Microsoft forced people to install their browser (2010)
toastytech.com
toastytech.com
At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. I don't think this would even raise an eyebrow now. They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers. /s of course this is a problem developers do not need to deal with anymore!
The Microsoft we are dealing with now gives you warnings if you are trying to install another browser and makes it difficult to change your default browser. And in that space Apple has done way worse: breaking internet standards by deprecating flash (and other unsupported features), banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely. And using their dominant position to force the deprecation of internet standards is another thing google is not shy about either.
Flash was never an "internet standard"; it was a proprietary product of Adobe.
OK, it depends on what you mean by "internet standard"; in general, I take "X standard" to mean a specification for X issued by some standards body, such that a third-party can implement X by following the spec.
Granted, there were reason to abandon it. But I can understand people being upset with it gone.
You're meaning that sarcastically, yeah?
> They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers
I do not think this is an accurate representation of history.
First, Microsoft was fighting against the whole concept of a browser as separate from its OS. The fact that one can 'change your default browser', as you so casually say, without changing your OS was a major victory in itself that people worked very hard to ensure.
Second, it was not just 'features' that Microsoft added to IE. They were actively ignoring standards and with Frontpage people could easily generate web pages that looked fine in IE but were a complete mess of impenetrable HTML for other browsers. And when you complained about this the owner would simply add a 'best viewed in IE' icon on their website and start blaming you instead...
In short, at the time it was not at all obvious that a large majority of the web would remain accessible using any other browser than IE. (And similarly for email clients, by the way.) I agree with you that there is still plenty of shady behavior going on, but I am not sure that I would classify the old practices as 'fairly benign'.
you mean, just like the Good Guy ChromeOS?
At some point, the ideas of a browser, and an OS, seemed to converge a lot - expose more of the machine to the browser (webapps), provide task and memory management for the sites and webapps... More and more functionality overlapped. From that point of view, maybe the argument to see them as connected made a lot of sense - the deeper the integration, the less double work might be happening, maybe. The cost, however, is always portability, or at least interoperability.
But as much as "having common code everywhere is good", I think switching all browsers to Chromium is not the way to go either.
History repeats itself, and this is now commonplace with Chrome.
FrontPage wasn't a Microsoft product, and was doing its whole thing with the "_vti_" directories before Microsoft acquired them.
Event better: I had a period of time where Edge would freeze before showing any content. So clicking a web result from start menu would just open an empty, unresponsive window. Windows would then tell me the window is unresponsive and ask if I want to kill it. Classic Microsoft quality. It's like that old org chart meme where Microsoft's departments are pointing guns at each other, played out directly in the OS, Conway's Law style. Very amusing.
You’re correct on that, Microsoft created a new link type ‘microsoft-edge:’, so that no matter what browser you use. Query’s from the search bar always get sent to Edge. They pulled a very similar move with Outlook where it now opens all links in edge, instead of in the users default browser. But for now, you can still toggle that setting back.
If you want windows searches to open in your default browser, you have to use https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect
Also as there is only one browser engine, the system only contains the bugs that are in one browser engine. Most operating systems have bugs in the browser engine that comes with the OS, and bugs in the engine users actually use which is more bugs.
If Orion can do it, why not Firefox ?
Adobe claimed that it could have gotten Flash working on the original iPhone in 2007 if Apple had allowed it.
When Flash did finally come to mobile in 2010, it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz CPU on Android and then it barely worked and wrecked hell on the battery.
The original iPhone came with 128MB of RAM and a 400 MHz CPU. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
I had flash 5 running just fine on my 2004 palm with 32MB of RAM and a 312 MHz CPU.
This also would have been Macromedia though and not Adobe, not sure how many of the original developers they kept.
Do you really think that Adobe could have optimized Flash to support hardware that had eight times less RAM and was half as fast four years earlier?
How quickly people forget the security nightmare that was Flash at the time. Every other week it was some new exploit that allowed rootkits to be installed straight from flash ads.
Adobe couldn’t keep up and was actively encouraging folks to move to HTML5 based web animations or Air/Flex runtimes for local app development and animation.
IOS never supported flash. That is not the same as “depreciating” it.
So let's say you're running a Linux distro and you install a browser. That browser then overwrites files elsewhere on the system making it nearly impossible to eradicate.
That's benign? Sounds more like a cancer to me.
