- creating sprite sheets of transparent png corners and sides that one could arrange in a table around an element to create drop-shadows and rounded corners
- putting single pixel, transparent gifs at the end of floated containers because clearfix used a "before" CSS selector that earlier IEs didn't know about.
- writing CSS rules like -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=75)"; to make something semi-transparent...
And so much more. Back then, we were certain we'd open a bottle of champagne once IE is not a requirement anymore.
Today, fortunately, I have a different Job and Microsoft makes different browsers. But looking back, I wouldn't have believed this day to arrive.
Google doesn't like the web, either. They control it at both ends. Search and the browser. Every web site today is built to conform to Google's blackbox SEO cargo cult. And Google performs an update regularly to their algorithm. At which point all websites have to do an SEO dance and hope it rains again. Google does this to prevent people from focusing on other search engines. If you always have to update for Google, then there is no time to focus on Bing or other avenues. Chrome also keeps people on Google search.
We don't have an open web today. We have three platforms. We have the Microsoft Windows platform, the Apple App Store platform, and the Google Web Platform.
And Facebook basically learned the lessons AOL failed to, on how to operate a walled garden on the internet.
There was Firebug Light, which from memory was a bookmarklet that injected a cut down firebug into the page, but even that didn’t help much.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/office/dev/add-ins/develop/...
They are not.
They just took Chrome and added their logo and theme around.
Just like Apple's Safari is built on WebKit. You wouldn't say that other vendors like Sony just took Safari and put their logo on the browser for the browser on PlayStation.
It's the same engine, not the same browser.
> Windows releases where Internet Explorer will still be available after June 15, 2022, include Windows 7 ESU, Windows 8.1, and all versions of Windows 10 LTSC client, IoT, and Server.
> "The Internet Explorer (IE) 11 desktop application will end support for Windows 10 semi-annual channel starting June 15, 2022," Microsoft says on the IE11 lifecycle page.
> As Microsoft further explains, "for supported operating systems, Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the Windows version on which it is installed."
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/internet-exp...
I gotta say... MS is serious about long-term support commitments and backwards compat!
The way I look at it, MS obviously is actually continuing to support the product, they are just choosing not to make it available to most people. It's still supported, just not for everyone.
I feel that if security patches are still being produced, they should be released as opposed to expecting people to use nothing, or roll their own by getting patches from a third party.
They could be released as "donations" to the public good from the big customers.
I am by no means a fan of Microsoft's, but when you release an OS and some applications and provide security fixes for ten years, asking for people who want to continue using that OS/app beyond that point to buy a support contract is not a complete dick move. In the FLOSS world, you may get volunteers who maintain a piece of software as a labor of love, but with something like Windows or IE, someone needs to pay people to do that work.
It might make sense to create something like a foundation to take care of the long term support for software, which would benefit everyone. I'm kind of surprised actually that this has not happened, yet (to my knowledge, at least).
But more than likely it is because deploying to that 1 customer is always going to be easier that deploying it publically.
25 years after the release of IE4, I'm just glad both of those browser codebases are now dead.
IE was really done in by Microsoft's "Longhorn" OS project. After Windows XP, Microsoft was planning a very ambitious update that would completely reset core APIs. File systems would be largely replaced by an OS-level database, and the Win32 GUI API would be replaced by an XML-based UI framework codenamed Avalon.
A new Avalon browser would ship with the OS, and thus IE + HTML would become legacy technologies as Microsoft confidently assumed most developers would flock to building their web apps in Avalon instead.
To Microsoft strategists, it seemed that they had succeeded in containing the web: Netscape was dead, Mozilla had almost no users, Apple was shipping their IE in Mac OS X, Google wasn't on Microsoft's radar, and the HTML standard process was stalled. So while a lot of content was being delivered as HTML4, there didn't seem to be any reason left for Microsoft to invest in IE — they'd already nailed the browser, owned the market, and would push Avalon as the next step.
Fortunately, Longhorn failed. Some parts of the project eventually shipped years late as Windows Vista. Avalon became WPF + XAML and still exists in Windows, but the dream of a XAML browser replacing IE was dead.
Only as a preview for web 3. Netscape, even when crashing, was faster and more user friendly. Error messages in IE were surrealistic. Unfortunately those are today standard in todays browsers.
