Microsoft man: "My job is to destroy IE6" | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft man: "My job is to destroy IE6"

pcpro.co.uk

31 pointsjaybol26 comments

Microsoft obviously knows that the only way to kill IE6 is to say it is unsupported software and to stop releasing security updates for it. Until that happens, IT departments will continue to cling to it as part of the default install of Windows XP.

Except, that will never happen before the support lifecycle expires. It would be devastating to their enterprise sales. One reason you buy Microsoft at a large company is because they promise support for 10 years. If they renege on that with IE6, it would get too much exposure and enterprise IT departments would revolt and MS would start losing ground in one of their last strongholds.

Exactly. Microsoft's enterprise business is built on backwards compatibility, and they've already had a few breakages in recent years, with (most things in) Vista, and the recent announcement that Windows Mobile apps won't run in Windows Phone 7.

Well, isn't that ten year support timeline due for expiration in the next year or so? I'm going from memory here so please correct me if not.

That would be for the initial release, but not for the service packs unfortunately. IE6 was still standard (and had some security enhancements) in XP SP2.

If Microsoft were serious about this they'd have released a ChromeFrame-style compatibility mode when IE8 came out which would allow admins to use group policy[1] to load the old rendering engine for poorly supported (i.e. all) enterprise webapps and use the modern engine everywhere else.

This is the same approach which will be necessary to address endemic security and reliability failures caused by bad architectural choices made for single-user desktops in the 90s. Since they finally shipped MED-V I suspect they'll probably use that approach and tell corporate customers that the only way to continue running IE6 is in an XP VM with some sort of on-demand launch scheme.

1. Setting an HTTP header would be easier but seems likely to allow phishers to opt-in to security holes and there's an argument that pushing the support cost off to app owners is better any way.

The problem is also compounded by the fact that a lot of companies (especially insurance and finance) have corporate intranets that are designed to run on IE6 exclusively. For these people not supporting IE6 is not an option, until the intranets themselves get rewritten.

Yet, despite such efforts, Microsoft has announced that it won't be bringing Internet Explorer 9 to Windows XP, leaving users of that operating system without access to the most modern browser.

You can see they're between a rock and a hard place - they don't want to annoy business customers by cutting off support for XP, but they don't want to spend significant resources bringing new software to an incredibly old platform.

turning off support for IE6 in a bid to push customers towards later versions was "unacceptable"

So not really then.

At least their own new apps (Sharepoint 2010, online versions of Office) won't run in IE6, so that's pushing people towards newer versions.

The problem is, even if we get rid of IE6 today, IE7 will be the problem tomorrow, then IE8 the next day. It's not hard to foresee a time when we're all moaning about how terrible IE9 is (if we're not already).

Have you looked into IE 9? Everything I've seen leads me to believe that Microsoft has finally started listening. All that loss of market share has finally had the right effect.

Even if IE9 catches up 100%, it will still be frozen in time at its point of release until IE10 is released several years later, where other browsers will be regularly releasing new versions every few weeks/months (with almost 90% take-up).

Except they've neglected to support XP, so anyone stuck on XP is stuck on IE8 unless they switch to an alternate browser.

They say that in a year or so, whenever they get around to actually releasing IE9, then people won't be using XP as much because they'll have upgraded to their much better offerings.

But that's what they said about IE6 too, and it's upgrades were free and didn't require complete re-installs. Basically, you're relying on the physical machine upgrade cycle to kill old IE browsers.

Also: canvas support?

IE6 was everything IE9 is, 10 years ago. IE9 will be everything IE6 is, 10 years from now.

It's orders of magnitude easier to develop something that works cross-browser today than it was ten years ago, even for quite advanced stuff. Back then, you basically had to develop two parallel sites (one for IE and one for NS) if you wanted it to do anything moderately fancy.

You still could easily find you need to, even with IE 8.

Sure, simple box positioning is easier and most of the stock jQuery UI library works fine, but it's precisely when you try to do anything moderately fancy that IE can quickly because a major hassle.

Aren't you a bit nervous about how they're talking about supporting HTML 5 but they appear to be strategically neglecting section 4.8.11 of the spec?

Canvas, for those who don't know and don't want to search for it.

The problem with canvas, as correctly identified on the IE blog, is that no-one has yet worked out what to do with it from an accessibility perspective. Other browsers just report it to screen-readers (and other similar technologies) as a graphical block, whereas it obviously contains a lot more crucial information than that, and there's no standard for how that should be represented.

This has always been Microsoft's excuse: there aren't clear standards, and it's definitely partially true.

But they seem to be the only one of all the other substantial browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera) that just isn't even close. Why don't they just try what Firefox does? Make all our lives a little easier for once...

Probably because Mozilla and Opera aren't easy targets for lawsuits from disability groups and governments in the same way that Microsoft has a bullseye painted on it.

Maybe ... but they are very serious about accessibility, going back to at least when they did the NT rollout in San Francisco where they made sure to put in everyone's hands a short paper on the subject.

If someone could point out where they've clearly used accessibility as an excuse vs. being truly serious about it I'd be interested.

Godspeed, Mr. Gavin, Godspeed.

IE7 too would be nice while you're at it :)

Cool, then we can start hating IE7! Remember the old days when IE 5.5 was the most hated browser?

Why wont they just admit defeat and built IE around WebKit?

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