Though, I do agree that Microsoft has steadily returned to being somehow even more gross post Windows 7. I've refused to upgrade to Windows 11 on my gaming PC. Never thought I'd be one of those people, but Microsoft's overall trend of gathering data and peddling their own sub-part solutions with blatant disregard for users is just not something I can support.
If it gets to a point where Windows 10 no longer supports the games I want to run, I'll revisit then whether they've come to their senses, but all of the recent news seems to indicate that won't be the case, so chances are I'll just give up on PC gaming entirely.
That is not true, there are over 100 web browsers on iOS, you can find them all through App store. You probably meant they all need to use the same web rendering engine optimized for iOS - WebKit. But that does not prevent them from achieving their purpose for their makers, if anything, arguably helps them as WebKit is much more performant, integrated and optimised to run on Apple devices (including macOS) than other rendering engines. Plus this is the only thing that is keeping us from a world where we have only one web rendering engine, and it would be one created by the world's largest advertising company. That would be, let's say, suboptimal outcome for the web.
Yes.
Running Windows 11, I use Chromium for my daily usage and Pale Moon for specific tasks, along with Edge for things I want to cordon in another browser altogether.
Windows 11 hasn't given me grief in my so far ~1.5 years of daily driving it, and I don't necessarily hold Edge's nagging against it since it's browsers catfighting each other. Chrome and Firefox also act likewise when given the chance.
I will note that I have Windows Update completely blocked and disabled via Group Policy, which means my system settings never get reset under the guise of "updates" every month unlike most people's setups. In fact, I'm still running 21H2, NT kernel version 10.0.22000.1281.
Windows 11 is quite well behaved if the administrator actually wields his administrative powers, as it turns out.
Been working this way since Windows Update has been a thing, and I've never been let down. Judging by the many tales of people getting grief from Windows Update, I'm perfectly content to continue as I have. I will run system updates when it pleases me, and no sooner.
Citation? Running a Wineserver should use less resources than a complete Win32 runtime.
Maybe things have changed since my last test (Ubuntu on my ~2011 MBA installed ~12mo ago)
Yup. I use my computer to achieve things, whether extraordinary or mundane. I could run most of my software through WINE or some form of virtualization on Linux, but at the cost of jank. Why would I bother with inferior experience for sake of dogma? It's not even all my software either.
>Corporate compliance?
While compliance doesn't apply in my case, doing business dictates my computer be generally compatible with the other party's computer. So that means Windows and Office.
>Familiarity?
Yup. Windows is reliable, MacOS is limited and Linux just wastes my time.
And you think this administrator is you rather than some botnet master taking advantage of your unpatched system? :-)
Potentially letting criminals control my machine in order to avoid giving slightly more control over my machine to Microsoft than they already have seems like the wrong choice to me.
If I was so concerned about Microsoft's updates that I would even consider this option, I would be urgently looking to replace Microsoft as my OS vendor. And if that wasn't an option (because lock-in) I would hold my nose and choose Microsoft over organised crime.
That sound unhinged... “so I we handcuffed our manager in my dungeon last year, and since the team has been doing great work; frankly our boss is quite well-behaved if the scrum master actually wields their power”
Everyone's threat models are different, mine simply doesn't care about most system-level vulnerabilities. I have had far more of my time and nerves wasted in the past by Windows Update compared to the supposed threats those updates protect against; the cure is worse than the disease.
What is your plan here? Do you manually update after some time, or do you plan on running that version until you reinstall Windows 11? Do you reinstall with an updated ISO?
Generally I don't reinstall Windows as I don't mistreat my Windows installations. As we speak, I've got a 15-year old XP install and an 11-year old Windows 7 install running perfectly fine on their machines (a Pentium 4 and i7-2700K machine respectively).
Better to use a long term servicing channel (LTSC) than disable Windows Update entirely.
The LTSC versions of Windows only get security updates, not feature updates.
> 4, when installed on Windows 95 or NT 4, would replace or update many system files with its own special versions, which sometimes broke functionality of other applications, and made it almost impossible to re-install these OSes once IE 4 was installed.
powershell -Command "& {Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=win64&lang=en-US' -OutFile 'Firefox.exe'}"
Edit: Actually now that I think about it I'm saving this to avoid using Edge myself in the future. Thank you!
is the same as
-Command “thing”
Assuming you haven't turned off web results in Win11 start menu, try searching for something and click on one of the Bing results. Those used to open Edge, and it certainly wasn't the only program that ignored user preferences.
You mean like every other person that has ever lived?
