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posted by
Fnord666
on Friday August 21 2020, @01:04AM
from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.
from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.
Microsoft 365 apps to end Internet Explorer support next year:
Internet Explorer's days have been numbered since Microsoft launched its Edge browser five years ago. Microsoft appears to be another step toward closer to retiring the web browser with the announcement its Microsoft 365 apps suite will end support for Internet Explorer 11 on Aug. 17, 2021, the company said Monday.
Users of Microsoft's Teams chat and collaboration service will lose IE 11 support a bit earlier, on Nov. 30, Microsoft said in a blog post. Microsoft also said it would end support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app on March 9, 2021.
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Microsoft 365 Apps to End Internet Explorer Support Next Year
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Work hard to improve.
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You've solved the wrong problem.
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @01:32AM (10 children)
I still use IE multiple times a day. I have Chrome, Firefire, Edge and few others but they not not compatible Payroll system and US Government websites refering to 2 vendors classes. WE even have a Vortext server with IE8 loaded so we can reach other non-standard webbase equipment, from printers to furnace monitors. Hell we just installed a new monitoring equipment required by US Gov that is built on Embedded XP!
MS go make your claims, but that will not end-of-life equipment if the Governmwent REQUIRE IT!
Start getting real using real standard in place first. No Flash, JAVA, C# or other non-stnadrad add ons. MAke REAL websites using real HTML. Get it full supported... send staff to the real pople holding this all up and FIX THE MESS,
Google and others YOU TOO!!! Stop fragging the internet for person fiefdoms..
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Friday August 21 2020, @03:13AM (9 children)
(Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft therefore my opinion is invalid. This isn't shilling; I'm writing this because I find this solution genuinely valuable and a huge improvement over using IE.)
I work with large enterprises that have this problem too. The direction we're taking is to deploy the Edge Chromium [microsoft.com] browser and use IE mode [microsoft.com] to seamlessly render the sites that need IE within Edge. IE mode supports all the legacy stuff (ActiveX controls, IE 6 compatibility mode, etc) by using the IE renderer wrapped within an Edge Chromium window. The advantage of this is you don't have the two (or three) browser experience. So far my customers have known the sites that need to go on the IE naughty list, but if they didn't we could use Enterprise Site Discovery [microsoft.com] to find them.
I have one customer on a mission to remove IE from their corporate workstations (it's a removable feature on the current Win10 releases). We have two apps left. I can't wait to see it go. :)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stretch611 on Friday August 21 2020, @04:04AM (7 children)
Wow!!! you work for Microsoft... And you admit it too!!! On a tech site like this too... I saw that statement and the first thing I expected was to see a Anonymous Coward post. It takes courage to admit that.
Ok, now the joking part is over. You said employee, not executive or board member, So I will assume that you are doing the job you are told to do and not setting policy.
This is the absolute wrong approach IMO. By figuring out new way to have modern browsers incorporate the horrible features of the past, you are just enabling people to continue to leave the old crap (like activeX) in place. Proprietary things like ActiveX are the problem; (as well as things like Flash;) It (and others) are huge security flaws. By letting modern browsers utilize these sites we are just adding new flaws into the browsers which are not the best at security already.
We need to fix this problem by going to the people running the servers that are still using ActiveX and force them to change to something different. We knew the issues around this stuff for years and anyone in technology should have known that these technologies were on life support and no longer use them. With the assumption that these websites still using ActiveX are profitable and important to their users that they are able to force their clients to stay on IE for this long... How much money are they making from this and yet they refuse to invest in a technology upgrade? These are the people that need to have change forced on them or die as a company. They have made their money, now fix your server... Don't expect others to downgrade their tech for you.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @04:13AM (1 child)
Some years ago, a friend called me and said, "I just accepted a job at Microsoft. Will you still be my friend?"
I'm still not convinced MS is not evil anymore, but this was before MS had made any moves away from the dark side.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Friday August 21 2020, @06:27AM
I have a good friend (a fraternity brother from college,) who also worked for Microsoft; our friendship lasted throughout this. He was eventually laid off by MIcrosoft.
