Microsoft updates Edge's Internet Explorer mode Still got that one weird corporate app that simply must use Internet Explorer? Microsoft has tweaked IE mode in its Edge browser to lure the last holdouts. Internet Explorer continues to hang in there. While its usage barely registers in Statcounter figures (coming in at just over 1 percent of desktop browsers worldwide), like …
Sadly this is a charity who bought a "professionally installed" system a couple of years back using MaxxOne DVR. That make has this monumental stupidity in terms of interface!
Of course someone "upgraded" one of their win10 laptops and now they can't access the DVR, other than via the shitty cloud service it also claims to offer.
So much fail on both sides.
Go get an old Win7 desktop, hook it to the DVR for use as the controller, & lock the computer down to be as secure as Humanly possible.
Grab a Win7 ISO, reboot the Win10 laptop, do an in-place reinstal of Win7, reboot to make sure it works properly, & tell them not to "upgrade" it again.
A charity I did volunteer work for a while back had a similar issue with the printer they were using. Worked fine under Win7, "upgrade" to Win10 on the same machine, suddenly the printer no longer works. Replace the drivers, nope, force Windows to update to the absolute latest & greatest, nope, the printer refused to work. Restore the desktop to Win7, reboot, & suddenly the printer is fine. Hmmmm, I wonder.
I gave them a USB thumbdrive for personal file data storage, installed a copy of DeepFreeze, "froze" the OS so you couldn't write to the MBR, & told/showed them how to save all their files to the thumbdrive every time.
Why not just replace the printer? Because they were a charity & didn't have the money. They also didn't have anyone (other than me) to help with their computer issues. *I* couldn't afford to buy them a new printer either, so they had to make do with what they had. When the only change was a theoretical upgrade from Win7 to Win10 then the printer is "no longer supported", it obviously was not an upgrade worth a damn.
Do your charity a favor, get them an old Win7 machine, clean it up, upgrade the hardware with max RAM & an SSD if you can, then lock it down to prevent it ever getting "upgraded" without your involvement. It'll put a load on your shoulders to explain how to use the thumbdrive for all their personal files, but it'll take a load OFF your shoulders by not having to constantly futz with Win10 "fixing" stuff on you. =-j
You've said it yourself, it only has a ~1% share of desktop browsers in use, so obviously it's not a very high priority target for the script kiddies & malware makers.
Given how far the internet has devolved into a "if it's not Chrome then it's not good enough" world, *ANY* alternate browser that is *not* Chromium based has to be a good thing.
Besides, I've noticed that various sites behave *very* differently depending on the browser used to visit the site. An example is Gmail. Visit it in Edge with JS turned off & the site refuses to load. It tells you that you need to enable JS "for security". Same URL, brought up in an instance of IE in a split screen, JS disabled, & Gmail loads just fine. Obviously the JS for security claim is BS, otherwise the site would complain to IE about it not being able to run, but it doesn't, so it isn't, and the only difference is the browser.
I also don't like how Edge doesn't allow the ability to prompt for 1st party cookie storing. 3rd party yes, 1st party no. You either accept them all or deny them all, but you can't accept/deny the cookie request at the time the site wants to set one. You have to go in afterwards, manually edit the site permissions, and by that time it's too late to stop the tracking. Under IE I'm allowed to set the setting of *any* cookie as an ask-first/allow-or-block-permanently aspect for 1st party & always deny 3rd party ones. But not in Edge which claims to have my privacy & security at heart.
*Snorts in disgust*
I figure that, even with all the quirks & crap inherent in IE, the fact that it's not Chromium based, is accessibility handled by my screen reader, and lets me get shit done is a good thing.
It certainly *is* that bad.
And they got away with inflicting that awfulness on us for many years, until it became too much bother.
In compensation Microsoft ought to be forced to update Trident to support all the standards that they were happy to sign up to but actively undermined in the actual implementation in their then-dominant product.
None of us is well served by a Webkit/Blink monoculture. Gecko struggles on. Trident v2* should be part of the ecosystem. Presto should be open-sourced, or sold to some organisation that will keep it up to date.
-A.
*or whatever. Call it Mosaic# if you like.
I wonder if they'll finally fix the issue with the "view it in a web browser" option in Outlook which only works with IE! Specifically, that option generates and then calls a .mht file rather than a standard html file, but Edge/Chrome/Firefox don't support that file type. So by default it'll open in IE regardless of what your system default is, and even if you change that default for that one file type it still doesn't work since the chosen browser can't render the page. I could almost forgive them if it was only older Outlook versions with the issue, but last time I checked people with the latest 365 builds still reported the same behaviour. And of course even if you still have IE, these days plenty of emails can't be viewed as they pull info from the website, and that in term redirects you to a page telling you IE isn't supported. Apparently Chrome used to have a experimental option to make it work, but that's since been removed.
I seem to remember a few years ago that MS changed the HTML rendering engine in Outlook from Trident/IE to whatever the one in Microsoft Word is called. In the interest of "security", apparently. Though why it was OK to look at insecure content inside a browser, but not an email client, was never explained.
-A.
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