Another abhorrent Microsoft Windows 11 feature is the tacky ads plastered all over the beautiful Lock Screen images. Oh, check out this beautiful picture {GIVE US MORE MONEY FOR COPILOT TO TAKE YOUR MIND}!
Truly, they fail to grasp the lesson of this random YouTube video https://youtu.be/MG7y8J0DXhU?si=lM46uNRGoVGrVDHL
That's a funny way of spelling Firefox
This one is funny in retrospect, because nowadays we would probably say that replacing a custom parser with a standard out-of-the-box runtime is a better tradeoff for security, as long as it is a full replacement suited for the task, and you are not greatly extending the functionality/looseness of the spec[^1]. Outlook 95's RTF format was likely afflicted by all sorts of vulnerabilities that are still undiscovered today, simply because it was less audited than modern Chromium and Firefox versions that get near-weekly security updates.
These days we have several interesting solutions that support this idea:
- The deprecation of Flash and replacement with HTML5 ports and Flash emulation via WASM - This has probably done a huge blow to the number of RCE exploits on the web.
- Firefox uses PDF.js to display PDF files inside of the web sandbox. We have wasted a ton of CPU time doing this, especially when compared to Okular - a particularly energy-efficient PDF reader, but Firefox having a builtin web-sandboxed PDF reader has likely has saved many users from the numerous RCE exploits in outdated version of other reader software.
- The proliferation of Electron and CEF. This has been troubled in terms of security due to lack of consistent updates for many applications, and because it's more privileged than web browsers it opens up a new attack surface for applications that could have just been true web apps -- however, when done correctly, using a standard known runtime allows important bugfixes to be centralized. But this is another one that has wasted a ton of CPU time for what is usually a more complex solution.
- The switch from C to memory-safe interpreted and bytecode languages, and the later un-proliferation of these as folks mostly switched to Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Lua, and Javascript
So, some great solutions, along with some technical debt we're not satisfied with. The core problem with all these solutions is that they risk putting too much weight on one failure point.
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^1: The fact that they shipped IE4 in Outlook 98 with known exploits is very bad on this front
Chrome is the new IE because it can set de-facto standards due to its market size.
Because ‘Works best with Chrome’ is the new ‘Works best with IE’. It’s such a monoculture that sites don’t bother to test on anything else.
Because Google takes a leaf from Microsoft’s playbook and degrades performance of its platforms on other browsers, e.g. Firefox and YouTube.
Because Google have a fundamental conflict of interest between allowing an open web browser and making money from advertising. See the upcoming changes to block ad blockers and initiatives like FLoC. The more Google need to show growth and squeeze out more profit, the tighter things will get locked up.
Saying Safari is the new IE is just saying it doesn’t support all the features you’d like, while ignoring what made IE IE, which was its overwhelming market power.
It's probably in the same vein as how phone apps that need a new feature quickly may decide to simply start a WebView.
I think their efforts to make their own browser-based controls feel like native controls was what proved thst Microsoft did actually want the web control for convenience.
Sadly, these days that native feel is hard to come by. UI toolkits are now super complex and the "solution" seems to be to port the entire UI toolkit to a Javascript runtime, then not maintain that for a while and let it deviate from the native standard, and launch a new Javascript runtime to make up for it. Updating anything in the OS has become easy, so you don't need to design give years ahead. In two years, you can just roll out an update and change the look and feel of the built-in applications.
Their browser was kind of shit when it came to sticking with preexisting standards, but if it weren't for their XmlHttpRequest, who knows what the web may look like. Their security disaster of a browser helped advance the web, not to build an ecosystem or bring possibilities, but to keep their monopoly.
IE's webviews saved a lot of developers from having to write or purchase a bespoke input parsing/formatting/(de)serializing formats whenever rich media features were required. It standardised the API in a way that allowed all developers to assume support was present, similar to the way DirectX could be assumed to either be present already or be a quick install away on any recent GPU in a time when every GPU manufacturer developed their own bespoke GPU API. Plus, Microsoft was already known for its backwards compatibility for developers (well, unless you were an early web developer, I guess).
Firefox showed that the inclusion in the OS doesn't mean Microsoft gets to have a monopoly if the competition is good enough. Then Chrome came and ate Firefox's lunch.
Microsoft's mistake was probably that they were so blatant about everything. They did things because they wanted a monopoly, and weren't afraid to tell others. Google dresses themselves in lies and deceit calling everything "open" and claim they want to "advance the ecosystem" when their true goal is to hold an iron grip on the internet and the devices connecting to it. Anyone who thinks operating system vendors like Apple and Google aren't at least as evil as 2000's Microsoft has fallen for their tricks. Even Linux has this control issue; just look at IBM/Red Hat trying to prevent people from switching to alternatives, or Oracle anything.
