Internet Explorer 11 has retired and is officially out of support
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
- creating sprite sheets of transparent png corners and sides that one could arrange in a table around an element to create drop-shadows and rounded corners
- putting single pixel, transparent gifs at the end of floated containers because clearfix used a "before" CSS selector that earlier IEs didn't know about.
- writing CSS rules like -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=75)"; to make something semi-transparent...
And so much more. Back then, we were certain we'd open a bottle of champagne once IE is not a requirement anymore.
Today, fortunately, I have a different Job and Microsoft makes different browsers. But looking back, I wouldn't have believed this day to arrive.
There was Firebug Light, which from memory was a bookmarklet that injected a cut down firebug into the page, but even that didn’t help much.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/office/dev/add-ins/develop/...
I say this as someone who has historically been very anti-Microsoft, that used to do all my work in Linux. Modern Windows with VSCode, running WSL, is something the Microsoft of the IE6 era would never have produced.
I'm using Linux and/or BSD on all my private machines, but from an outsider's perspective Microsoft appears to have undergone some significant changes since Nadella took over. From what I know, if someone had suggested making the .Net runtime open source in, say, 2008, under Ballmer, they would have been treated like a heretic.
There's still plenty to complain about, it's gotten more nuanced.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that Microsoft - and surely many other companies of that size - are like a feudal system internally, with different teams/divisions doing things their own way, not necessarily playing nice with the others if it doesn't suit their own agenda.
At least Ballmer didn't try to milk me for my data.
I remember its first version and my first impression was "WTF". Nowadays it's pretty usable. IE of its era really wasn't. You can switch to anything else if you don't want to use VSCode. IE ... you either couldn't (on a company-issued computer) or you didn't know how (at home). Nadella's Microsoft is a far cry from Ballmer's.
Some would suggest that it's closer to open-core: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605975
Google doesn't like the web, either. They control it at both ends. Search and the browser. Every web site today is built to conform to Google's blackbox SEO cargo cult. And Google performs an update regularly to their algorithm. At which point all websites have to do an SEO dance and hope it rains again. Google does this to prevent people from focusing on other search engines. If you always have to update for Google, then there is no time to focus on Bing or other avenues. Chrome also keeps people on Google search.
We don't have an open web today. We have three platforms. We have the Microsoft Windows platform, the Apple App Store platform, and the Google Web Platform.
And Facebook basically learned the lessons AOL failed to, on how to operate a walled garden on the internet.
Now that sounds really far fetched. It's like claiming Apple's developer documentation is so terrible to make sure devs have no time left to develop for other platforms :)
What would you say if Google never changed its algorithm? Surely, that would be evidence of a stagnant monopolist no longer finding it necessary to invest in the product.
Somewhat related: I had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Fernando Pérez (Jupyter) a while back. He made a very similar point, saying "there are only 3 computers today: Azure, AWS, and GCP". I'm not quite cynical enough believe that Google or MS would ever do something to lock down their cloud services to only their consumer products, I think the scale of this oligopoly can't really be understated, and it seems that we're moving away from personal computers and back to the time-sharing systems from before.
"Google hasn't been a perfect ally to the Web, but Google's incentives do align far better than Apple's ongoing opposition.
Apple can be ruthless because the Web is a competing platform for them—versus Google's situation where the Web is critical to revenue. Both companies are just acting in their own business interests (even if Google's interests happen to align with what I view as "good").
That's why Safari spent a decade Grover Norquisting the Web. No one told them to—and I'd bet most of them even believe they're saving the Web. But Apple's incentives have long been against the Web, and that won't change unless the incentives change.
Of course, even if Google's incentives are more aligned, they're… messy… and certainly not perfect. So, it is smart to maintain informed suspicion of Google's influence over the Web. That stated, I do see Chromium itself as a very strong hedge."
They are not.
They just took Chrome and added their logo and theme around.
