The Sun is shining, the birds are singing, and Microsoft has pulled support for Internet Explorer in Microsoft 365 Microsoft has pulled another block from the Internet Explorer Jenga, with the end of support for IE11 in Microsoft 365. The move has been a while coming, and despite the ongoing pandemic the company has stuck doggedly to the roadmap it published last year and, as of yesterday, even its own products would prefer to look the …
Forget the last two words, that simply wasn't healthy.
When someone I knew went to work in Microsoft, I read up on their treatment of employees. It made me happy that MS was unlikely to offer me a job!
Admittedly, I don't think I would like to work for many US companies.
Fair enough - IE is too long in the tooth and not very good, but since when was a web browser a "platform"?
The browser seems to be the new OS, which is far from ideal in many respects, not least that it still needs to run on a real OS.
One could certainly make a case for a browser (any browser) being a "platform", albeit a really, really unsteady one. An OS, however, it most certainly is not.
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amfM will now probably jump in and tell me why I'm wrong.
"but since when was a web browser a "platform"?"
Eh, wasn't that why MS came out with IE to start with back in '97 or so? They saw the rise of the Internet and realized that Netscape's browser could/would marginalize their cash-cow Windows as the Internet continued to gain traction ( an unusually astute observation for MS...). So they baked IE into Windows (more or less) to both help assure the users got to the Internet through the blue E, and make it so Windows without the blue E was nothing, and hence, inseparable.
And updated Windows 95 to add Active Desktop with shell integration with, and reliance on, ie. And then argued in the antitrust law suit that it wasn’t possible to separate Internet Explorer from Windows without making Windows ‘unstable’ -which, if you think about it is a defence that says: ‘we can’t make changes to our own software without breaking it all, and our testing is such that if we tried we wouldn’t know if it all worked properly or not’. A sort of genius/ridiculous defence which sorta worked out well for them - and badly for Mozilla.
MS is pulling back from it's own browser in favor of one basicly Google's Chrome with a different badge. When MS itself starts barfing up "use a better browser" warning notes on it's own hosted sites then it's a long way fallen from it's once lofty heights. IE11 was still part of Win10 back when the OS was first released. What's next on the chopping block, MS Bob? Clippy? My trusty Zune?
/Sarcasm.
"Pfft - move up to the 20th century and get a slide-rule."
Slide rules were 17th century. Pfft back atcha ... and have a beer while I tell my tale :-)
Slide rules get too sticky and gummed up in the feed barn and seed/fertilizer sheds, and other dusty environments where sweaty humans may have a cause to handle them. The abacus beads tend to knock the crap off the wires with use, so they are self cleaning.
However, I use my[1] old Sun[2] Engineering slide rule for back-of-the envelope calculations (decking needs, fencing, roofing, DG, roadbase, asphalt, concrete, beam loads, and the like), and I have a circular slide rule in each of the aircraft.
For my needs, there is quite literally no modern electronic technology that can replace the ease and convenience of these two old tools. Both are well worth learning, IMO.
[1]My Dad's, actually, it got him his Electrical Engineering Masters at Berkeley in the '50s. Helped me with mine a couple decades later.
[2] No, not that Sun! This Sun: http://sliderulemuseum.com/Hemmi/S071_Hemmi_255.jpg
What’s sadder is that I still have, and occasionally, use an Otis King cylindrical slide rule (Wikipedia). When I bought it new, I think it was about a day's wages (These days about £100, but now on eBay for ~£30).
And Chrome is basically Safari, which is basically Konqueror.
Look at the UA string it sends to websites:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/92.0.4515.131 Safari/537.36 Edg/92.0.902.73
Back in 2000, when the KDE project announced that they were going to Konquer the world, would anyone have seriously imagined that Microsoft would ship a browser that pretends to be Konqueror?
done this years ago
And taken it out back , got it to kneel down and stuck a round in it, then buried the remains in quicklime and battery acid while firing up a program that would seek out and delete any mention of it.
Fooking crappy browser linked so hard to the OS, that when a bad script came along it would cheerfully send the payload to the OS and the OS would cheerfully delete all your data for you... sheesh....
