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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Microsoft divides its browsers this way.

They seem to be the only one that actually has versions, and [security] updates within a version.

Instead just have a single browser (instead of 5 or more counting from IE6) and any update increments the version. Both Firefox and Chrome work this way.

They would have to allow installing the latest version of IE on any machine all the way back to XP, but there is no reason they can't do that. They just don't want to.

I know they hope people will upgrade the Windows version - but has that ever happened? Has someone ever upgraded Windows just to get a new browser? I highly doubt it, that's not why people upgrade the OS.

So just give it up, let any version of IE run on any version of Windows and stop making developers (and users) crazy.

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I don't think they can. IE's (since IE5) is not your usual standalone browser application - it's an operating system component, that's used in a lot of places, starting right from the desktop. Tighter integration and mutual OS-browser dependence means it's not as easy as saying "ok, let's allow IE10 to run on Vista".

I've heard that, but no one is forcing them to program it that way.

They could do the equivalent of static linking and include the necessary components in the browser instead of the OS.

That's more or less what the Utilu IE Collection does I think.

Yeah, they could do that now, but that doesn't help the IE 6, 7, 8 problems, does that?

Yes it does. They could ship a statically-linked copy of Edge to Windows Vista (and even XP) users via Windows Update. The old IE DLLs would have to stay there to be used by the system, but the actual web browser could be a newer one.

That's a terrible idea from a security standpoint.

If they're stopping delivering security updates for those versions of IE then it's better than nothing. Actually assuming they keep the statically linked Edge updated via windows update then I don't see any issues (as annoying as a large update to a statically linked program will be).

Microsoft Edge is a Universal Windows App, i.e. uses APIs that exist on Windows 10 only. And Microsoft is not backporting that.

It's the other way round: programs include the browser as a COM component. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752040%28VS.85%29...

So on the older operating systems, programs that shipped with the OS will be embedding the browser as a COM component, usually for help purposes. If they're rendering local HTML (or generated HTML!) then they require that to keep working. So that particular interface has to be maintained, making it very difficult to upgrade.

Microsoft were kind of correct in the "browser choice" lawsuit that they'd used the browser as an OS component, and everyone else was correct that this was kind of a bad idea.

On the other hand, how do you embed a browser component in a forward-compatible way?

On the other hand, how do you embed a browser component in a forward-compatible way?

Use a consistent API and just upgrade the rendering engine, while maintaining quirks mode. It's not as much of a problem anymore because HTML5 specifies consistent parsing and rendering behavior for new and old documents.

Embedded rendering of local HTML doesn't need security updates, so that's not a major problem. You can leave it alone while you update the actual browser.

> Microsoft were kind of correct in the "browser choice" lawsuit that they'd used the browser as an OS component, and everyone else was correct that this was kind of a bad idea.

Unfortunately, Microsoft signed a consent decree with the DoJ in 1995 which allowed them to add features to the operating system but meant they couldn't tie a separate program to the operating system. Therefore the browser had to be an added feature.

This was only a tiny part of a much broader decree. None the less, you can thank Janet Reno and the US government for the problems this has caused ever since ;-)

The consent decree is a large part of why we have browser (and OS!) choice at the moment. Imagine the world where IE6 won and use of ActiveX controls on websites was routine.

I don't see how that follows, seeing as the IE dominance era came years after the consent decree was signed (2000-2003).

The implication is that absent the consent decree IE would have been more dominant in that era, and that the dominance would have lasted longer than it did. This is plausible, since a world of sites built with non-web-standard crap would have been barren ground for nascent Firefox. It was for that exact purpose that IE has always been the way it has been, and would have been worse without the decree. Yeah, we're grateful for XHR, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

But the consent decree didn't impede the creation of non-web-standard crap, and in fact XHR was made after it was signed, so how did it help?

Remember that "the decree does not address any of Microsoft's applications software." It only regarded their dealings with OEMs.

To quote myself from earlier...

The IE6 era (2001 to 2005 or 2006) was a period of great creativity, and it was when a lot of dominant web properties became established. Examples include Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Second Life, The Pirate Bay, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, OpenStreetMap, YouTube, MegaUpload, Pandora and Twitter.

Web 2.0 became popular during that era (2004 onwards).

That "stagnation" compares rather well with much of the flashy, transient rubbish being launched nowadays.

Also, when it came out, IE6 was the most standards-compliant browser and generally performed better than its main rivals.

> On the other hand, how do you embed a browser component in a forward-compatible way?

Android uses a WebView component. If an app wants to display a webpage, it can make use of this to render HTML. I imagine iOS uses something similar.

I believe this component is compiled separately for different versions of Android, and Android will only update to the newest compatible version.

Docs: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi...

Store page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Not even counting all the things like COM integration and embedded browser components in WinForms and the like...

I do some work with various embedded extension APIs in different office and collaboration tools, and it's quite a mess trying to figure out what those web browsers actually are

I remember that installing an older version of IE on Windows 95 enabled some features like the Quick Launch bar in the task bar. Previously, I believed that this was a feature exclusive to the newer Windows 98 but that IE installation backported a lot of the visible Windows 98 changes into the Windows 95 Explorer.

That was Internet Explorer 4. It was however an optional part of the installation and if you installed IE5 without installing IE4 before, you couldn't get it.

Messy.

...it's an operating system component, that's used in a lot of places...

This is a strategy tax, for a strategy that stopped being reasonable a decade ago. Numerous alternate browsers have had no problems competing with an "integrated" IE, for many years now. The DOJ case was settled by a completely different set of executives, so the current bunch don't have to pretend that OS integration is somehow vital to the function of a browser. Someone should draft a memo to the browser department: that stupid shit you were supposed to do 15 years ago? stop doing that. An organization that continues with such a farce for so many years is puzzling.

They did exactly this with Edge, which - AFAIK - is not a system component, but a standalone application, just like the others.

Sure that's the plan, but it doesn't seem to have actually rolled out to any users yet? Why do they need IE 11 if Edge is ready to go?

Probably because Edge is a Metro/ModernUI app that doesn't work on Vista and 7.

So... not actually standalone. Chrome and Firefox don't have that dependency. I guess that memo still hasn't been sent.

But it's perfectly normal to depend on some OS parts and have minimum version requirements. Happens with everything out there, just that thresholds are different. Any recent Chrome doesn't run on Windows XP. IE11 doesn't run on Vista. Edge doesn't run on 7. Safari 7 doesn't run on OS X 10.8.

What do you propose to MS - to spend time supporting Windows Vista? Or make a browser that supports it? Bet they just don't care about Vista, besides security patches and alike stuff that they have to do under various enterprise contracts. Given that they go lengths to persuade 7 & 8.x users into upgrading to 10, doubt they care much about those versions, too.

Any recent Chrome doesn't run on Windows XP.

I'm regularly in an office that is rife with XP. I won't be in that office to check the exact versions on all the installed Chromes for a couple of weeks, but they certainly seem up-to-date.

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