Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#171

Post by brc » Sat, Dec 17, 2011, 10:57 PM UTC

phillmv wrote: post #89

dextorious wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""Yes. You need to find/create more markets.""" Actually you don't "need" anything. There are tons of examples of profitable companies that do one thing / product, or several things / products and do it for a century or more, with thousands of employees that do not look to expand on other markets. Even more so for companies with less employees. """If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back a…

I don't mean to be adversarial, but could you provide examples? >Yeah, that's why the stock market promotes cancerous growth of companies. I have troubles with this sometimes. I lie awake at night and think about the little I know about finance and economics and I wonder - is this all a zero sum interaction? Abstractly, the earth is a closed system, right? Of course, value and money are also abstractions and so aren'…

My suggestion is stop laying and wondering and start reading. Economics and finance is a fascinating topic if you want to truly understand the history and theory of money and finance.

I don't mean boning up on company reports (though the ability to read and understand them is a good life skill) but rather truly trying to understand what money is, what it means, why so many apparent paradoxes exist.

To wit; wealth is not a zero sum game. Hard numbers like valuations come about just from an agreement at a point in time, which are just the opinions of two people at a flash in history. Even the value of a dollar in your wallet is a massively volatile thing in terms of what you can purchase with it.

A good jumping off point is Niall Fergusons 'The History of Money' (book or video). Get through that and then decide which of the sub-themes you want to delve into further.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#172

Post by kgc » Sun, Dec 18, 2011, 1:21 AM UTC

Web designers around the world rejoice.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#173

Post by ams6110 » Sun, Dec 18, 2011, 3:15 AM UTC

veidr wrote: post #60

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #11

The article points out that MS will still provide blocking tools for companies. Corporations are the major source of IE6 browsers and I'm not sure this will have any impact on them. The best we can hope for is that high consumer adoption rates will force many more sites to drop IE6 support which might spur companies to finally test and upgrade.

Big corporate is such a weird space. On one hand, you're right: big corporate will block this, and that will limit the impact, and thus I think a lot of the hallelujah in this thread is over-optimistic. But MS would never force such consequential upgrades on those customers; that's part of why MS owned and still owns the "enterprise" market (decreasingly lucrative though it may be). On the other hand, I doubt that co…

While I personally think that's insane -- if you are that specific (not to mention antiquated) with your browser requirements, why don't you just code a native app?

They pretty much have. They are probably using VBScript for event handling and depending on various IE6 behaviors that are no longer supported in current versions of IE and never were available on other browsers. They've written a "native" app for the IE 5/6 platform.

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#174

Post by ams6110 » Sun, Dec 18, 2011, 3:28 AM UTC

mdc wrote: post #128

veidr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big corporate is such a weird space. On one hand, you're right: big corporate will block this, and that will limit the impact, and thus I think a lot of the hallelujah in this thread is over-optimistic. But MS would never force such consequential upgrades on those customers; that's part of why MS owned and still owns the "enterprise" market (decreasingly lucrative though it may be). On the other hand, I doubt that co…

>why don't you just code a native app? It sounds like that's exactly what they did, They just hosted most of the code on a server. It's kind of like the "native" iOS apps that just use a webview component to display a web app. Sticking with IE6 just means you have all the hassle of a native app (like needing to make sure IE6 gets installed and stays installed on every machine) with none of the benefits.

At the time, IE6 WAS installed on every machine and using it as a platform for internal apps was VASTLY easier than deploying client/server apps that needed a powerbuilder or some such runtime on each desktop.

Almost as easy as CICS. ;-)

Re: Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone

#175

Post by superuser2 » Sun, Dec 18, 2011, 5:40 PM UTC

msujaws wrote: post #127

dangrossman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE9 implements too much of its modern HTML5 and security features using Windows 7. DirectX 10, which it uses for hardware accelerated graphics, text and video does not run on XP. XP is eons behind the times in security features. It's not just a marketing decision, at some point if they wanted to do these things they had to say "this version of IE will not run on our 10 year old OS."

Hmmmm.... I wonder how other browser vendors are able to pull it off then? This answer doesn't seem to carry much weight if Firefox and Chrome can do these things and still remain secure.

The latest version of Firefox does not run on PowerPC (my parents are both still on PowerPC Macs). Mozilla has no financial interest in people buying new Macs.