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Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

wired.com

121–130 of 221 posts

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#121

Wired doing some clickbait meme here, but I heard about the news last week. My question is, who the hell uses IE still...? And don't give me that one in a million guy stuck with it because he's running Windows 2k Server.

Working in the B2B world, I can tell you that unfortunately many buyers are still running on archaic systems. Many projects still require support for these old browsers. In the B2C sector, there are so many users that the few who don't upgrade are just a tiny afterthought. In the B2B sector, where a single company not upgrading can mean that more than half of your customers can't use your website, it's a whole other issue.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …you now need a team of H1B's to start writing shims… This was uncalled for. You could’ve just said engineers. For those of us in an unending battle with a broken immigration system every day of our lives for over a decade, this really rubs the wrong way.

Some HN comments are down right elitist bordering on xenofobic, assuming that only westerners must be responsible for writing the "good" consumer facing software everyone loves, and that the "boring" corporate software everyone hates or sees no use for must be written by unskilled immigrants from third world countries.

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS Well, it's kind of explicable: It was at about that time Microsoft rolled out HTML Help, so they needed an HTML rendering engine on every PC to be able to read the documentation. Using a web browser as your native app's rendering engine is what all the cool kids are doing these days, so in a way they wer…

This is one of the reasons a lot of people see the Microsoft anti-trust suit as a mistake (in that it wasn't based on any sound legal theory, and history has shown that every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for it; essentially, the government stepped on the neck of one private company in an asymmetrical way because the administration at the time didn't like their face.)

Was it because they wanted cooperation on surveillance and other law enforcement projects from the winner-who-had-taken-all?

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#124
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.

Google* Android

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#125
post #102

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…

Microsoft only cares about legacy support if it means the vast majority of customers. I will give you an example: go to a top tier research institution for biology, and sort your cells with the fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS). You might have to now burn that data onto a cd rom, because the software running the six figure instrument was written in 2002 for windows XP, and for reasons only known to microsoft,…

Would you expect a 20-year-old MacOS to run on a modern MacBook? Why not?

Would you expect a 20-year-old Linux to install just fine on a modern PC? I remind you that this was the era of RHEL 3! I had trouble getting RHEL 6 running in a virtual machine just recently.

Meanwhile XP will run on most modern PCs, it’s just not supported. That means no security patches.

The mistake here is not Microsoft’s.

The mistake is your organisation’s for buying a half-million-dollar device with no support plan from the vendor for its control OS.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#126

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…

Does this include MSHTML (Trident), or just the iexplore.exe binary?

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#127
post #45

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…

That was a great read.

> daytime infomercial of an OS

I'm not sure how you managed to write this post but I'm totally on board with the linguistic energy of it

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#128

Wired doing some clickbait meme here, but I heard about the news last week. My question is, who the hell uses IE still...? And don't give me that one in a million guy stuck with it because he's running Windows 2k Server.

A lot of business intranet software still runs on IE, especially in the far east.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google* Android

Android always has a browser you can’t remove. It’s just not always chrome.
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