IE8 Update Forces IE As Default Browser 311
We discussed Microsoft making IE8 a critical update a while back; but then the indication was that the update gave users a chance to choose whether or not to install it. Now I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes in with word that the update not only does not ask, but it makes IE the default browser. "Microsoft has a new tactic in the browser wars. They're having the 'critical' IE8 update make IE the default browser without asking. Yes, you can change it back, but it doesn't ask you if you want IE8 or if you want it as the default browser, it makes the decisions for you. Opera might have a few more complaints to make to the EU antitrust board after this, but Microsoft will probably be able to drag out the proceedings for years, only to end up paying a small fine. If you have anyone you've set up with a more secure alternative browser, you might want to help check their settings after this."
Death to IE6! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's to the end of IE 6 and all the hacks needed for site to render correctly!
Nothing changes (Score:4, Insightful)
IE remains the biggest security problem in Windows (besides user stupidity).
If webpages can override the render engine in IE8 then IE8 is only as secure as the worst render engine.
Whooooooooosh! (Score:1, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with this tactic. Firefox does the same thing to me in Linux.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope... Many corporations built their intranet around IE6 and changing browser will break it. Rather than spend buckets of money revamping their intranet, they are just more likely to keep going with IE6...
Making it a critical update was a favor (Score:4, Insightful)
IE6 is a plague on the internet development world. If it gets rid of that, wonderful. Making it the default browser, that's classic Microsoft. Actually, that's the new, desperate to hang on to market share in the face of shrinking revenue Microsoft.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure it was accidental. Nobody at Microsoft would notice this because they all use IE (by law).
You fucking suck... Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm yet another person who installed IE 8 via Windows Update and it did NOT forcibly set itself as the default browser.
Seriously Slashdot, do you even bother to vet your troll articles anymore? Do you realize how embarrassingly pathetic this one significant site in the tech world has become?
Re:More secure alternative browser? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it not a bit early to be deciding which browsers are more secure than IE8?
No it isn't, unless you believe in miracles. This isn't really Microsoft's fault but for every hacker who says "lets target Firefox and try to capture bank details" there are 100 trying to do it for IE.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that they don't care if you warned them. They just want to keep making money.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, the fact that the HTML protocol could be interpreted two different ways indicates that it's not entirely Microsoft's fault... this time.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:2, Insightful)
FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree that making it default _without asking_ is a shady move on Microsoft's part, I'm sure what the payoff is for them versus the negative response many people will have. Those users who have a non-IE browser as default will notice the switch and will switch it back, these are the users who are actively choosing which browser to use anyway. The people who don't care what browser they are using, are probably already using IE. So what do they accomplish, other than reaffirming to the non-IE people the rightness of their choice?
Re:Nothing new here (Score:1, Insightful)
Because you've not installed IE8 yourself and discovered the `article` to be pure BS. I use Ubuntu, and didn't get around to installing IE8 until I've put Ubuntu 9.04 on my box (which works great, thanks), but when I got around to installing IE8 it was relatively painless and didn't make itself default over Firefox, but I'm forced to assume that TFA was written by some sort of fucking idiot or a liar. It's that which should not be surprising.
As Machiavellian as this seems... (Score:4, Insightful)
...we know that most people (sadly) are using some version of IE currently; ergo, if they install IE8 and it makes itself the default, this is good for a variety of reasons entirely related to security (and good for the rest of us as the last thing I need is more zombies out there spamming me night and day.)
Now, most people who have an alternative browser installed do so because they are 'aware' of the realities of modern web surfing and make an intelligent choice accordingly. These people are being inconvenienced by this because they've got to set their browser back to being the default (often this is simply a case, using Mozilla as an example, of starting up their favorite browser and it saying "Hey, don't you want to use me all the time" and they choose "yes, make yourself my default browser." Inconvenient, annoying, suspicious, yes - a real problem for these people? No...
The last group are the (imho) very small minority of web users who've been lucky enough to have an informed web user install an IE alternative for them, but they themselves do not know what the fuss is about. These are the people actually getting screwed by this. They may end up with IE8 until their good Samaritan revisits them to right this terrible wrong.
