what ActiveX is or whether they use it.

      Oh, there's loads of software companies in the industrial sector who are still flogging ActiveX and Silverlight as being the very latest and greatest web technology, and releasing new products based on them. And this is for stuff that I've done with HTML5 (or even XHTML 4) and Javascript, not something exotic. I expect to see many more wails and tears from people who willingly ignored the writing on the wall despite having been told repeatedly they were investing in dead-end technology.

      1. Teiwaz
        Coat

        Re: I do dispair at these massive companies...

        "AOYNFIOX"

        Which Asterix the Gaul villager was that, and in what language?

  3. mistercrisps

    Pesky Cotgrox.

  4. AMBxx Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Why aren't they celebrating?

    Lots of upgrade revenue, all blamed on Microsoft.

  5. 0laf

    Lol we've still got suppliers bitching about moving on from IE6.

  6. Malcolm 1

    It should probably be noted...

    ...that the receiver software itself works fine. So you could just run that directly and add your Citrix account manually (the first time). After that, just launch the receiver or an appropriate shortcut, no need to involve a browser at all is there?

    (I should probably mention that my experience with Citrix is as a user, rather than an admin, so I guess there could be some circumstances where this isn't appropriate, but it works fine for me).

  7. Buzzword

    Can't they do it the iOS way?

    On iOS Safari, when you open a website which has a corresponding app, it shows a "Smart App Banner" at the top of the page. This prompts you to run the app, or download it from the app store if it isn't already installed. Since Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 also have app stores, this ought to be possible.

    > Update: I've checked, and it is indeed supported. Citrix, you know what to do.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Can't they do it the iOS way?

      AIFAIK all browsers support linking a protocol in a link (e.g. telnet://server.name) to an application (er, telnet). Citrix could make one of their own up (e.g. citrix-receiver://whatever) which would link to Receiver.

      I very much doubt that Edge, as basic as it is, doesn't support this.

      1. Mike Dimmick

        Re: Can't they do it the iOS way?

        "I very much doubt that Edge, as basic as it is, doesn't support this."

        It does. It produces a prompt ("Did you mean to switch apps?") that Edge is trying to launch the Receiver client, but there is no option to suppress this prompt in future, so Citrix have decided not to go that way. I believe it's a system-level prompt from Windows Runtime rather than Edge itself - the result of setting TreatAsUntrusted to true in the LauncherOptions object passed to Windows.System.Launcher.LaunchUriAsync.

        I suspect the decision is default security paranoia - don't trust any Uri that isn't one handled by Edge itself.

        Frankly I think the inconvenience factor of getting this prompt every time is far, far lower than the workarounds they list to avoid it.

  8. ElReg!comments!Pierre

    Interesting times ahead for the wife...

    ... as she's just done supervising the deployment of a new integrated management "solution" based on Receiver. Fortunately she's in the health public sector so they had to upgrade some machines from W98 to XP to make it work; W10 doesn't seem likely before next decade.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Interesting times ahead for the wife...

      hahahahaha

      I had a job interview a couple of weeks ago with quite a large company (6,000 users) in the electricity supply business. (didn't get the job but anyway) I can see a whole lot of pain coming there way sometime as they're still running a windows 2003 domain, with Exchange (I take it 2003) that's a right sh1t storm brewing to get to be able to migrate to something current, a whole lot of pain

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. whereistheanykey

      Re: Fuck Citrix

      "Back in the day I came to associate the name Citrix with garbage", industry leader.

      "My current employer insists on using Receiver as a means to remote to my office PC", fantastic that means it could be setup securely.

      "the installer completely and utterly failed to install with nothing but a cryptic error message that lead me on a merry goose chase through the Citrix forums culminating in a big fat nothing.", i would suspect including the error message might help you out a bit more.

      "Success! It installed. But then failed to connect to the server in the office", again no error message. Though i suppose the generic 1030 error that something went wrong somewhere isn't always that helpful.

      "Bizarrely I am free to remote desktop directly from my office PC to my home PC whenever I like", your network and security team should invest in better monitoring and security.

      "he would open a support ticket with the in-house Receiver team", unlikely you have a team for receiver unless you have 10,000 or more people in the company?, you unfortunately just weren't able to get past service desk. And their extensive toolkit of fixes such restart and re-profile were unsuccessful.

      The fact that it's failing from multiple devices you might want to try from a work sanctioned piece of equipment or a known good device used remotely that can sucessfully connect to another desktop. Then try yours, if it fails then the VDA/studio/appcenter/group policy/citrix policy is munged for your desktop only.

      If your desktop launches from another device then i'd be checking much closer to home.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Phil_Evans

    Amen

    Weeell, shit! So at the very end of one of the longest advents in IT history, Citrix sees an issue. Of course they've known about it for ages, so why talk about it now?

    FirstIy reckon O365 must be causing more pain to them in the last couple of years than the threat of any new OS shenanigans, so maybe the excuse here is one of distraction. As thick/thin client relevancy wanes in the cloud world, so Citrix's raison d'etre dissolves too.

    Then there's Win 10's new APK/windows Store/whateva package delivery with Intune/store/finger that (at least tries to believe that) devices are agnostic. Of course it's yet to work properly, but it has probably focused Citrix's attention back on the importance of IE and other browsers working properly for revenue.

    And then, as indicated in this thread, there's pig-ignorance and complacency. Much like inventing Windows 8, but lessons are hard to learn when you're that big.

    Good riddance, hopefully to a very expensive layer of badly maintained complexity.

  11. jason 7

    Citrix...another word for...

    ...glacial!

    Well that's the speed at which they fix anything.

    As mentioned earlier it's not like Edge just popped out of nowhere last week.

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