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.
Going a bit further back, IE 5 and 6 were the best browser by far. Strange for me to think that my now-beloved Firefox has its heritage embedded in Netscape, which at the same time as IE5 was an absolute pig. - ed for some reason I have it in mind as IE5.5 specifically that was The Great IE.
While I wouldn't want to do it, if you've been working on that codebase for years and you're no longer young and fired up about always going for the latest things, it could be a good way to sunset your career. A guaranteed position using technology you understand rather than being thrown out into the job market, struggling to get up to date on the latest programming fads so you can compete with people half your age,…
That's fair! I guess I just assume the codebase is terrible (not just because of age, but also judging by the end-product) and will remain terrible; why would you do a refactor, or optimize something, or add new features when it's become a niche project that nobody likes and is on its way out? It's probably just patching over critical bugs from here forward It's not just about doing something new; a bad codebase that…
If the task is just "keep this working", I could see plenty of people being alright with not making major changes to a codebase. It pays the bills, and that's all a good number of people care about.
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…
We have a critical 3rd party business app that absolutely requires IE11 (actually it requires IE11 to be in compatibility mode for IE5 or something). We currently use Internet Explorer only for this app and I think we will welcome the change to IE11 mode in Edge.
Luckily it only to last another year or so before we replace this product. Some people don't understand the cost and effort required to replace some of these older but hugely important legacy products.
Imagine being the engineer who has to keep maintaining the IE codebase for the next 8 years. [shudders]
I’m pretty sure almost no one is. There are tons of IE11 layout bugs (not missing features, straight-up bugs) that have not gotten fixed in 8 years. I get the vibe that MS may have totally cut off development and all but the most critical security maintenance in order to speed the plow of Edge adoption.
Yeah, I'm happy if they change nothing about IE11 till the end of time at this point. Software that currently requires IE11 isn't going to change either.
That's true, and I wish that emails could just work like everything else on the web. But simply removing Outlook and all its baggage from the equation would be a big, big improvement on the status quo.
There are good reasons to reject a lot of it. You don't want JS running in an email for example. Or even some of the fancier CSS abilities.
By "I wish that emails could just work like everything else on the web" I meant modern web HTML/CSS - I was replying to the GP - not the full set of browser capabilities such as Javascript. I suppose it's possible you'd also want to exclude certain CSS abilities, but at that point you're now diverging from the web CSS spec which isn't ideal either.
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…
I am genuinely curious, what do you think is the end game of this apparent conspiracy by browser creators to reduce the intelligence of users through simplified user interfaces? They will convince them to buy more things... somehow? And that benefits the browser creators... somehow?
It's not "browser creators"; it's one huge company which is literally the gateway to the Internet for the majority of the population, effectively controls the web standards now, knows far more than the population thinks it knows about them, and profits off an industry whose primary goal is to convince users to buy and consume increasingly more through misinformation and misdirection.
Despite the decline of Mozilla and Firefox in recent years, it managed to outlive Internet Explorer! And I still remember the print ad with the launch of Firefox 1.0. M$ still have a lot to do to redeem themselves.
According to https://gs.statcounter.com/ FF is more popular than Edge. Many years ago I used to complain to webdesigners how they simply ignored FF.
It is a victory and not an empty one. Firefox is the most independent among last remaining browsers. It is a good browser and an important alternative now that most other major browsers all use the same engine.
The most important feature any browser ever included was auto-update. If IE had included this, things would be quite different.
Auto-update was never important or even desired on GNU/Linux distros world. A simple apt-get update/upgrade always felt much better than having each app implementing their own failure prone update mechanism. It is a good thing that the competition chose to mimic this feature. It is way more convenient.
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.
If they took the Edge rendering engine (which is really like Chromium or some close approximation of it now) and put it in the IE UI instead of the opposite, I think that would get a lot of praise from me and probably many others including all the Google-drunk web developers. Those who like IE and prefer it to other browsers are doing so despite its horrible rendering engine.