251–260 of 304 posts
I hope someone finds a way to use its interface with a better rendering engine, which I think is the best part of IE - no infantile HUGE buttons, patronising error messages, or other dumbed-down things, just a serious UI with good ideas like per-zone trust security settings and user stylesheets built-in. It also doesn't have gobs of phone-home "telemetry". (Firefox is a close second but is clearly starting to become…
Did you completely miss IE9?
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Given that email is MIME (i.e. you can add multiple “bodies” to a message, with different content-types, and the email client will select the best one it can render), you’d think we could just come up with a new content-type for email meaning “HTML, but for real”, and add that to email in addition to the current “HTML, but sucky” semantics we get from text/html-typed bodies. For a while, people would be sending both…
CSS grid email designs would be great, but we'd also get an avalanche of nightmare canvas-tag spam...
I smell a lot of nostalgia in this thread, and rightfully so! IE has been a terrible browser, but it was our terrible browser. But fear not! Outlook still uses the HTML parsing engine from MS Word (!) to display your HTML emails, and it's not going anywhere.
Maybe that's why my replies from Thunderbird using interspersed posting shows up empty for some Outlook users.
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"but it was our terrible browser." Don't you dare include me in "our" 8) My first browser was telnet (1992ish) From 1993 onwards it was all a bit weird in internets land. For me the golden time for wwwbly_internets was around 2000-5 or so. /. was still (just) worth reading, FB was still a bulge in MZ's trousers. Google was cool, Amazon was clever, Apple was cool. The www was still interesting - US frontier like. I am…
eBay has changed very little since then if that helps, however PayPal might as well be unrecognisable.
I guess your damned if you update and damned if you don't.
By moving to Microsoft Edge, you get everything described above plus you’ll be able to extend the life of your legacy websites and apps well beyond the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application retirement date using IE mode. Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge will be supported through at least 2029. While IE11 as an independent program is going away, the rendering engine is still around for 8+y. Here's hoping th…
Always sounds good in theory but when trying to maximise reach, it can be hard to instantly tell a whole bunch of the web, who might be running old PCs, that they can't use your site any more.
Also, when you have large corporate customers, you often do not have enough muscle to tell them that unless they upgrade their client browsers, they can no longer use your service.
That decision might sound simple but there can be loads of regulatory or accreditation hurdles to overcome to use a new browser and it can affect 1000s of corporate employees.
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HTML/CSS is designed to be safe for web by browser vendors and working groups. Unused HTML/CSS feature is fine as long as it's not vulnerable, but blacklist for email is problem because new feature is not designed to be safe for email. Theoretically email client vendor can host working group like WHATWG to define standard by picking subset from web HTML/CSS. I don't know why it's not happened.
I don't think there's any HTML or CSS that is problematic in an email. The problem is Javascript.
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> currently in development program requires IE + Java applets. Why? Surely it's not a greenfield project.
It's just a defense program with a very very long timeline.
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It's just a defense program with a very very long timeline.
I would worry about long term availability. For that type of project, it might be worth it to write a detailed spec for how the back-end talks to the front-end so in the future it's possible to write a more modern client.
All of that on top of a system which has likely changed in the intermediate years. Basically, you might as well milk the existing system for as long as possible and then replace it with a completely new system that probably runs on newer hardware (1990s instead of 1980s), is much more maintainable and does things in a more modern way.
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That sounds just unbelievable to me, and I've worked at government agency doing Lotus Note programming on Windows XP past EoL. What was the decision process like, to decide to create a new Java applet in 2021?? Edit: I've seen a later comment mentioning it was started a while ago. But still... this is a dead platform. To me this is on the level of launching a new app targeting Windows XP. It's just a disaster
About 5 years ago I briefly contracted for a large multinational, who shall remain nameless, who were still running a version of some Lotus thing (I forget whether it was Notes or Smartsuite) that was well over a decade out of support, and possibly two decades old, running on a long since obsolete niche operating system, on hardware that probably dated from the 90s. None of it could be upgraded. Which would have been…
People should know that hardware will become obsolete or fail, that software will become unsupported, the supplier might go bust etc.
You need to be able to run generations of IT in parallel so that you always have newer hardware/software getting used/proved alongside the old nonsense and if you will need to replace an aging system, you better have seen it coming enough years earlier to give you time to find a replacement.
Also, large corporates have a habit of over-customising what they want so a new system has to be completely bespoke = slow and expensive to replace.