Just like Apple's Safari is built on WebKit. You wouldn't say that other vendors like Sony just took Safari and put their logo on the browser for the browser on PlayStation.
It's the same engine, not the same browser.
> Windows releases where Internet Explorer will still be available after June 15, 2022, include Windows 7 ESU, Windows 8.1, and all versions of Windows 10 LTSC client, IoT, and Server.
> "The Internet Explorer (IE) 11 desktop application will end support for Windows 10 semi-annual channel starting June 15, 2022," Microsoft says on the IE11 lifecycle page.
> As Microsoft further explains, "for supported operating systems, Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the Windows version on which it is installed."
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/internet-exp...
I gotta say... MS is serious about long-term support commitments and backwards compat!
The way I look at it, MS obviously is actually continuing to support the product, they are just choosing not to make it available to most people. It's still supported, just not for everyone.
I feel that if security patches are still being produced, they should be released as opposed to expecting people to use nothing, or roll their own by getting patches from a third party.
They could be released as "donations" to the public good from the big customers.
But more than likely it is because deploying to that 1 customer is always going to be easier that deploying it publically.
I am by no means a fan of Microsoft's, but when you release an OS and some applications and provide security fixes for ten years, asking for people who want to continue using that OS/app beyond that point to buy a support contract is not a complete dick move. In the FLOSS world, you may get volunteers who maintain a piece of software as a labor of love, but with something like Windows or IE, someone needs to pay people to do that work.
It might make sense to create something like a foundation to take care of the long term support for software, which would benefit everyone. I'm kind of surprised actually that this has not happened, yet (to my knowledge, at least).
25 years after the release of IE4, I'm just glad both of those browser codebases are now dead.
IE was really done in by Microsoft's "Longhorn" OS project. After Windows XP, Microsoft was planning a very ambitious update that would completely reset core APIs. File systems would be largely replaced by an OS-level database, and the Win32 GUI API would be replaced by an XML-based UI framework codenamed Avalon.
A new Avalon browser would ship with the OS, and thus IE + HTML would become legacy technologies as Microsoft confidently assumed most developers would flock to building their web apps in Avalon instead.
To Microsoft strategists, it seemed that they had succeeded in containing the web: Netscape was dead, Mozilla had almost no users, Apple was shipping their IE in Mac OS X, Google wasn't on Microsoft's radar, and the HTML standard process was stalled. So while a lot of content was being delivered as HTML4, there didn't seem to be any reason left for Microsoft to invest in IE — they'd already nailed the browser, owned the market, and would push Avalon as the next step.
Fortunately, Longhorn failed. Some parts of the project eventually shipped years late as Windows Vista. Avalon became WPF + XAML and still exists in Windows, but the dream of a XAML browser replacing IE was dead.
Especially the Mac version of IE 5. Tasman was such a breath of fresh air. I never understood why they didn't use that engine everywhere.
Only as a preview for web 3. Netscape, even when crashing, was faster and more user friendly. Error messages in IE were surrealistic. Unfortunately those are today standard in todays browsers.
I actually just discovered the same comic also has a voice-over: https://youtu.be/8rygV_MeudA
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
This will make IE very insisting to upgrade to Edge if possible.
That said, it all came to an end after Microsoft "won" and disbanded the IE dev team, resulting in that era of stagnation we all remember.
No.
We never really used the answer against anyone if they couldn't think of anything, but the advent of XHR and other improvements offered was something a lot of developers had already forgotten about, and it was interesting to see various responses and reactions.
But I really dug into SPA/AJAX web apps in 2000 - building enterprise stuff. They were all "IE6 apps". IE6 was basically my X-windows. No other browsers were supported, and there as no pushback from customers back then. Only one of those apps made the transition to IE11.
Last year I explained to my current client that our big enterprise reporting app had to move off IE11. And I was really surprised how much pushback on got on that.
IEMode in Edge also works very well
So if these companies are getting windows updates at all, or edge updates at all is somewhat not optional
The funny part is the app they use still works, you're just forced to run it in compatibility mode on Edge (Holy, I forgot this existed) but their user profiles have limited access so they can't right-click, properties, unless they have admin priv.
