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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

#181

Post by testTED »

Gigachad wrote: post #172
testTED wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OS needs a browser engine for its WebView, which many apps etc rely on. On non Google Android releases these can pretty easily be swapped. Possibly on Google Android as well.

The out of the box experience with Android is that you can not replace the OS browser. The fact that you can recompile AOSP to have a different browser is not particularly noteworthy, you could do that for any mandatory component.

Nobody is talking about recompiling AOSP.

It's a popup dialog.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#182

Post by jackvalentine »

morpheos137 wrote: post #135
asdff wrote: 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,…

Sounds like the writer of the software is equally at fault, and the sysadmin could have been more creative. I see no reason why the data collection can't be managed by a highly portable console app running inside a VM or dos emulator or the legacy PC can't be kept behind a firewall that only lets data out.

> I see no reason why the data collection can't be managed by a highly portable console app running inside a VM or dos emulator or the legacy PC can't be kept behind a firewall that only lets data out.

Having been in this exact situation at a research institution with expensive equipment and Windows XP only software before - support.

Helpdesk and lower levels of back-end only pay a certain amount so turn over constantly, and “those PCs have had hot glue put in their ethernet jacks and USB ports and burning CDs is the only way to get data out” is a hell of a lot easier to reliably keep going than some esoteric system of VMs and firewall rules.

The people in the lab have way more tolerance for having to burn CDs than they do for firewall changes stuffing up their process and taking a while to figure out and resolve!

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#183

Post by SlickNixon »

morpheos137 wrote: post #135
asdff wrote: 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,…

Sounds like the writer of the software is equally at fault, and the sysadmin could have been more creative. I see no reason why the data collection can't be managed by a highly portable console app running inside a VM or dos emulator or the legacy PC can't be kept behind a firewall that only lets data out.

>or the legacy PC can't be kept behind a firewall that only lets data out

Only because I had the same thought and I feel like you might know more, is there an example of software that does this securely?

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#184

Post by mr_toad »

daviddever23box wrote: post #27

I have zero sympathy for those who, by designing an application solely for use with Internet Explorer, put their heads into the lion's mouth, expecting to get their face licked. (Same applies to Safari.)

I’ve never seen an app that only works in Safari.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#185

Post by jiggawatts »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #162
jiggawatts wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 56…

The trick is to make the controller board swappable and an independent set of products.

E.g.: If you make 30 different kinds of industrial machines, have one controller board as an additional product for a total of 31 SKUs.

When the controller board is too old and no longer supported, make a new SKU that is backwards compatible with the old machines.

E.g.: Some televisions allowed the entire controller board to be swapped out, upgrading the TV's OS and HDMI ports with new capabilities. The panel and the case stayed the same.

Similarly, a CNC router or whatever is "just" some analogue wires that go into a digital board. Make the digital board swappable.

A similar mistake that I see is customers that are used to "archive grade paper" asking me how long digital backup tapes last. That's the wrong question!. The important thing is to be able to copy from old tapes to new tapes with full fidelity, which digital technology enables, but analogue technology does not. You can retain data indefinitely with digital media that lasts just a few years. Instead of trying to scrounge up some old floppy or CD readers, just copy the data to BluRay, then cloud storage, and then... whatever.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#186

Post by ninkendo »

skc wrote: post #13
athorax wrote: post #7

Take edge with it, please and thank you

What's wrong with Edge. Been pleasantly surprised by it myself.

Have you been able to configure it so it doesn't have an enormous Bing search bar in your new tab page? I know you can change search providers, but the new tab page seems to be hardcoded to Bing with no way to change it.

(No, using a plugin/extension to do this doesn't count, IMO.)

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#187

Post by morpheos137 »

SlickNixon wrote: post #183
morpheos137 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the writer of the software is equally at fault, and the sysadmin could have been more creative. I see no reason why the data collection can't be managed by a highly portable console app running inside a VM or dos emulator or the legacy PC can't be kept behind a firewall that only lets data out.

>or the legacy PC can't be kept behind a firewall that only lets data out Only because I had the same thought and I feel like you might know more, is there an example of software that does this securely?

OpenBSD. The documentation is good too. The social engineering of getting campus IT to approve your solution might be harder though.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#188

Post by makeitdouble »

Lapsa wrote: post #136
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…

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

It's not Microsoft as a whole though: the OS team goes above and beyond in maintenance, Office team did nothing of that, Azure team doesn't seem to be keen on that either.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#189

Post by layer8 »

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…

The article didn’t say “from all PCs”. They also don’t remove it from Windows 7 PCs that don’t have Edge installed, for example.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#190

Post by makeitdouble »

shadowgovt wrote: post #76
michaelt wrote: post #48

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.)

Microsoft's antitrust suit was mostly about illegal business practices, wide bullying of vendors and OEMs to block conpetition. How was it not based on sound legal theory ?

[Edit: I'm actually thinking of the EU lawsuit that was probably broader and better managed than the US one. Memories are now vague, it took me a while to even remember US and EU had different suits, but sure th US one was a lot worse in many aspects as Microsoft was on their home turf.]

> every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for

If you believe this, is the fault on those who smacked MS or the regulators who didn't smack the later violations ?

Is your argument that a crime shouldn't be punished in the past if people fail to punish it later in the future ?

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