I found this the most amusing line of the post, given the current state of many staple desktop applications. Besides games, how many programs these days are designed to run natively on desktop as opposed to in a browser? It feels like the default is now browser-based!
I have to smile when I see young people complaining about Safari incompatibilities now. You have no idea, young padawans. :-)
"It" was using the Document object to load a URL. WHATWG was not responsible for standardizing XMLHTTPRequest.
Hm? Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox changed tons of behavior in order to match Internet Explorer specifically, which was the de facto standard at the time.
This is not even remotely true. There’s thousands upon thousands of bugs publicly available in Bugzilla showing fixes to standards conformance, not to mention the Acid Test and things like that.
As far as “got their behaviour declared as the standard”, in several important cases the opposite is true. The reason why Netscape 4 was so terrible with CSS is because there were two competing approaches for styling – CSS, which Microsoft had already started implementing; and JSSS which Netscape had already started implementing. The W3C picked CSS, and Netscape scrambled to catch up by transcoding CSS into JSSS as a stopgap measure. Which is also why Netscape 4 lost CSS support when JavaScript was disabled.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo...
The irony.
And the market share doesn't matter, cause for iOS users, 100% of them use Safari, and you are not allowed to build a competing browser for it. This freezes web standard development, since it is a major player in the space the is literally against improvement in the space.
Safari isn't popular enough to have the latter.
That’s more than five incredibly long years where front-end web development was dragged down to an absolute standstill by Microsoft. Even the subsequent Internet Explorer 7 was just a quick patch job to fix the weirdest rendering bugs, add some CSS selectors, and add tabs. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 7 (released in 2006) dropped out of use that web developers could rely upon post-2001 CSS, and it wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 (released in 2009) dropped out of use that web developers could rely upon post-2001 JavaScript. In that entire 2001–2006 span, the most significant forward motion that happened was a slight change to how a couple of HTTP headers were handled if the user had installed Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Safari, even on its very worst day, is not even remotely on the same scale as the horrific effect Internet Explorer had on the industry. Anybody telling you that “Safari is the new IE” simply has no clue whatsoever what Internet Explorer was like to deal with back in the day. Browser support for absolutely everything was at a complete standstill for most of a decade because of Internet Explorer.
Apple cripples Safari (and other browsers) on iOS, and mobile ads are an abomination on all platforms if the user is not savvy enough to know how to block them.
"[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers."
-- Marc Andreesen, then CEO of Netscape
Microsoft was right to worry. The browser is the only app most people use on the laptop today.
What should they have done? I'm asking this not as a rhetorical question, to justify their behaviour, but because I think it's interesting, and they still haven't answered it.
Microsoft still tries to add back Edge as the default browser after every patch. They always reset your setting silently (how is this shit even legal?)
Also IMHO nowadays they are pushing updates much more often and those constant updates slow down the computer to a crawl - they do this because they try to force you to upgrade. Seriously the amount of updates nowadays is incredible - and as an user you simply cannot disable windows update due to multiple dark patterns (e.g. windows ignoring the settings in the windows update menu... + you you cannot disable the service since there is another service that turns it on). Windows keeps downloading patches when you do something else - every few days the computet becomes unusable and requires a restart.
To add insult to in injury: windows 11 requires computers with this new bios, so even if you gave up and wanted to pay microsoft their extortion money... you cant, since the new Windows wont work on your older computer.
Seriously due to updates every few days random services take 10% of processor time, or updates eat all internet bandwith.. even when every windows update is turned off.
The only solution is to use hard to audit programs from the internet that can disable updates completly. [Downloading such things is nor very safe... so I dont do it]
Yes I scanned the computer for trojans - its the updates that make it slow.
My old machine used to play doom and browse websites randomly slows down every few days because they use a dark pattern of patches that try to convince you to throw away a perfectly fine computer and buy windows 11. Which wont even work.
So I wonder what is a safe way to disable windows updates? It makes the computer behave normally (e.g .if it has no connection for 3 weeks of behaves ok for 3 weeks. Connect to inetenet - updates...)
So today, instead of building their own infrastructure, and using free (as in freedom) OSS for their organizational software needs, governments and public agencies pay massive amounts of taxpayer money, that could be put to use elsewhere, in licensing fees.