New browser, same old 2009 problems. Obviously this is not the browsers fault, it's just insane to hear about shops like this that still hold on to legacy apps FOREVER.
Bosses never want to spend a cent, because of the "shareholders". They also don't want to say "yes" to something because if there is an issue, it is then their fault even if it was worth doing. They would rather kick the can down the road until the wheels come flying off the car.
This is why nothing ever gets updated.
IT: Well IE is end of life so we need to Spend X to upgrade
That is an IT reason, not a Business Reason.
It needs to be put into a BUSINESS reason, and I admit I am terrible at that as well
Which yeah, doesn't mean absolutely anything for existing software that is still working and requires the old version to run. If by any chanche you need to support that configuration, the "official" deprecation simply means "good luck!" and a pat on the back.
Just like XP, I've seen plenty of shops with custom software that still requires XP+IE6+activex that still get active development, because a total rewrite is out of the question when changes are small (and that is totally understandable as well).
The poor folks though will need to containerize and isolate everything from any network though to keep it somewhat safer. If they do that at all.
This news is meaningless. This confirms it:
> For supported operating systems, Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the Windows version on which it is installed.
From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-expl...
Having a IE mode for whitelisted websites would have killed IE11 on public internet a long time ago.
“Website broken? Click here to try IE11 mode.”
But no, IE is still on the desktop and people will use it for both intranet and internet
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/15/microsoft...
Any apps / mainframes / industrials systems that needs IE to run?
A fine is a bad idea since companies should be able to take risk freely as long as this risk isn't socialized. I don't get fined for leaving my door unlocked, because it is my prerogative whether I take that risk. If risky behaviour affects others, then fines would be appropriate (e.g. managing customer data)
Probably outdated version or not a hard requirement...
That is so ironic. Love it.
There is also "Internet Explorer Mode" in Edge, which uses iexplore.exe under the hood.
Additionally, if somebody were _really_ desperate to launch iexplore.exe itself, then there are unsupported means to do so.
For example, via manually modifying the registry key "NotifyDisableIEOptions" under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\
My favourite hack though, which should not be used by anyone ever, is launching via the COM object interface, which bypasses the registry key check [2]. I have personally verified that this works(!)
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/i...
[2] https://twitter.com/aaaddress1/status/1523590203658862592
A bit more effort, can also lock the control to only browse to the intended web service, and launch the default browser for any external links.
There's kind of a market for this type of solution in the legacy enterprise app space I think.
As a sibling comment stated, you use the registry to tell the WebView what version of IE you want to emulate (on a per app basis).
Interestingly, Edge for Linux doesn't support spnego at all.
The lack of support for spnego in edge for linux isn’t entirely surprising though I am curious what the excuse is.
The vendor allegedly has an update coming soon to allow other browsers to work.
Yeah.
- crisper and higher-contrast font rendering on low-DPI monitors
- Ctrl+N/Ctrl+K clone the current tab into a new window/tab including its history, letting you “fork” the tab and effectively navigate a history tree. Edit: And, maybe more importantly, opening a link in new window/tab also clones the history.
- generally good keyboard usage, e.g. for the history tab (you can for example always blindly hit Ctrl+H, Home, Enter to go to the last visited page, something which is more fiddly in other browsers)
- larger viewport height than possible on Chrome/Firefox/Edge (after hiding the toolbar and status bar, configuring tabs to be on the address bar, etc.)
- allows yellow search highlighting (which Firefox doesn’t on light backgrounds)
You can do this in Firefox by middle (or Control) clicking the Reload button.
Firefox does some semi-functional hack for handling quotation marks, but gives up on "content:", while Chrome and all other Blink-based browsers don't handle that kind of text at all and just skip it entirely. (No idea about Safari, but given its shared rendering engine history with Chrome it presumably doesn't handle it, either.)
