Internet Explorer 11 limps to the end of Windows 10 road

The end is nigh for support for Internet Explorer 11 on some editions of Windows 10. That is, unless users look a little too hard at Windows' internals. Support is ending today for the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application on the Window 10 semi-annual servicing channel. From tomorrow – June 15, 2022 – customers still …

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they are ending support, they are also releasing the source (Microsoft <3 open-source) to help keep those internal legacy business applications alive.

Edit: Oh, my bad. Turns out they aren't. Just killing it and recommending Chrome's rendering engine as a replacement.

[Captain Scarlet]

Its Microsoft, they recommend Office 365 with a corp version of Windows so you can make use of https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet Edge-in-IE-mode doesn't work for many "enterprise apps".

However corporate IT will rise from its slumber in its silo, click the mouse to let the "kill IE" update through, and go back to sleep. Meaning that not even their own employees will be able to belatedly migrate their own enterprise software so it works with a non-IE browser. *

Genius!

* For non-IE browser, read hard-coded for Edge or Chrome, because standards are too taxing.

[ShadowSystems]

It's a shame, actually.

I know IE was never popular, but IE11 has one massive plus point in it's favour: the fact that as far as Screen Readers & other Assistive Technology is concerned, It Just Works(TM). No problems with funky icons that don't have AltText descriptions, no funky "hamburger menu" gubbins that have nothing to read to the visually impaired, nothing that really drops a bag of spanners in the gears & causes the whole machine to come to a metal shredding, lubrication igniting, parts fuzing, catastrophic halt.

Unlike Chrome & Edge which have many such issues & nobody seems to GAFF about fixing them to (restore? add in the first place?) functionality. The attitude seems to be "It works fine for us, so sucks to be you, huh?" to which I'd like to break off a ClueBy4 upside their skulls in Karmic bitchslap. *Deep calming breath*

Yes there are other browsers, but they've all got their little quirks & foibles that drop the occaisional hurdle in the path of the blind person trying to figure out WTF is happening & HTF to Get Shit Done(TM). Is that unlabeled icon something I need, or is it the "reformat your hard drive without confirmation" button that I'll regret? Is that silent bit of screen the place where the controls are hiding that prevent me from ticking the "Don't sell all my PII to everyone & their dog" box? We can't see it, our SR's can't read it to us, & we're prevented from GSD because someone sighted didn't think it was important enough to describe for the less-than-perfectly-sighted.

This is not a request for alternate browsers, it is a lament that other browsers can't seem to do what that crusty, ancient, out dated, out moded, unsupported monstrosity can do but the newer, modern, bright & shiny, supported ones can not. What's that say about those new ones that can't fully do what the old one can? I'll give you a hint & "security" isn't one of them.

Turn scripts off, refuse JS at all, block cookies, reject a site's ability to store any data about your visit at all (no DOM, etc), and stop accepting that ensuring security means losing privacy. If my bank can render without those bits & do so with the padlock icon (which has AltText TYVM), then all the modern sites that can NOT need to go back to the drawing board & have _competant_ WebDevs in charge of site creation. =-/

[Dark Eagle]

Re: It's a shame, actually.

Feel you brother. When it comes to accessibility, nothing comes anything near the IE. I remember how when I learned to use computer back in 2014, blind people were unwilling to switch to anything else, because the shear amount of headaches other browsers and technologies cause us.

The problem is also spreading, since most browsers do use chrome engine, meaning if one site has some accessibility problem, then it will be useless to switch the browser, and try to access it that way. Because the browsers are using the same engines, the problem is carried over to them.

This is why I actually don't like what is happening with Firefox recently. Once it goes out, what we're left with? Nothing. IE is already gone, and once Firefox and its engine are gone, we'll be out of options. Linux doesn't offer anything better for us, the accessibility is bad there.

And even if someone tries to fix that, the folks yell at them. I know a guy who tried to develop an alternative screen reader to Orca, and a lot of the Linux folks yelled at him for that, telling him to focus on Orca instead. Never mind it is badly documented, and has some other issues, including badly designed, and poorly documented accessibility interfaces.

[Sandtitz]

"to help keep those internal legacy business applications alive"

"Edit: Oh, my bad. Turns out they aren't. Just killing it and recommending Chrome's rendering engine as a replacement."

Death of IE was announced year ago, but the writing has been on the wall for quite some time longer. Shouldn't come as a surprise. Migration from IE-only applications should have started a decade ago - if not earlier.