Especially the Mac version of IE 5. Tasman was such a breath of fresh air. I never understood why they didn't use that engine everywhere.
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
This will make IE very insisting to upgrade to Edge if possible.
That said, it all came to an end after Microsoft "won" and disbanded the IE dev team, resulting in that era of stagnation we all remember.
No.
We never really used the answer against anyone if they couldn't think of anything, but the advent of XHR and other improvements offered was something a lot of developers had already forgotten about, and it was interesting to see various responses and reactions.
But I really dug into SPA/AJAX web apps in 2000 - building enterprise stuff. They were all "IE6 apps". IE6 was basically my X-windows. No other browsers were supported, and there as no pushback from customers back then. Only one of those apps made the transition to IE11.
Last year I explained to my current client that our big enterprise reporting app had to move off IE11. And I was really surprised how much pushback on got on that.
Which yeah, doesn't mean absolutely anything for existing software that is still working and requires the old version to run. If by any chanche you need to support that configuration, the "official" deprecation simply means "good luck!" and a pat on the back.
Just like XP, I've seen plenty of shops with custom software that still requires XP+IE6+activex that still get active development, because a total rewrite is out of the question when changes are small (and that is totally understandable as well).
The poor folks though will need to containerize and isolate everything from any network though to keep it somewhat safer. If they do that at all.
IEMode in Edge also works very well
So if these companies are getting windows updates at all, or edge updates at all is somewhat not optional
The funny part is the app they use still works, you're just forced to run it in compatibility mode on Edge (Holy, I forgot this existed) but their user profiles have limited access so they can't right-click, properties, unless they have admin priv.
New browser, same old 2009 problems. Obviously this is not the browsers fault, it's just insane to hear about shops like this that still hold on to legacy apps FOREVER.
This news is meaningless. This confirms it:
> For supported operating systems, Internet Explorer 11 will continue receiving security updates and technical support for the lifecycle of the Windows version on which it is installed.
From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-expl...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/15/microsoft...
Any apps / mainframes / industrials systems that needs IE to run?
There is also "Internet Explorer Mode" in Edge, which uses iexplore.exe under the hood.
Additionally, if somebody were _really_ desperate to launch iexplore.exe itself, then there are unsupported means to do so.
For example, via manually modifying the registry key "NotifyDisableIEOptions" under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\
My favourite hack though, which should not be used by anyone ever, is launching via the COM object interface, which bypasses the registry key check [2]. I have personally verified that this works(!)
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/i...
[2] https://twitter.com/aaaddress1/status/1523590203658862592
A bit more effort, can also lock the control to only browse to the intended web service, and launch the default browser for any external links.
There's kind of a market for this type of solution in the legacy enterprise app space I think.
That is so ironic. Love it.
The vendor allegedly has an update coming soon to allow other browsers to work.
Probably outdated version or not a hard requirement...
Yeah.
- crisper and higher-contrast font rendering on low-DPI monitors
- Ctrl+N/Ctrl+K clone the current tab into a new window/tab including its history, letting you “fork” the tab and effectively navigate a history tree. Edit: And, maybe more importantly, opening a link in new window/tab also clones the history.
- generally good keyboard usage, e.g. for the history tab (you can for example always blindly hit Ctrl+H, Home, Enter to go to the last visited page, something which is more fiddly in other browsers)
- larger viewport height than possible on Chrome/Firefox/Edge (after hiding the toolbar and status bar, configuring tabs to be on the address bar, etc.)
- allows yellow search highlighting (which Firefox doesn’t on light backgrounds)
Firefox does some semi-functional hack for handling quotation marks, but gives up on "content:", while Chrome and all other Blink-based browsers don't handle that kind of text at all and just skip it entirely. (No idea about Safari, but given its shared rendering engine history with Chrome it presumably doesn't handle it, either.)
You can do this in Firefox by middle (or Control) clicking the Reload button.
Does anyone (especially from MS) know why later versions of IE and pre-chromium Edge were so good and snappy with scrolling? The level of accuracy and speed was incredible (on touchpads at least) - it was probably the last time I had an interaction on a computer that made me go "wow".