Does anyone (especially from MS) know why later versions of IE and pre-chromium Edge were so good and snappy with scrolling? The level of accuracy and speed was incredible (on touchpads at least) - it was probably the last time I had an interaction on a computer that made me go "wow".
They really went all out on input lag reduction for Windows 8 touch interfaces. I remember some videos from the time where they showed off such low input lag that scrolling and drawing almost perfectly tracked finger movement. Perhaps not so impressive today with iOS as a benchmark, but Windows is still king for desktop input lag
The King is dead, long live the King.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_...
var request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
* html { _background:black !ie; }
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/ltsc/ [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/windows#what-...
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/05/23/annou...:
> The Windows 10 China Government Edition is based on Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, which already includes many of the security, identity, deployment, and manageability features governments and enterprises need. The China Government Edition will use these manageability features to remove features that are not needed by Chinese government employees like OneDrive, to manage all telemetry and updates, and to enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms within its computer systems.
Why would you even announce something like this in a cute PR blog post? Only thing I could think of is it's to impress shareholders with the fact that they're trusted by a rich and powerful government organization. Maybe that's a good enough reason alone.
Internet Explorer had dominant market share, non-standardized features, and powerful corporate backing.
Chrome has dominant market share, non-standardized features, and powerful corporate backing.
Safari doesn't have the newest standards always, but mostly sticks to the standards from what I know. The major difference seems to be a lot of devs liking Chrome.
-Coupled to OS updates, meaning that people on older versions of the OS will also have an older browser, with worse standards support (thankfully apples upgrade policies aren't as bad as android manufacturers, or this would be way worse)
-lagging behind on standard features with less frequent, big updates that still often end up missing crucial things (my prime example is how long it took them to support webp, which they thankfully finally support now, but there's plenty of others)
Chrome got the non-standard extensions and dominant market-share.
Safari got deliberately lagging behind standards and trying to hold back the web so that people have to build native apps.
Likewise on Windows itself, Microsoft will have to continue shipping IE's rendering engine for backwards compatibility with all those programs using the old web view control (as well as Edge's hidden IE11-mode).
I made to the web UI of a firmware device, and needed to check whether it will work with old browsers as far back as IE9.
Because IE11 has an emulation mode, I didn't have to install IE9.
Thank you, IE11!
:)
(note, they say they are compatible with Edge etc. But sadly they are really not)
Thank you, IE - and good riddance!
only webkit is left
the king is dead, long live the king.
If they had wanted to stop IE but keep competing they would have made Edge a Gecko-based browser and worked on it.
At least it's not hard wired into the OS and we're not going through another era of mega-corp hard wiring browsers into their OSes any more.
Oh wait.
https://www.developer-tech.com/news/2019/apr/17/mozilla-goog...
This can happen again, we just need to collectively stop feeding these monopoly wannabes.
I switched back to Firefox a while ago for ideological reasons, but the majority of people are not going to switch to something that is more or less the same, just without their bookmarks, passwords and history.
Thats not to say Safari isn’t dragging it’s heals, but it looks like Apple are finally ramping up development speed. I gather they have been expanding the Safari dev team, and the latest announcements at WWDC look really good.
I actually use Safari as my primary browser, I prefer it (as a user) to Chrome. Although for debugging Chrome dev tools are better, I probably open it 2-3 times a day to check stuff, but never leave it running.
There's only one reason Web Apps are not currently viable on mobile, and unless you're down in the trenches building these apps these issues are invisible.
IE was actually very innovative, did stuff like AJAX before everyone else and the developers adopted the ways of IE. Websites did not work well on other browsers, every website had a disclaimer at the bottom: Works best in IE.
Now I see similar situation with Chrome and gives me goosebumps. Some people say that Safari is the new IE but I think they got it wrong, I think the new IE is Google Chrome.
IE become bad when Microsoft dropped the ball and made it into a browser with a reputation to crash all the time and bring down Windows with it.
