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Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

blogs.windows.com

201–210 of 304 posts

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#201
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you’re talking about the subset of HTML+CSS used in ePub. Come to think, ebooks and emails have pretty similar “richness” needs.

> Sounds like you’re talking about the subset of HTML+CSS used in ePub. EPUB3 supports JS.

EPUB3 is a half-baked standard that nothing actually fully supports. The JavaScript parts especially—most e-readers don’t ever plan on adding JS support, even if they nominally support EPUB3.

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#202
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Gmail is already a web app, and only supports a tiny subset of modern HTML and CSS. The limitation is of course arbitrary, it could in theory support any modern standards. But HTML mail is so quirky and full of hacks, that they probably have to do it that way to preserve compatibility. Apple's Mail app is one of the few modern mail clients that can render modern HTML/CSS

Given that email is MIME (i.e. you can add multiple “bodies” to a message, with different content-types, and the email client will select the best one it can render), you’d think we could just come up with a new content-type for email meaning “HTML, but for real”, and add that to email in addition to the current “HTML, but sucky” semantics we get from text/html-typed bodies. For a while, people would be sending both…

CSS grid email designs would be great, but we'd also get an avalanche of nightmare canvas-tag spam...

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#203
post #80

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.

When Outlook becomes a PWA (currently in test, I think it's probably two-three years from stable), it'll be rendering mail with all the functionality of Blink. Which depending on your point of view, means a sigh of relief or time to buy more RAM. https://www.windowscentral.com/project-monarch-outlook-web-u...

Wow this is awful. I just moved to an outlook company after years on google. It’s so nice having my mail client be native.

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#204
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a version of myself aged in their twenties and working in web development that really wants to stab anyone believing that IE6 was the best browser. I won't argue that it wasn't decent at launch, but MS kept support for that browser around way too long and failed to actually roll out support for new features that customers desired. I believe it was the era of IE6 specifically that led to the proliferation of to…

Oh, don't get me wrong - it was a Trojan Horse, and my first ever web browsing experience was on Navigator, so it was a hard-hearted appreciation at the time. But from my stand point then, It Just Worked.

Same for me - I started browsing the web on Mosaic and quickly switched to Netscape. I hung on during the Netscape 4.x days but at some point couldn't deny how much better IE was (I think maybe even IE 4 was already as good or better than Netscape).

I switched to IE until the Mozilla suit released and later on switched to Firefox 0.something - it was amazing how fast it was compared to both IE6 and Mozilla.

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#205
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Outlook becomes a PWA (currently in test, I think it's probably two-three years from stable), it'll be rendering mail with all the functionality of Blink. Which depending on your point of view, means a sigh of relief or time to buy more RAM. https://www.windowscentral.com/project-monarch-outlook-web-u...

Wow this is awful. I just moved to an outlook company after years on google. It’s so nice having my mail client be native.

Thunderbird is still a thing and Google supports IMAP.

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#206
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you proved his point. ;) He's talking about the Mozilla browser, the precursor to Firefox. (Well actually, Firefox was named Phoenix before it became Firefox.)

Firebird

Wasn't that the email client?

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was IE 5.5 that was particularly a champ compared to the terrible Netscape Communicator / Netscape 4 product. I continued to regularly use Netscape 4 through those years, as I didn't like IE, and it was a real dog in most every respect. Netscape took their eye off the ball in an attempt to further build their business away from the browser (Communicator of course was their suite attempt), and failed at both things…

There's an old post about that by Joel Spolsky that I remember thinking was particularly insightful at the time:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

I also vaguely remember jwz writing about the experience of developing it.

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#208
Hate it or hate it, Internet Explorer paved the way for a lot of developers to provide web content and applications as it was the de-facto browser used by a lot of end consumers.

It also paved the way for technology to focus on security, standards and most of all, a better and standardized approach for browser technology.

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#209

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.

The Edge rendering engine is Blink, because Edge is a fork of Chromium now.

Re: Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

#210
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML/CSS is designed to be safe for web by browser vendors and working groups. Unused HTML/CSS feature is fine as long as it's not vulnerable, but blacklist for email is problem because new feature is not designed to be safe for email. Theoretically email client vendor can host working group like WHATWG to define standard by picking subset from web HTML/CSS. I don't know why it's not happened.

Can you share some CSS vulnerabilities that would work in email but not in a browser? I can certainly think of CSS vulnerabilities that would not work in email because email can't execute javascript, but can't come up with the reverse off the top of my head. Genuinely curious here.

* Any way that reference external resource like css url() can be used as beacon. It should be blockable by client like image, but thinking how it affect is difficult if all tags are allowed.

* iframe content inside message is editable after message sent.

* Java Applet/ActiveX is almost dead, but still available. Should it be allowed on email? (for web mail on IE11/Trident)

* Sanitizing JavaScript from HTML by blacklisting isn't simple operation. Possibly attack vector. (for web mail)

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