Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

wired.com

61–70 of 221 posts

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#61
post #45

More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is. On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicit…

>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…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#62

More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is. On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicit…

> most legacy apps should continue to work

*most*

I recently had an issue with MS deleting IE and a corporate legacy app not working.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#63
post #45

More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is. On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicit…

>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.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#64

In 1998, Microsoft asserts that their browser was an inherent component of the operating system and could not be extracted. In 2020, Microsoft miraculously defies the impossible! What can't Microsoft do?

Well, 22 years of refactor make things possible ;)

Or they were just lying, which they seem to do a lot of.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#65

This is a serious problem for us in my business as our business banking software we are forced to use by our bank in mainland China still only works with IE. I spent an hour last night ultimately inputting shady commands into my registry, to try to force IE to open instead of being hijacked by edge. When an entire industry in a country refuses to upgrade what the hell? Of course I’m pissed the bank hadn’t upgraded bu…

I'm at a US government agency and the system that processes our time and attendance still does not work with Chrome or Firefox - I think it's some kind of security certificate issue? So they tell us to use Edge to fill our our time and attendance. I click some link from our internal home page and it loads up the page in "Internet Explorer Mode," complete with the blue "e" in the address bar.

It's bullshit "security" for banking, it could be that it depends on something that isn't emulated by Edge, like toolbars or some other form of deep browser extensions, not "just" ActiveX.

For all it's worth it could be something as insane as a kernel driver that assumes a certain IE build and hooks into it for "security". Never heard of such things in areas outside of gaming, but won't be remotely surprised. Banking industry is way more backwards than gaming, after all.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#67
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…

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…

> making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable.

And, indeed, you can't remove Windows Update. Nor (in more recent versions) the Add or Remove Features component in Control Panel— er, sorry, the Settings app. So long as you can still re-install Internet Explorer without a web browser (which I think you have always been able to, ever since the days IE came in a box), there's no reason to stop you removing it.

Microsoft did have legitimate reasons to integrate the browser engine in Windows 95, what with the whole Active Desktop, HTML Application, the-web-is-the-future schtick they were going for. But that isn't one of them.

Re: Microsoft is forcibly removing internet explorer from PCs

#70
post #45

More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is. On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicit…

>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…

    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 in an anti-competitive manner to deprive Netscape of sales.
Post reply on HN