Ignoring whatever the actual motives for this decision at Micro$oft was, I personally think the good outweighs the bad. It would still be nice to smack the guy who green lighted this in the face though, wouldn't it? :)
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:3, Insightful)
I help develop for a health care website, which is used internally by large clinics, etc, in Minnesota. With a strong, persistent insistence on clients switching from IE to Firefox, we've got from ~97% of users using IE to this month's stats showing 48.4% using IE, 50.8% using Firefox. We've also been pushing notices that IE6 has been EOL'd by Microsoft, and given links to upgrade to IE7. this has seen that 48.4% of IE users to be split with 20.3% of total users using IE7 and only 28.1% still using IE6.
IMHO, it's been a quite successful campaign. I'm not a huge fan of IE, in general, but it's far easier to code for IE7 than IE6.
Bollocks (Score:3, Insightful)
When I looked at my XP box the other day, there was a bubble notifying me of available updates. I checked to see what it was and all there was was IE8. So I unchecked the box, told it never to ask again, and that was the end of that. So why the FUD ? Can't you even configure windows properly ? Please stay away from Linux.
Re:SOP for all Microsoft products (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean "your" operating environment? Windows is theirs!
Re:works on my computer (Score:1, Insightful)
The guy was probably clicking "next, next, next, next" and missed the option to NOT make it the default browser.
I've noticed Firefox and Opera ask you TWICE. Once when you install it, and once after you first start it (or forever if you leave "don't ask me again" unchecked).
Re:More secure alternative browser? (Score:5, Insightful)
How was this modded troll? It's a fact of life, and he even added "This isn't really Microsoft's fault" which most slashdotters wouldn't have bothered with.
IE is the primary target for browser hacking, and will remain so as long as its market share is anywhere in the vicinity that it is now.
The best thing you can do at the moment is install Firefox *and* Chrome *and* Opera and try to dedicate types of sites to each browser.
I usually assign Google properties to Chrome, highly compliant sites to Opera, and everything else to Firefox.
(This may sound paranoid, or just overkill, but I have to develop/test on multiple browsers anyway so for me it's also a way to get to know them better.)
I'm not suggesting that everyone should install every browser, but at the very least install Firefox and make it the default, because they patch it early and often, and it's very good at maintaining itself (updating when you restart, checking for plugin updates, etc.)
How much difference would it actually make? (Score:3, Insightful)
possibly this was by-design (Score:3, Insightful)
It's conceivable that it only makes itself the default under certain circumstances. Maybe if you have auto-updates "fully" turned on (where it doesn't even ask, it just installs), it'll make it the default.
I don't want to sound troll-ish but it's likely that people who have auto-update set to "download-and-install-automatically" aren't the more savvy set, and therefor MS thought they could get away with it (I almost added "and I don't want to sound like a conspiracy-theorist", but this is MS, it's *expected*).
I can even see MS apologists taking their side here, something like: "look, you probably installed Firefox on your parent's computer to protect them from IE hacks, not because of usability, but IE8 makes very significant improvements and you know that it will be kept patched on a system that automatically installs updates from MS"
To me this seems to be a designed tactic.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just about having built their intranet around IE6. A lot of (really large) companies I have done contract work for are still using Windows 2000 as their OS and you can't run anything newer than IE6 with that. I think when XP came along, they decided not to upgrade, but just wait until the next version of the OS came out. Then Vista came along....
Re:SOP for all Microsoft products (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a reason why I hate Microsoft at times, and Visual Studio installs are definitely one of them. First it goes and update your entire system, restarts a couple of hundred times and then it messes up your file associations. And of course you can be assured additional fun if you work at a company that does not have internet connections on their development PC's.
Compare that with an Eclipse inst^H^H^Hunzip.
Anyway, the whole idea that a single source file should open in an IDE is flawed. Let IDE's open workspaces and projects, but single files (many of them just containing fragments of code) that I want to view (promptly if possible) should *NOT* open in an IDE, and especially not in VS.
That said, VS itself is getting better. But it starts off by annoying the hell out of possible switchers.
Re:first post (Score:0, Insightful)
Same here (Score:5, Insightful)
Installed on Vista 64.
I think what TFA actually means to say is:
"I got really click happy and just blindly clicked my way through the IE8 install without looking and it made itself my default browser, how dare it!"
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:1, Insightful)
and you can't run anything newer than IE6 with that.