However, our friendship is significantly more strained right now. He a devout Trump support and spews the Rupublitard spin on everything. Even when he was benefiting from the extended unemployment package after he was laid off he refused to acknowledge that he was being helped by Obama and the democrats. (He was laid off by Microsoft during the financial crisis a decade ago.) Out of one cult... and into another.
The fact is, after 30 years of friendship, I know he is not a racist. He is a catholic and has a strong anti-abortion stance. We both grew up in the same city in the NE and while we were both republican leaning back in our college days, I felt disillusioned by the party caring more about the religious right than the fiscal responsibility. I became an independent, while his religious view on abortion drew him further into the republican party. Now that is what keeps him there and he has a big set of horse blinders on for anything that is not reported by fox news.
Note: Those who are familiar with me on this site probably realize by now that I am a huge wise-ass and joke all the time. But this is no joke, it is true, and honestly I find it a bit painful that my friend and I are currently strained like this right now. I have not given up on the friendship, but it is very hard right now for us to even talk with each other.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 21 2020, @08:13AM (2 children)
> How much money are they making from this and yet they refuse to invest in a technology upgrade?
For quite a few, no money at all. For example, folks running internal software in medium/large enterprises. Don't screw the devs or they might walk away.
Nb: for many corps, browser lock-in is one of the things holding people to windows. I run a windows box purely for talking to our HR systems, otherwise I would have moved completely to linux many years ago.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Friday August 21 2020, @10:59AM (1 child)
I actually made this same point yesterday. [soylentnews.org]
However, there is one huge difference... I wrote it in reference to devs selling software on a particular platform. They are not paid to work on said platform. When you are paying the devs, the devs should build what you want... not what the devs want. Yes, it is their field and you should listen to sound advice... but sound advice is not keeping around flawed tech. (Old systems do not necessarily be replaced, they can work for years... but flawed systems that are incompatible with modern tech has got to go.)
If your devs can only work on obsolete systems with horrible system flaws, it is your own problem for paying them to do that. A corporate entity should pay them to replace it with a better system and replace those developers that can not or will not change/adapt.
Yes, a big thank you to corporate accounting. (I spent many years as a developer in large corporations.) The IT area is nothing more than a money pit. It costs a lot to run and it makes nothing in profit.The whole group should be happy with what little funding we give it. That seems to be the mantra of the board of directors at all corporations except *some* of the ones that sell software.
The fact is, the corporation should be making money. Maybe not this particular year... but over time they would cease to exist if they only lose money. Like it or not, they have to invest in their IT infrastructure, If it breaks, or has a major security breach, they risk losing everything.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 21 2020, @01:59PM
> Like it or not, they have to invest in their IT infrastructure,
Sure, I agree. I think my point was that MS should continue with backwards compatibility. Of course IT departments should invest in their infrastructure.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday August 21 2020, @08:52PM (1 child)
(Parent Poster, same disclosure.)
Candidly, I don't know anyone within Microsoft or in the real world that doesn't want to see the end of Internet Explorer. Unfortunately you have businesses with technology solutions they won't or can't replace. Case in point, I did some work for a beverage company that with an application that tracked maintenance and repairs on their trucks. They retired this application and replaced it with a modern html5 app. They have a legal mandate to keep that old application running that requires IE running for, no shit, ten years. It's an exceptionally tough sell to ask them to spend money to fix that app.
If we dropped support for IE entirely it wouldn't get rid of IE. Instead you'd have millions of pre-drop machines sitting out there, unpatched, to access apps like that. What I like about IE mode is we can get the majority of people doing the majority of browsing in a modern browser. Getting IE in a sandbox for the majority of users is a huge step forward. I think that was the motivation.
