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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

#161
post #144
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's one thing I genuinely admire Microsoft for - the effort they put into maintenance

I somewhat agree, but even that is only for capitalistic reasons. If they didn't have the massive backwards compatibility, corporate users would essentially be free to choose a new OS platform every few years. By maintaining deep legacy software support, they make it easy for their customers to stay addicted to Windows. MS is not doing this for your benefit, or out of some kind of dedication, it's pure capitalism.

> even that is only for capitalistic reasons

That's a good thing. People wanting to pay for your stuff is a good sign that it's valuable to them, and thus worth doing.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#162
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

As a device builder creating those machines (well, industrial CNCs, but similar idea) I don't have many options when trying to build something with a useful life of 20+ years. I just received an order for another machine in a lineup that started with some using Heidenhain controls from the early 90s, we ripped out those controllers and replaced them with models running a custom black box RTOS based on Motorola DSP 56002 chips on ISA cards that were on Windows 98 and Windows XP motherboards, then that company got aquihired and they stopped making those cards, there was a brief foray into PowerPC and now we're installing Arm processors running surprisingly modern Linux 4.9 with preempt_rt. We're talking to these motion controllers using VB6 running on a bunch of Windows 7 PCs with a few compatibility hacks enabled, and I'm installing new fanless PCs with Windows 10 LTSC 21H2, which claims support until 2032-01-13. If it's not running those relatively public, well-documented systems, it's likely a PLC or robot containing a proprietary ASIC running some WindRiver RTOS, and completely subject to the whims and survivability of that product line.

I love my customer's maintenance department, they're unusually thorough and attentive to preventative maintenance, greasing and oiling and replacing wear items, root-causing failures and keeping the machines in good working order for decades. But when you keep fixing each individual small part that breaks, eventually the market moves on and you have to throw all the replaceable parts away and start over. The process requirements haven't changed, the weldments and castings aren't broken, it's just that you can't replace a failed servo drive or Core 2 motherboard or ISA card because the supply chain gave up on them 10 years ago. There's no great advantage of Windows 10 LTSC and a 64-bit Arm controller over Windows 98 with 56002 ISA cards except that I can buy the former today and I can't buy the latter because no one makes them anymore.

There is no control OS or hardware supply chain that lasts as long as military, industrial, or scientific equipment can be made to last. Fanuc and others try with massive vertical integration and a "never deprecate anything" mantra, but they don't run their own semiconductor fabs to guarantee production of chips for stuff that doesn't keep up with the rat race.

Yes, I'll keep supporting my company's gear for as long as possible, but sometimes the answer is that I need to throw away 4 working servomotors, drives, a controller, and a PC, and invest 600 engineering hours into making this machine do the exact same thing it did last week, because that 5th drive blew the IGBT and took out the controller and no one can get a replacement. Customers don't like to issue $100k invoices when a $1k subcomponent dies...because that $1k quote was from 2008, and it's now literally priceless.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#163
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I think this is an example of markets working well. Customers don’t want to have to adapt to a new platform every year and are willing to pay for that service. Microsoft recognizes that desire and provides backward compatibility. Microsoft charges a price above what it costs to provide the service but below what their customers are willing to pay. Both parties win. Seems like a good thing.

Rarely have I seen "both parties win" used in describing dealing with Microsoft. There is tons of documented history of their anti-competitive behavior and deceptive practices. It is not very often that a CEO of a company in a market that is "working well" is called to testify in front of Congress.

You seem to have changed the topic. As the previous poster was saying, them doing this particular thing for money is not bad. It's good. The fact that you're for some reason pulling in unrelated things that Microsoft has done presumably means you agree, but it's a mystery as to why you don't want to say so.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#164
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…

> …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.

He's probably a Midwestern engineer, if you know what I mean.

Or someone not from a coastal state (or Texas).

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#165
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,…

The only way to continue supporting all those things is to never change anything. Even if all the APIs are still around, are they going to be bug-compatible?

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Was Internet Explorer ever actually a core and critical part of Windows? Sure, Microsoft claimed that it was. But of course, they would have done that, given that the alternative was to admit that the Justice Department's argument was correct, and that Internet Explorer was being bundled…

It's been a long time. I'm trying to remember if they'd rewired things so the Help function actually ran atop the IE rendering agent, or if I'm thinking of MacOSX and Safari.

The CHM viewer used for many help files is a webview, yeah.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#167
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…

> 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…

> 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 were just 15 years ahead of the curve.

As others have said parts of explorer were using mshtml for the user interface. However it wasn't just Microsoft. Third party vendors used mshtml as a component to render their UI! You can find samples around still, e.g . https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/6845/Implementing-snap-...

Most memorably, Norton Antivirus 2003 (I think) was one such application. The entire UI was in fact written in HTML with lots of callbacks into c++ code.

So in many ways... Electron isn't all that new of an idea :)

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#168
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,…

> and for reasons only known to microsoft, this software is no longer able to run on modern windows.

The reason is most likely... because the driver relies on APIs that were insecure and removed in the XP-Vista transition!

> The vendor for the instrument has no incentive to update that software either; they'd rather you dish out another half million dollars for a new sorter. > There are hundreds of instruments like this in any given research institute, all because Microsoft decided unilaterally that software that ran fine 20 years ago is clearly useless and doesn't need to run anymore on modern hardware that receives security updates.

So it's Microsoft's fault that the vendor won't update it's software?

Didn't this "elite institution" get a support contract for the machine?

Would they expect the driver and software to still work if it had been written for a PowerMac G5, running Mac OS X Panther?

Would a binary compiled 20 years ago even have a remote chance of running on Linux?

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully you have no idea what you're talking about. These half-million dollar devices (often more expensive than that) were the ONLY option at the time to perform certain kinds of experiments. Not exactly a choice.

Respectfully you have no idea how complex an OS is and how completely nonsensical it is to expect 100% backwards compatibility for 2 decades later. There is a reason software gets sunsetted: most of it is irrelevant 20 years later and holding on to it makes everything much more complex than it already is. Especially for a consumer OS like windows, where you can expect the vast majority of people to upgrade. If this i…

I'm not sure what part of my comment you're responding to because I wasn't referring to anything related to backwards compatibility. I was responding to the other commenter asserting that biotech companies have somehow made an incorrect judgement call by purchasing certain types of instrument. In reality these vendors assume you're going to keep the system air-gapped forever, some don't even (officially) support joining their control PCs to a domain. Anecdotally I've found that in a lot of cases unless you're dealing with strange custom drivers usually the vendor-provided PCs can be replaced with new computers running the same control software (sometimes in compatibility mode if needed) and still operate the instrument.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#170
post #143

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…

The era in which Microsoft forced IE into the OS was purely about anti-competitiveness and their own fear of being caught off guard on this whole internet fad. The only reason we need IE shims at all is because MS botched their overall internet strategy. Had they made a truly competitive browser and supported common standards, and the user's ability to choose their browser, none of this would be needed.

Notepad.exe is forced into the OS. Is that anti-competitive too? If it's okay to have an app be a frontend for an OS provided text edit control why not the same with a webview control?
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