Many companies have a lot of legacy stuff that only work with DOS, XP, Win7; or Flash, ActiveX, or a specific (old) Java version. You need to deal with the fact that most software/hardware has an EOL date in the future. As your systems are already(!) microsegmented and proper access control is in place, you just publish the old stuff via e.g. Citrix/RemoteApp or dedicate firewalled workstations for the work.

With IE you can still use the IE Mode in Edge. If it doesn't work, IE is still supported in Windows Server versions and LTSC.

[katrinab]

Re: "to help keep those internal legacy business applications alive"

The windows server version of ie doesn't support much beyond plain text files though.

[Sandtitz]

Re: "to help keep those internal legacy business applications alive"

"The windows server version of ie doesn't support much beyond plain text files though."

Windows Servers have the same IE as their non-servers counterparts have.

Windows Servers since 2003 had have the IE Enhanced Security Configuration enabled which severely limits IE in every way. ESC can be disabled and while I still wouldn't use it for web browsing, it should be perfectly sufficient for any old business application that require IE.

[Nick Ryan]

Re: "to help keep those internal legacy business applications alive"

Most importantly, competent developers develop against actual standards and not whatever flavour of bullshit a third party vendor happens to throw at them. Well written applications written for Windows XP and Windows 7 should still run just fine in Windows 11. Badly written crap, such as the junk that requires ActiveX or specific web browsers always causes problems. Using Flash for anything other than enhancing a part of a website was always a good idea, and standards have been in place for some time now allowing the removal of Flash content. Unfortunately the current crop of useless developers are coughing out JavaScript driven shit shows in stead of websites and these tend to fail on delivery (if tested for usability, accessibility and security) and will fail in a few years regardless.

[captain veg]

Re: open-source

I'm pretty sure that they don't own all of it. In the first place they licensed the original codebase wholesale from NCSA via Spyglass.

-A.

[Phones Sheridan]

My photocopiers can only be programmed from Internet Explorer. Cant see me replacing them any time soon, far too expensive and far too reliable.

[Gene Cash]

Gotta love that this was downvoted.

Perhaps the downvoter can buy the OP some new expensive Edge-compatible photocopiers?

[J.G.Harston]

Like the person that downvoted me when I stated I wasn't going to throw away my £8,000 printer just because PC manufacturers couldn't be arsed to spend 15p on a Centronics connector.

[Ozan]

But they do. A lot of people loves the new shiny and companies feed that to make more.

[ilmari]

Yeah I also have some "enterprise" stuff like that which works reliably but the only way to change settings is through a Java applet in IE11.

[Anne Hunny Mouse]

Same here. Have a phone system which requires Java for the web access (a lot easier than the command line). It is not an old system, last upgraded 2021.

There was an exercise by a project team to collate sites which needed IE Mode. However, looking at the list produced it included several URL's and sites which don't work in IE.

Luckily it's not my project.

[Sora2566]

Then keep your old never-updated windows version just to program your photocopiers. Just don't browse the web with it.

[phuzz]

We have an old laptop, which lives in the server room, and has a battery life of <10s, and which has all the old software for talking to UPS's, network switches, iLO's etc.

It's a piece of shit, but it's staying until we get to retire the very last of the kit that relies on it.

[sreynolds]

This is why we have virtualization. Sometimes some legacy shit, without source code, just doesn't want to die so you have to keep on resurrecting the old stuff. I heard that someone had to do a Win98 install because of a certain application. DOS isn't dead yet either. This is what those dickwads who oppose the right to repair don't get.

[katrinab]

The problem is, if you need DOS or Windows 9x, the most likely scenario is that you need to be able to control parallel port pins or similar directly from your program. That is not going to work in a virtual machine.

[Ozan]

YOu need full emulation for that, then.

[Mike Lewis]

I never thought I'd say this but...

I'll be sorry to see it go. Of all the browers on my PC (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, IE and Opera), it's the only one that renders RSS feeds correctly.

[simonlb]

Re: I never thought I'd say this but...

You're RSS feeding it wrong!

[Mike Lewis]

Re: I never thought I'd say this but...

I'm referring to looking at an RSS feed file in a web browser, not using a podcast client to download it.

[mark l 2]

I guess those that still need IE for some legacy app can run a VM with an older version of Windows with IE installed but firewalled off to only access that one app and not go out on the wider internet. Which to be honest is how IE should have been treated ever since MS decided it was done for an they were going to throw all their eggs into the Edge basket.

I for one won't be shedding a tear when its gone completely, it was the crappiness and insecurity of IE that got be to switch to Firefox around 17 years ago, and I haven't used a MS browser to do anything other than download an alternative web browser ever since.

