Azure DevOps Services reminds users that, yes, it really is time to pull the plug on Internet Explorer 11 Microsoft used the Ignite product singalong to reassure customers that its veteran Internet Explorer 11 browser would remain supported while also urging users to nuke the thing from orbit. It is, after all, the only way to be sure. "Some of our web properties are not going to support IE in the 2021 timeframe," explained …
So - not content with having both Skype and Teams offering essentially the same functionality, they have decided to throw a third spanner into the mix? And one that only works if you trust Chrome/Chromium.
What next? Microsoft Azure Wheels, for when you really want to reinvent something that doesn't need reinventing?
I fail to see why IE is still pre-installed on Windows 10, its just another potential security vulnerability on every single Windows 10 PC. It should now be an optional extra for those enterprises that still have legacy platforms that only work in IE and they can download it and install it as needed. And FFS set it up to allow it access to those whitelisted apps that need it, don't be going out onto the internet with it.
There's three reasons all of which stem from when Win10 was originally released. Firstly because Edge was so rough and unfinished when Win10 was originally released. Secondly, IE was still very heavily used in businesses and MS was keen to get them to adopt Win10 without making life any more difficult than they had to. Thirdly, Edge was very tied into the quick-release approach of Win10 and wasn't designed to cope with the LTS builds early-on, hence IE had to be included as otherwise those systems wouldn't have had a browser of any sort.
It is a bit daft, but it's basically a legacy of these reasons above. Saying that, I would not be at all surprised to see IE removed soon from the core of the OS and instead offered as an optional download for those people who still need to use it. Trident may linger on in the background as a library for applications that still use it of course...
Currently, MS's own Outlook requires it for "If there are problems with how this message is displayed, click here to view it in a web browser", at least in desktop Outlook. That always opens the email in IE11, whatever your default browser.
Setting Windows to open .mht files in another application might help, but W10 doesn't support that.
Wait, they're going to pull the plug on IE6? But what about all the apps we bought in the early 2000's that are no longer supported and depend on IE6? We can't replace them - they still work just as poorly as the day we bought them. And we've already paid for them - they're free from now on! Win! Win!
'Sticking with the unloved browsers after that date will result in what Justin Chung, director of product management at GitHub, delicately referred to as a "degraded experience".'
When he invented the world wide web a mere 30 years back, Tim Berners-Lee mandated the concept of client agnosticism, so that web content would be accessible regardless of the client being used.
By the end of that decade, as presentation on the web became fancier, the principle of graceful degradation was introduced, allowing the important (informative) content to be viewed even if the fancy presentation was beyond the capabilities of the client.
Quite soon, though, that principle was abandoned, forcing users to "update" their browsers to view pages that refused to degrade gracefully - hence almost ubiquitous notices to the effect that "you must turn on javascript to use this site".
Now, you can't make use of many sites at all with scripting and style sheets turned off, as they're typically an unordered heap of content snippets shuffled and laid out by the scripts and styles, so with those turned off they're unreadable.
Haven't we made progress!
No matter how creatively we imagine our new technologies, they all eventually are coopted by agents of social control to achieve their own furtive ends. There is no technological key that will unlock us from the cage that our primate psychobiology has grown us in.
Scripting and style sheets allow sites to do things that the venerable Sir Tim never even imagined. Most of these things are good.
You're well within your rights to switch off these technological advances, but don't expect people who want to make interesting stuff to pander to your luddism.
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