Correction:
"and you can't run any newer IE than IE6 with that."
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:5, Insightful)
Real problem is they're forcing their browser to be default system browser, in place of Opera, Firefox, Chrome - whichever is your default. Y'know how aforementioned browsers (and older IE) ask you if you want them to be the default? The /. summary makes point of forcing IE8 as the default.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:5, Insightful)
They also won't remember that you warned them. They'll remember that somewhere along the line, IT oversaw this intranet for them. It worked for a while, then something broke. Even if they're aware that this is related to IE6 (probably not), nobody will remember who made that call, especially not the idiot who said "let's just go with that blue E internet thingie."
They'll just know that IT made it, and it broke after a few years.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:3, Insightful)
It amazes me how when firefox has a new version, everyone downloads it with a warm and fuzzy feeling that it is going to be an improvement. However, whenever IE has a new version, people are so reluctant to download it that MS now has to force the public to upgrade.
People who use Firefox generally understand the concept of updating software. Folks who use IE, en masse, don't even know that there's a difference between "Internet Explorer" and "web browser"; in fact, they might not even realise that IE is an application as such - how many times in your life did you hear, "and then I clicked on the blue Internet icon"? Making the former group update is easy - roll out a bunch of new features, including stuff only a geek would truly understand the meaning of and care about (such as 100% ACID3...). It's much harder for the latter group.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft thinks their browser is the best, or at lest good enough for everyone, but when you upgrade an unused program and end up wrecking another one, YOU FUCKED UP!
This is definitely the kind of thing that Opera needs to bring to the EU's attention.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:3, Insightful)
> document as SGML and apply SGML rules to it. This means
> that namespaces, MathML, etc. cannot be supported by
> that browser,
Actually, it's theoretically possible to still support those things without fully embracing all the other XML rules. It won't make the purists happy, but it can be done.
> and that it will not fail on invalid content as an xml parser should.
I consider completely failing on all invalid content to be an undesirable characteristic in a web browser and contrary to the basic principle of graceful degradation that the web is built on. If a browser sees an element it does not recognize, it should just treat it as a generic element (comparable to span) and go on. This allows webmasters to go ahead and use new features before every web browser that's still in use supports them (which can take a decade or more).
A web browser is not a validator. That isn't its purpose. Web developers need to know how to use a validator, yes, but the web browser shouldn't be it.
You just proved his point! (Score:5, Insightful)
By those numbers, only 6.5% of IE users are running the latest version. Even if you include IE7 you get that only 73.5% of IE users have upgraded to a browser released in the last three years.
On the otherhand, 91.4% of Firefox users are running the latest stable version or a beta version. And if you include FF2 (released the same month as IE7) 99.5% of firefox users have upgraded to a browser released in the last three years.
Firefox users are far more likely to upgrade to the newest version than Internet Explorer users are, which is what he was claiming.
Re:Death to IE6! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. But it actually has to be served as XHTML, and the vast majority is not.
There is a popular misconception that an XHTML DOCTYPE means the page is interpreted as XHTML, this is incorrect. All the DOCTYPE really does is turn off quirks mode in IE, the actual content-type of the page (which is sent in the HTTP response header from the server) is virtually always served as text/html.
In order to have a page truly interpreted as XHTML, it needs a content-type header of application/xhtml+xml, and this will indeed break rendering and display an XML parsing error for the most trivial of errors. And of course IE6 doesn't support application/xhtml+xml, so this is not a viable option unless you want to start serving different versions of your page based on the browser.
Thus the situation we have today, is that everyone writes "XHTML style" HTML (ie, self-closing tags, everything lowercase, quoted attributes, etc), but it's actually interpreted as poorly formed HTML by the browser. (ie, <br /> is technically not valid HTML) Luckily browsers are extremely forgiving of poorly formed HTML.
A couple links on the subject:
http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2005/04/08/doctype-declaration-and-content-type-headers [autisticcuckoo.net]
http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml [hixie.ch]
Re:You just proved his point! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been my experience that Firefox automatically downloads updates and installs them when I restart my browser. Firefox users are up to date because *they don't have a choice.*
Now, who was complaining about MS forcing an update?
Re:You just proved his point! (Score:2, Insightful)