... I can't offer any defense for the bazillions of IE-only government websites. That's just shameful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @10:17PM
It is not better. Maybe then patch the broken os and keep them too up to date. M$ will feel the pain that they created. They create a monopoly and heavy lock-in. They should be paying for the repairs for breaks they have left behind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @10:12PM
So IE ia NOT gone - just hidden again. Better to leave stand alone then to bury. THink make clean work and dump the old. Issue you failed to dump the source of the old. Get off butts and go directly help them for FREE and get this done.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 21 2020, @01:44AM
All support should have ended about ~1999 or so.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @02:12AM
IE 6 was the pinnacle of Microsoft's Internet "career."
I remember the guys that did front-end for web apps in those days. Fuck "the standard," IE6 is the de-facto standard.
Of course, they were called "web designer" (or some such), we saw them as buncha tech hipster wanna-be programmers - javascript wasn't so endemic as it is today.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday August 21 2020, @03:11AM (1 child)
This will be interesting. Thanks to Microsoft's "integration", IE is still mixed in with Windows 10 under the hood.
So what are they going to do? Keep this decaying browser at the core of the OS? Perhaps wall it off somehow? Or perhaps finally pull its evil ass of the OS kicking and screaming while destroying every application that stupidly embedded IE.
I told people not to embed that crap. Just launch the user's default browser when your software needs to go on the web. But nooooo, you had to have your own navigation UI from within your application, hard coded to your web site that disappeared a year after the software was released anyway.
If Microsoft had treated IE like the application it was, rather than some "OS component", they could have booted IE out a long time ago. When Windows 2000 came out, it was too far mixed in with the OS to pry out with the likes of 98lite. With Windows 7/8/10, they just plopped Edge on top of it and hoped people wouldn't notice it was still there.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday August 21 2020, @03:16AM
You can remove it on all of the current Win10 releases with Dism, Powershell, or the "Turn Windows Features on or off" GUI. We've come a long way from the "It's a core part of the OS." days.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Friday August 21 2020, @08:24AM (2 children)
Like Flash... just die already.
Until you actually just set ONE date, and kill it on that date, people will keep kicking it further down the line.
Flash has been dead to me for nearly 10 years now.
IE has been dead for nearly as long.
I literally laugh and say "Are you serious?!" whenever something suggests I should use it (our bank tried to tell us that, until I laughed at them, and then they said "Oh, it works in Firefox ESR too"... so just it's the same ActiveX control, isn't it?).
Don't bank, purchase or browse on sites that only take ancient browsers, and only one of them at that. Even internal.
I have a couple of old internal services that only work web-wise on IE. So I don't use them via that interface. They are ancient (20-year-old codebase), not exposed to users, and provide other avenues. But if they didn't work in other ways, I'd have replaced them by now.
And at home, only a cheap Chinese NVR that sits on a private VLAN with no outgoing connection has an interface that only works in IE - because it loads the video by ActiveX. So I just use a third-party app and/or the RTSP stream over VLC instead, and manage it via the physical mouse if I absolutely need to.
Seriously, just let this stuff die. If you can't do it in HTML, then you need to write real software or provide a real interface (e.g. RTSP, etc.).
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 21 2020, @01:08PM (1 child)
And yet, I still see the random "you must have adobe flash to view this media". Thinking - I believe it mostly happens on the BBC. When I see it I just close the tab, of course. There is no good reason to install flash, period.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday August 21 2020, @08:55PM
Microsoft will be removing Flash in IE and Edge at the end of this year. I can't wait! :)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 21 2020, @04:35PM (1 child)
Microsoft should absolutely NOT be allowed to discontinue IE support for it's applications.
Since Microsoft thought it okay to inflict IE upon the world for monopolistic reasons, making it the bane of web developers everywhere, Microsoft should have to live with IE 6 forever.
Even if IE 6 is no longer used by anyone, a Microsoft funded, government testing lab should be created that ensures all Microsoft applications work with IE 6. Incompatibility or compliance failure should result in immediate shutdown of those Microsoft apps until Microsoft fixes the issues and passes all tests against IE 6.
And yes, there is a web browser in hell. And the biggest walmart you ever saw.
Is there a chemotherapy treatment for excessively low blood alcohol level?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @06:13PM
Yep, & that Walmart is run by feminists.