IE6 was hated by the developers because it had the largest userbase but had non-standart features, which meant that CSS and HTML and JS had to be written in a way to accommodate IE and Mozilla.
Today Chrome is very good but if Google takes something from the Microsoft playbook, we will be screwed. Some already say that Chrome is not what it used to be and Google no longer abides by the "do no evil" motto. They are even notorious to favour their own services, i.e. if you sign in into a Google website, Chrome treats that website differently than the rest, assumes that session as the browser account.
Anyway, that's not the point. IE wasn't bad because it was a shitty browser. It was bad because it had features that other browsers did not have and it was very popular because it was very innovative and it was heavily marketed. This resulted in websites being made for IE only, which resulted in a lockdown of huge userbase that even Microsoft couldn't get rid of once decided to get rid of IE.
Safari is nothing like that and there's no Safari lockdown. On the other hand, Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share, forcing web developers to make everything for Chrome. That's exactly like IE.
If anything, Apple's refusal to allow the Chrome engine into iOS is the only thing that keeps us from complete lockdown into Chrome.
Also, what matters in a browser it's the engine. If it's always WebKit and you find a issue or something else in iOS you can switch the browser but the result will always be the same since Chrome and Firefox are forced to use WebKit.
Chrome's engine it's Chromium which is open-source and used by other browsers like Microsoft Edge for example, so I don't see as much of an issue with Google Chrome, since you're not actually forced to use it.
> Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share
Even Firefox has it's own non-standard features and I don't see people complaining about it.
Maybe they never will do it but I simply don't want Google has the option to go to the next step.
I'm more concerned about Apple nowadays, they're doing everything to keep people locked down on their own ecosystem.
Apple makes a lot of money but Apple is an underdog with it's tiny market share. Apple can and does evil stuff but it's nothing compared to the potential of Google.
No thanks. Apple might be in their rights to control their own platform but I like my Web free, not wholly owned by Google or anyone else.
IE post-dates the addition of process isolation to Windows - IE never brought down Windows because it ran as a normal process. When people say IE was integrated into Windows they just mean applications like the shell used it as a component, it wasn't actually in the kernel.
Safari is now the browser that resists web standards and an open internet for its parent company's personal gain. See: PWAs, webgl, webview.
And Chrome is now the thousand pound gorilla forcing standards nobody wants, for its parent company's personal gain. See: manifest v3, cookie security.
The problem starts when you implement alternative standards and you have a market share to make people code for your standard. In this situation, your users don't suffer but everyone else suffer, that's what I call villain.
Check Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Exterminate strategy. This is the evil thing, making browser that doesn't adopt some web standards is not evil.
The only property that benefits from dragging your heels on webgl 2.0 adoption is the App Store, which could see its influence and revenue easily be cannibalized by progressive web apps using modern gpu rendering. And would you look at that, those are exactly the two web standards Safari has dragged its heels on.
We're going to have to agree to disagree because your argument you've made twice now without adaptation is a bit absurd. If Safari doesn't implement it it must not be important? I am now conscious of my original comment being inexplicably downvoted and I'm worried I might be banging my head against Apple fanboys instead of having a discussion about corporate influence over web standards. There is considerable evidence for this and I've given it in this thread.
Welcome to the most popular OS in the world, called 'Android'.
- A GDPR-style mandate to make cloud apps secure by certifying all libraries and upstream authors that run your stack, down to the OS,
- Thus cloud providers providing “Debian, only for amateur purposes, PII forbidden”,
- And “Amazon Linux, certified GDPR III, all upstream identified.”
That would be the end of free software. But at the same time, it would be the only reasonable move from EU, it drives me crazy that websites all use random NPM modules, half of them written by Russians we’re at war with.
In the IE era, if you wanted a "web application", you simply used Flash. There was a clear separation between the document and the application. It was nice. I miss it.
Not that GNOME is any better, suffering as it does from the same tabletitis disease that has infected today's UI designers.