Internet Explorer fails to make the cut, banished from Microsoft Teams for good As of today, the Microsoft Teams web app no longer supports Internet Explorer 11, as the Windows giant foretold in August. Microsoft says that customers using IE 11 with Teams can expect either degraded capabilities or the inability to connect at all. Redmond noted earlier this year that Teams usage had surged with so many …
While I realise people do have legacy web apps that require IE, so its probably not going away anytime soon. Really the sensible thing to do is think of IE as a way of accessing those legacy apps only, so whitelists just those site and deny everything else. And then install a proper modern browser for actual web browsing.
These days even low end PCs are more than capable of having two web browsers open simultaneously
> These days even low end PCs are more than capable of having two web browsers open simultaneously
Not in Windows they can't. :) Have you looked at what "low end" means these days? Buy a used business machine from 5-10 years ago, and stuff a SSD and maybe some RAM into it and you will run circles around current low end stuff. Most of the current Low end stuff also can't be upgraded.
I've got an almost 8 year old laptop with a 3rd generation Core i7 and just 8Gb of RAM that still does everything Windows quite briskfully, even casual gaming from kids (nothing graphically intensive, natch). I just had to add an SSD some years ago to bring it up to speed and it just works fine. Of course YMMV depending on your personal use case.
I see it as Windows itself is low-end. You can say that so many people use Windows because so much software is compatible, but you could also say that so many people make compatible Windows software because Windows is the low bar. In 2020 and as a safe blanket statement, if you're running Widows, it's not because you choose to.
I assembled a PC back in 2008 with a 1st gen i7 (or i5) with 16GB of RAM, it's running KDE, but I'm sure it can run multiple browsers in Windows 10 or any other OS.
I wish, especially considering it has the look and feel of a program from the early 1990's. Like how can you have a program that can run only instance at a time. If I am using the editor, I can't open something else until I first close the editor. So I am not surprised that it requires Internet Explorer to run.
Bah. Netscape was better than IE. Sun's HotJava Browser was better than IE in 2000. NCSA Motif was better than IE. Lynx. CERN's www client.
In 1998, while goofing off during a conference, I wrote a little Perl script to do HTTP downloads, then strip HTML tags and do some minimal ASCII-text formatting and line-wrapping. It was better than IE.
telnet host 80 and just reading the HTML source was better than IE. My imagination did a more faithful job of rendering, it was faster, it was more secure, and the UI was better.
"NCSA Motif was better than IE"
That's NCSA Mosaic, which had been out of development[0] for three years by 2000. It was still better than IE, though :-)
Yes, Mosaic used the Motif widgets, and often ran under the Motif GUI. Easy mistake to make, I'm sure I've done the same. Have a beer.
[0] Well ... kinda out of development. It's baaaaaack, sort of ... It's kind of fun to play with, but can be frustrating for folks entirely too attached to our modern world. It builds and seems to run just fine on Slackware.
"How am I supposed to tell the fucking difference to its "regular operation"?"
Quite. If you are using a VPN then route Teams directly, rather than via the office. eg with OpenVPN:
push "route 52.120.0.0 255.252.0.0 net_gateway"; push "route 52.112.0.0 255.252.0.0 net_gateway"; push "route 13.107.64.0 255.255.192.0 net_gateway";
"How am I supposed to tell the fucking difference to its "regular operation"?"
Ah, that must be why Teams users seldom turn their video. And people on e.g. Zoom do more frequent. Or Teams members always mention you can DL it from ShitePoint while others just share their screen. Must be just like with Skype from the past, which also always gave better results if it didn't have to work that hard.
Not that I'm looking forward to staring up people's noses that is. But with video at least I can have a Teams <u>conversation</u> because it gives you different cues which you can combine: sound... lip read...
I hate most things about Teams, but FWIW I have multiple conference calls most days, and Teams video and screen sharing usually work just fine. That's more than I can say for Fuze, which had consistently poor latency, quality, and reliability. (I don't remember whether I ever used any of the many other videoconferencing packages we've gone through from this location.)
I've only ever used Zoom once, on someone else's machine at a different location, so I can't draw any comparison there.
But there's no shortage of idiocy to complain about in Teams, from stupid UI limitations1,2 to having SharePoint3 underpinning it.
1I'm editing a post. I'd like to check a message in some other channel for reference. Sorry, can't do that! And if you try, the behavior is the always-adorable "we've just silently discarded your data, ha ha!".
2There is still no support for sorting the teams list alphabetically. It's a fucking sort, Microsoft. Like, one of the very first things ever done with a computer. And team discovery is pretty much impossible. Apparently no one at Microsoft ever used, say, any decent NNTP client.
3The worst mechanism ever invented for storing and retrieving information. Pigeonholes were better. Winter counts were better. Clay balls with tokens baked inside were better.
Using the latest Outlook 2019/386 Desktop app, and if you view an email and then "click here to view it in a web browser", it insists on opening up Internet Explorer 11. Looking at workarounds to get around this highlights that they are using MSHTML to encode the webpage, so it doesn't really view any better in other browsers.
I've never used IE and there was a time when I swore I'd never use a Microsoft browser. But the latest Edge is actually just Chrome, but with all of the Google spyware removed and replaced with Microsoft spyware. So on my Windows machine, Edge it is. Why have two copies of Chrome when one will do -- so I went with the one that can't be removed. Of course, there are two important tweaks: one is to install DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, to rid Edge of its ties to Bing. And the "New Tab Redirect" extension is important, to make new tabs open to either a blank page or DuckDuckGo -- without this extension, you can't totally remove Bing Search or MSFN from new tabs. Once those tweaks are in place, it's basically Google-free, Microsoft-free Chrome.
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