[Boris the Cockroach]

I only

ever used to run IE once per re-install windows/new PC

And that was to d/l firefox

Icon... for what IE was to us of the early/late 2000s

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well

Bye!

[Spamfast]

Re: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well

It's "Alas poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio."

(Someone was going to. May as well be me.)

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well

I see your pedantry and raise you

"...alas poore Yoricke I knew him Horatio,"

from the first quarto. (Although the number of times he hath bore/carried me(e) (up)on his backe apparently varies from twenty to a thousand).

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well

I don't think Hamlet was scraping between the corrugations of the soles of his boots with a stick when he said that ...

[hammarbtyp]

Nuke it from orbit...just to make sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Must look out my IE T-shirt - free from MS in 1995 when I downloaded IE at midnight. Before the men in white coats come to take me away, it wasn't midnight in the UK - I was already at work and the company had good internet connections (especially with the US - I think there was a leased line to its US HQ, from whence it connected to the internet back then). So a fairly easy download; I was surprised when the T-shirt arrived as I didn't really expect they'd bother sending one to the UK.

[J.G.Harston]

Just a couple of years ago I was in a project scrambling to stop things requiring IE6 to work. Front-line life-critical stuff, like prescription dispensing and X-Ray scanning.

[Roland6]

I wonder how many of those 50 top online UK government services will be upgraded to IE11 by 2025...

[WolfFan]

I’ll take a guess and say ‘zero’. There’re several reasons why I have some XP machines around here. One is that some ancient things need IE 6. Yes, really. I betcha that there will be a lot of things that need IE 6 or some ancient Java or something similar… and the something similar might need IE 6. Because, well, reasons. Me, I have some ancient hardware which still works and which would cost $150k or more to replace, which ain’t happening until said hardware dies. And which won’t work with Windows beyond XP. I suspect that there are lots of people who have similar problems.

[captain veg]

thought experiment

As a some-time front end developer I'm well familiar with the myriad ways in which IE breaks standards-compliant code, but I never really had to contend with making IE-specific stuff work in standards-compliant browsers. Naively, though, I can't help but wonder if some kind of translating proxy couldn't fix at least some of it. Any takers?

-A.

[katrinab]

Re: thought experiment

Porting guide:

vb-script - translate to javascript

java - translate to javascript

active-x - translate to javascript

flash - translate to javascript

In otherwords, trash your existing code and start over.

[captain veg]

Re: thought experiment

Thanks for that.

I'd completely forgotten about VBScript.

Still, all those things look do-able, especially if you target WASM rather than plain JS.

Trashing your existing code and starting again is, in fact, the best course. As I understand it the problem is that the existing code can't be changed for some of these ancient apps, e.g. it's served up by some embedded program.

-A.

[phuzz]

This weekend, on my home computer (running Windows 10), I was getting annoyed by security dialogues popping up when I was trying to copy stuff from my NAS.

The official MS solution? Go into Control Panel (itself already an anachronism), and access 'Internet settings', AKA, the original Internet Explorer settings program.

I'm pretty sure there's not even any installed version of Internet Explorer on that PC, but Microsoft integrated it so deeply that it's control panel is still there. Probably still in Win 11 too.

[katrinab]

The unofficial solution. Set up your NAS as a domain controller, join your home computer to the domain, and log in using it. This won't work with Windows 10 Home edition though.

[Dan 55]

Enable Services for NFS in Windows Features and connect to the NAS using NFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE11 GPOs

When IE11 came out Microsoft upgraded the group policy objects for Server 2008 (which were automatically updated when you installed IE11). Microsoft being Microsoft, the new policies were completely incompatible with IE10 policies, and to make it worse, if you installed the IE11 policy pack, they overwrote the IE10 ones. The IE10 policies would remain in place, but you couldn't view or edit them because they'd been overwritten with the IE11 policies.

In a separate issue: IE11 wouldn't install on Vista and older, and there were also numerous update problems where some Windows 7(+) PCs would simply refuse to update (leaving you stuck on IE10), meaning anyone running a reasonably sized network ended up with a mix of both IE10 and IE11 PCs.

These two issues combined meant that every time you wanted to update the policies you had to install IE11 on your domain controller, make all your policy changes (for them to apply to IE11 across the network), then uninstall IE11, and make the same policy changes again for them to apply to IE10. I must have installed/uninstalled IE11 hundreds of times on Server 2008 due to this bug.

Technet and the various forums were full of confused admins, all asking for help with the problem. It remains unfixed to this day.