They really went all out on input lag reduction for Windows 8 touch interfaces. I remember some videos from the time where they showed off such low input lag that scrolling and drawing almost perfectly tracked finger movement. Perhaps not so impressive today with iOS as a benchmark, but Windows is still king for desktop input lag
The King is dead, long live the King.
var request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
* html { _background:black !ie; }
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/ltsc/ [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/windows#what-...
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/05/23/annou...:
> The Windows 10 China Government Edition is based on Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, which already includes many of the security, identity, deployment, and manageability features governments and enterprises need. The China Government Edition will use these manageability features to remove features that are not needed by Chinese government employees like OneDrive, to manage all telemetry and updates, and to enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms within its computer systems.
Internet Explorer had dominant market share, non-standardized features, and powerful corporate backing.
Chrome has dominant market share, non-standardized features, and powerful corporate backing.
Safari doesn't have the newest standards always, but mostly sticks to the standards from what I know. The major difference seems to be a lot of devs liking Chrome.
Likewise on Windows itself, Microsoft will have to continue shipping IE's rendering engine for backwards compatibility with all those programs using the old web view control (as well as Edge's hidden IE11-mode).
I made to the web UI of a firmware device, and needed to check whether it will work with old browsers as far back as IE9.
Because IE11 has an emulation mode, I didn't have to install IE9.
Thank you, IE11!
:)
(note, they say they are compatible with Edge etc. But sadly they are really not)
Thank you, IE - and good riddance!
only webkit is left
the king is dead, long live the king.
If they had wanted to stop IE but keep competing they would have made Edge a Gecko-based browser and worked on it.
At least it's not hard wired into the OS and we're not going through another era of mega-corp hard wiring browsers into their OSes any more.
Oh wait.
IE was actually very innovative, did stuff like AJAX before everyone else and the developers adopted the ways of IE. Websites did not work well on other browsers, every website had a disclaimer at the bottom: Works best in IE.
Now I see similar situation with Chrome and gives me goosebumps. Some people say that Safari is the new IE but I think they got it wrong, I think the new IE is Google Chrome.
IE become bad when Microsoft dropped the ball and made it into a browser with a reputation to crash all the time and bring down Windows with it.
IE6 was hated by the developers because it had the largest userbase but had non-standart features, which meant that CSS and HTML and JS had to be written in a way to accommodate IE and Mozilla.
Today Chrome is very good but if Google takes something from the Microsoft playbook, we will be screwed. Some already say that Chrome is not what it used to be and Google no longer abides by the "do no evil" motto. They are even notorious to favour their own services, i.e. if you sign in into a Google website, Chrome treats that website differently than the rest, assumes that session as the browser account.
IE post-dates the addition of process isolation to Windows - IE never brought down Windows because it ran as a normal process. When people say IE was integrated into Windows they just mean applications like the shell used it as a component, it wasn't actually in the kernel.
Safari is now the browser that resists web standards and an open internet for its parent company's personal gain. See: PWAs, webgl, webview.
And Chrome is now the thousand pound gorilla forcing standards nobody wants, for its parent company's personal gain. See: manifest v3, cookie security.
In the IE era, if you wanted a "web application", you simply used Flash. There was a clear separation between the document and the application. It was nice. I miss it.
https://www.developer-tech.com/news/2019/apr/17/mozilla-goog...
Welcome to the most popular OS in the world, called 'Android'.
Thats not to say Safari isn’t dragging it’s heals, but it looks like Apple are finally ramping up development speed. I gather they have been expanding the Safari dev team, and the latest announcements at WWDC look really good.
I actually use Safari as my primary browser, I prefer it (as a user) to Chrome. Although for debugging Chrome dev tools are better, I probably open it 2-3 times a day to check stuff, but never leave it running.
This can happen again, we just need to collectively stop feeding these monopoly wannabes.
- A GDPR-style mandate to make cloud apps secure by certifying all libraries and upstream authors that run your stack, down to the OS,
- Thus cloud providers providing “Debian, only for amateur purposes, PII forbidden”,
- And “Amazon Linux, certified GDPR III, all upstream identified.”
That would be the end of free software. But at the same time, it would be the only reasonable move from EU, it drives me crazy that websites all use random NPM modules, half of them written by Russians we’re at war with.
Not that GNOME is any better, suffering as it does from the same tabletitis disease that has infected today's UI designers.