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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

I will - just as soon as our Sharepoint installation properly supports other browsers.

That ain't going to happen though, is it?

It sounds like you should try to upgrade to a modern employer.

That will solve his problem, but there are millions of employees out there relying on the same old stack and it isn't going to be replaced in the next few years, despite the failing support and the better alternatives. Replacing all those systems will take time and money in large quantities.

Replacing those systems will happen faster if they can't find people willing to maintain that old stack.

These old systems I see at gov and enterprise customers are rarely replaced when no one maintains them, they are held running by small miracles and large stitches. In many non-tech large organizations there are too many legacy systems for anyone to consider replacing them all. Go visit a large hospital near you and start counting how many XP machines they have as control systems and how many access applications they use to register maintenance schedules of those systems. Ever wondered about the OS version of the systems monitoring the water quality in your neighborhood?

The problem will be solved very soon, the new Chromium based Edge has an IE mode.

Interesting. I wonder how compatible the mode will be and with which version. Going to research it, thanks for pointing this out!

edit: oh well, nothing is solved: When these web sites are viewed in Microsoft Edge (Chromium), a full instance of Internet Explorer 11 is running and rendered within the tab.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-gui...

How does that not solve the problem that you detailed? You said replacing all those systems will take time and money. Edge is coming to every supported platform, so if you don't want to update your applications, you don't have to. I'm not sure what else you want Microsoft to do here. They can't make you update your software, only provide a high level of backwards compatibility for those that can't justify the expense on their side. MS is carrying your financial burden by building this out and supporting it. You're free to do what you please, even complain about it, but you aren't going to find better support than that.

I don't know why you got the impression that I'm somehow bashing Microsoft here. I don't think Microsoft have much better approach, having decide to move on from IE and their previous generation stacks.

Anyway, running IE within Edge doesn't solve the problem of users wishing to ditch IE but can't because of compatabilty - it is still running IE process. I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but it seems to be similar to the IE tab extension for Chrome, which exist for years. It just covers instance an IE instance within a Chrome tab. It is better from user perspective comparing to running IE in separate application but from security perspective it is just the same.

Edit: It still not clear how much will actually work, and the support is actually worse than I thought. currently only IE 11 fully support SharePoint, even in the latest 2019 SharePoint version.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/browser-...

I didn't say you were bashing MS, nor did I suggest it. I just don't know what else you want them to do. They absolutely are bending over backwards so that organizations can't continue to use those ancient webapps. There's nothing else they could do from their side. They're going to have the burden of making sure that IE tabs continue to function and remain secure.

My company uses SharePoint and Chrome. What are we missing? As a light user I've not yet missed a thing.

great big list of stuff that only fully works in IE here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/browser-...

Wow, that's a lot of core features. And it sort of makes sense because it's all in ActiveX, and ActiveX is not supported by Edge.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/emie-...

So an ActiveX control written in 1996 can run in Windows 10 Enterprise today via IE11. Neat... I guess.

There are quite a few other things that don't work with, such as calendar overlays - the ability to display multiple calendars on a single calendar page. LOts of other weirdnesses too.

> Enables a webpage to display a contact card and presence status for people. Integrates through client-side APIs with Office client and Skype for Business client.

It's crazy that modern sharepoint version still use ActiveX for something like this imo. I wonder if Microsoft's newer web APIs could be used to reimplinent this functionality without ActiveX

In Microsoft Teams they do, but I find the availability status sometimes conflicts with what the Skype for business app says.

I think you'll just need to rewrite that Sharepoint that app first.

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