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This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

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Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#11

Post by inlined »

TwoBit wrote: post #4

I have no idea how confident I should be in Edge's security. Microsoft just doesn't have a great history there.

A major category of IE vulnerabilities involved tricking it into loading COM objects. The Chakra JS engine moved from a COM based implementation to compiled JS. And Edge doesn't support ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) like IE did either. It looks like most of the COM attack vectors have now been shut down, though some components like the clipboard still use COM to interact with the broader OS.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#13

Post by silon7 »

cm2187 wrote: post #7
saurik wrote: post #2

I feel like users in China will be more likely to install a "don't nag me about upgrading" counter-patch than actually upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer.

If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice. I work for a major European corporation and I am also stuck on XP. We don't exactly have the best in class IT dept (despite claims by a senior IT guy that we have more developpers than google and facebook together... we don't really have much to show for it).

Is it because of an in-house software maintenance problem, or mostly due to being tied to 3rd party software and would have to buy new licenses / migrate?

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#15

Post by cm2187 »

silon7 wrote: post #13
cm2187 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice. I work for a major European corporation and I am also stuck on XP. We don't exactly have the best in class IT dept (despite claims by a senior IT guy that we have more developpers than google and facebook together... we don't really have much to show for it).

Is it because of an in-house software maintenance problem, or mostly due to being tied to 3rd party software and would have to buy new licenses / migrate?

I think it is a mix of lots of internally developped software which is not compatible, or at least not tested as compatible (and often this software is not developped anymore), cost constrains, and mostly a lot of bureaucracy and glacial-paced processes. I don't think it has to do with third party software.

[edit] in fact if anything third party software is forcing us to upgrade as we see some critical third party software progressively becoming incompatible with XP.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#16

Post by frik »

IE9 support is already in a sad state. Many new websites already look in IE9 as bad as in IE6.

Chrome should spawns less processes (hold some more tabs in one process). IE spawns less processes than Chrome and therefor is less of a memory hog.

Firefox finally needs a proper multi-process implementation. Even the latest Developer edition just uses two processes (firefox.exe and plugin-container.exe) - I just tried it again with a new profile. Good luck keeping 100 tabs open (with "open" I mean "in memory"). If one tab crashes... you switch back to IE/Chrome. In the current state Firefox is great for development, but not for my daily web usage.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#18

Post by flohofwoe »

Very funny, End of Life for a popular product just means more trouble for 3rd-party-devs since they need to continue supporting the product as long as a significant chunk of their users don't feel like upgrading, but with support for the required SDKs cut off. Case in point: WindowsXP's End of Life was 2 years ago, but between 25% and 35% of (mostly casual) gamers still run it worldwide (this is heavily skewed by XP installations in China): http://hwstats.unity3d.com/web/os-win.html, http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os.html.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#19

Post by ars »

cmurf wrote: post #17

I think it should have a built in kill switch. It knows it's own EOL date, and just wouldn't work after that.

Really? I know that would be easier for developers, but think about it from a "it's my computer" point of view - do you really want people doing that to you?

It's your computer, you should be able to to run whatever software you like.

A reminder to upgrade, OK, that's fine. But actually disabling? You go too far.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#20

Post by ars »

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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