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Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

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Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#111

Post by shadowgovt »

amenod wrote: post #88
shadowgovt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google and Apples's ... and Linux (well, Ubuntu specifically). I'm staring down the need to upgrade from Ubuntu LTS 20.04 to Ubuntu LTS 22.04 because some software I maintain now relies on GLIBC v2.32, which is an absolute bear to back-port. The party line is "So just upgrade," but there's no guarantee my hardware is compatible with Ubuntu LTS 22.04 because the vendor doesn't support that config and I'm not really…

> ...but there's no guarantee my hardware is compatible with Ubuntu LTS 22.04 because the vendor doesn't support that config... So it's your vendor who doesn't care about backwards compatibility - Linux does. Whatever hardware you have, once it was supported, it will stay this way until it is really ancient, and even then you will have special builds that will support it. That's the beauty of open source (or even sou…

(a) Of course it needs binary blobs. This is the real world where medium- to high-performance machines need binary blobs. The GNU dream never materialized.

(b) If Ubuntu (and I'm going to say "the Linux ecosystem in general") cared about backwards compatibility in the same sense Windows does, a minor-version bump to glibc wouldn't introduce API breakages that mean I can't build a codebase that's doing nothing new and special on my machine right now purely because a 31-subver bumped to a 32. They aren't doing anything new in the code; their JNI dependency just bumped up and so they bumped up the whole codebase's requirements.

That's fine, but it's not The Windows Way. The Linux Way doesn't think about compatibility issues like that in anything like the same way. It's a source-code-and-patch-it-yourself world. The approaches are completely alien to each other.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#112

Post by bakugo »

shadowgovt wrote: post #82
Idiot_in_Vain wrote: post #20

Micro$oft seems to think that my PC is their PC and they can do whatever they like with it, without even asking.

It's complicated. They'd really prefer not to be in that position, but they learned the (extremely) hard way in the early days of the Internet that when you have the largest OS install-base (And MS still has like 29%), you have some obligation to the global community to police it. Because Lord knows individual users don't pull upgrades in fast enough voluntarily, and an exploit shared by 29% of computers can be easil…

> They'd really prefer not to be in that position

What makes you say this? If I was MS I'd be perfectly happy to effectively own most computers on earth and be able to do anything I want with them.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#113

Post by cld8483 »

rbanffy wrote: post #100
horsawlarway wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very strange comment. Personally... I absolutely understand exactly how they ended up in this situation. There are actually several good reasons to embed the browser into the OS, the top two easily understood ones are... --- 1. They've put a lot of work into the browser, and they've shared many components of it with other tooling. EX: Internet EXPLORER and EXPLORER the file system browser don't share their…

> several good reasons to embed the browser into the OS It was actually a great feature (memory may be failing at this point), and it seemed like the filesystem viewer was IE presenting a filesystem view. If you typed an http or https URL, the window would turn into an HTML renderer window. This made it possible to build their mail and newsgroup reader apps as filesystem views. Mail was nothing but a folder full of e…

> I would love if Gnome would allow pluggable views in Files

This is essentially what Gvfs is for except basically nobody uses it, at least in the ways you describe, because forcing non-FS things into the shape of a FS usually doesn't work very well. So instead Gvfs gets used for relatively simple things that naturally map onto the FS concept well, like mounting archive files, browsing FTP, etc.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#115

Post by silverwasthere »

tarotuser wrote: post #87

Wired should know better. Microsoft is not removing IE from 'personal computers'. MD is removing from machines running Windows . None of my Linux machines are affected, and damn straight are personal machines. Edit: for those of you who downvoted, I'm tired of having personal computers meaning only MS windows. There's those of us who are Mac users and Linux users both. By making "PC" as windows only is removing the r…

Pc means wintel my good dude. Actual personal computers are not seen as "a computer" to lusers. They are workstations. Or devices. But PC (like it was printed on oh so many software boxes) means windows+intel(or unremarkably compatible).

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#117

Post by shadowgovt »

bakugo wrote: post #112
shadowgovt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complicated. They'd really prefer not to be in that position, but they learned the (extremely) hard way in the early days of the Internet that when you have the largest OS install-base (And MS still has like 29%), you have some obligation to the global community to police it. Because Lord knows individual users don't pull upgrades in fast enough voluntarily, and an exploit shared by 29% of computers can be easil…

> They'd really prefer not to be in that position What makes you say this? If I was MS I'd be perfectly happy to effectively own most computers on earth and be able to do anything I want with them.

They'd really prefer not to be in the position of force-pushing updates because it's a huge pain in the ass to build and maintain the infrastructure to allow it and it generates mostly ill-will and negative press for them (because every user sees the updates, but only a handful of users get their online sites slaughtered by a low-orbit ion cannon made out of compromised Windows nodes).

It is, however, pretty much the price of doing business when the business is "Being a dominant operating system vendor." The other ones breathing that rarified air are Android and iOS, and they're about as strict as Windows regarding updates (with the exception of long-tail Android open source builds that are maintained by whatever vendor cobbled something together, which the core project only has indirect influence over in terms of minimizing ability to exploit it as a common-codebase threat vector).

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#118

Post by [deleted] »

justeleblanc wrote: post #99
nimbius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and replace them with compatibility shims christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Its so bombastic the US Justice department hauls your pepsi sipping CEO in for a round of slouching, hand-waving antitrust…

Try to uninstall Safari from Mac OS or iOS, or Chrome from Android. Tell me how that works out for you.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#119

Post by judge2020 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #104
quickthrowman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a problem for Geely, not Microsoft.

Microsoft makes it their problem by rug pulling IE

No, they made it their problem by promising both users and vendors they'd do the dirty work of keeping it compatible. As shown here[0], removing the OS "bloat" that keeps old apps compatible on newer Windows 11 versions vastly decreases resource usage and improves software responsiveness.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654649

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#120

Post by rodgerd »

nimbius wrote: post #45
PreInternet01 wrote: post #5

More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is. On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicit…

>and replace them with compatibility shims christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Its so bombastic the US Justice department hauls your pepsi sipping CEO in for a round of slouching, hand-waving antitrust…

> christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination?

Elsewhere on HN: Everyone should be forced to install Chrome because I can't be bothered testing against Safari and Firefox.

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