Yeah I sure didn't. Last few projects I wrote that used Javascript, I didn't do anything specifically to break IE; but I also didn't test against it and have no idea if it worked with it or not. Person I wrote it for, their users used iThings (so Safari), Chrome, or possibly Firefox (I developed on FIrefox since I'm used to the debugging tools on it.) I also loaded it in Opera once with no drama there either. I used bog standard Javascript, not pushing the boundaries with some "latest and greatest" features, and a few libs that as far as I know don't push things either, but if IE won't run stuff that'd run on a regular browser 10 years ago, I'm not going to do anything about that.
See ya!
Context: work computer, Windows 10.
Edge: Can't do RSS feeds without a plugin, which is blocked.
Chrome: Can't do RSS feeds without a plugin, which is blocked.
Firefox: Pretty sure it doesn't do RSS either.
As long as IT lets me, I'm keeping IE 11 installed just for RSS, including El Reg's feed.
Icon --> in the details.
(Home Win 10 PC? I don't need RSS feeds, so IE 11 can shove off.)
Yep, Firefox axed (inbuilt) RSS support back in 2018.
I may be the only person in the world to hold this opinion, but IE11 was not a bad product. Most of the people railing loudest about it are airing complaints about IE6, almost 20 years out of date. Those faults were steadily corrected between versions 8 and 10, and by the time 11 came out it was a solid product that could hold its head up alongside Firefox and Opera.
Too late, though.
Article It was all for naught in the long term as the final iteration of Internet Explorer is very much headed to the boneyard.
Hardly! A 25 year run and worldwide use would counts as a huge success for the developers of any software. Most pieces of software have far fewer users, and die far sooner.
I was on a Teams call the other day, a project manager doing a presentation, sharing a screen rather than a specific Window, so their Windows Task Bar visible.
IE icon not only pinned to the bar, but icon showed it was actively in use! No other browser related icons (Edge, Chrome etc) visible, and as this was Widows 10, they must have actively removed the Edge icon that's normally there by default.
Was on a direct call with the same PM later that week, just the two of us, so asked them about it.
They were only using IE 11 as that's what they were familiar with (no legacy web apps for example that needed IE), and didn't actually know what Edge was! (They only used Windows for work, they had an iPad for personal/home use). They're not a techie person, so don't follow tech news etc.
So they didn't understand why using IE 11 was an issue! After all it was included with the OS, so it must be safe?
I know I have. I'm using IE right now, in fact - though let me assure you before you all head for the downvote button, I'm certainly not using it because I think it's good. I'm using it because Edge doesn't feel good to use, the one browser I dislike more to use is Chrome, and because nothing else is approved for installation on work PCs. I'm kind of stuck, really.
Wow. That's an understandable horror story for sure. I'm somewhat unsurprised.
For our customers (YMMV) I expect that "going out of support" will be the fire that needs to be lit underneath them as much of their industry accreditation (ISO 27001 etc) depends upon using software that's being supported. I can expect group policies to be rolled out and much loved old laptops to be wrenched from loving arms.
I'm just looking forward to not expending test/dev effort in keeping the app IE11 functioning.
Since IE11 came out it's been the supported browser for one of our in house CRM applications. After all these years, one of our clients pushed to have us switch to formally support Chrome for them, but only because they also now have a Salesforce based platform used in tandem, which won't support IE.
So a project is started up, and while we had no major code changes required (only a few cookie shenanigans that needed to be sorted out) we switched a few weeks back to Chrome being the officially supported browser, at the agreed level with Chrome 91.
Now, we knew, and warned the customer, that Chrome updates a lot more quickly than other browsers do, so there was some contingency planned in as part of the project that client machines should not be updated to bleeding edge versions, but be managed via group policy so we also have time to test and certify our application against the next major version to be released. I'm sure you can see where this is going...
Not one week after we launched supporting Chrome 91, the client goes ahead and installs Chrome 92 on all machines, and raises all sorts of escalations as to why our application is broken on Chrome 92 when opened via an iFrame, when neither Chrome 92 nor iFrame invocations were supported. You may even have seen some of the articles on the Reg on the issues chrome 92 caused with that special little feature.
For all the faults IE11 has, at least it was "stable"** in that sense compared to chrome (the same way a glacier looks stable compared to a flowing river).
** I know I know. About this CRM is always behind IP whitelist and other security policies, so it's not like IE11 was being used for any general web browsing.
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