Microsoft Upgrading Windows Users To Latest Version of MSIE 476
helix2301 writes "Microsoft will be upgrading all Windows XP, Vista and 7 users to the latest IE silently. They are doing this because they have found a large number of non-patched systems. Microsoft pointed out that Chrome and Firefox do this regularly. They will start with Australia and Brazil in January, then go world-wide after they have assured there are no issues."
start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
Australia.... starts with an A
Brazil... starts with a B
probably just going down an alphabetical list of major countries.
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
-Canadian AC
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
Shit! We're next!
-Canadian AC
Ha! USA! USA! USA!
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
Shit! We're next!
-Canadian AC
Ha! USA! USA! USA!
Time for Luddites to move to Zimbabwe?
Re: (Score:3)
Argentina comes before Australia alphabetically. Its got more population too.
Anyway, what if you don't have Windows Update set to automatic mode?
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
No, they decided to do it alphabetically. So they spent $13 million conducting market research in which they asked focus groups to name a country that starts with A and another that starts with B. After spending another $4 million running statistical analysis on the results (plus an additional $87 million trying to keep the analysis computers running, since after all they were Windows machines), they came to the conclusion that the ideal A country is Australia and the ideal B country is Brazil. Shortly they will be running a $150 million ad campaign depicting Kermit the Frog and Al Gore traveling from Australia to Brazil.
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Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
Brazil I imagine has rather high infection rates, due to the high piracy rates (I'm pretty sure Windows_XP_NoWGA_+_Keygen.torrent doesn't have all the patches slipstreamed in).
Australia is probably just because if the inhabitants can handle thousands of incredibly toxic spiders, scorpions, snakes, fish, and even exploding trees, they can probably handle a browser that's slightly more broken than normal.
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:4, Funny)
Not to mention driving on the wrong side of the road.
And Vegemite.
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
Brazil I imagine has rather high infection rates, due to the high piracy rates (I'm pretty sure Windows_XP_NoWGA_+_Keygen.torrent doesn't have all the patches slipstreamed in).
Australia is probably just because if the inhabitants can handle thousands of incredibly toxic spiders, scorpions, snakes, fish, and even exploding trees, they can probably handle a browser that's slightly more broken than normal.
"Crikey! This is a really dangerous virus on our computer! I'm going to try to take it by the tail and drag it out of the drive so you can see it. That's quite a magnificient beast, isn't it? Look how it hooks in between layers and takes advantage of vulnerabilities. OK, letting it go again. Watch yer selves!"
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
In Russia, they put worms in vodka to see if it's toxic
... enough to drink yet.
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I suppose you'd be surprised to learn then that there are regular releases with all patches slipstreamed in.
For example:
http://www.rlslog.net/microsoft-windows-7-enterprise-x86-sp1-integrated-december-2011-bie/ [rlslog.net]
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:5, Funny)
No. Australia was chosen as its use of IE6 is 1.8%, which is pretty high.
Re:start with Australia and Brazil (Score:4, Interesting)
Do they start with Australia and Brazil because they do not care about the users there?
Looking at Statcounter, I noticed two things about Australia and Brazil:
IE 8 is the dominant browser in both countries (30% each) and IE 6 doesn't even make the top 12 in either country. The last of the hold-outs running IE 6 should not be a problem.
finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't believe it's taken this long.
I like there strategy, I like it a lot... (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha, I guess a big thanks goes out to Australia and Brazil for being the beta testers. Thanks!
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Australia is the alpha tester, Brazil the beta tester.
Re:I like there strategy, I like it a lot... (Score:5, Funny)
I think Microsoft might want to reconsider the order. Having a country filled with the deadliest snakes and spiders in the world be the alpha testers is NOT a smart move. Worse, Paul Hogan and Rolf Harris might release a celebrity protest song.
Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Microsoft is going to find plenty of issues trying to roll this out in the US.
Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly?
Fuck 'em. They deserve the headache.
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It's coming in through Windows Update. If you have intranet apps with specific requirements and don't carefully manage Windows Update, you'd have gotten fucked long ago.
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I think that a lot of organizations are going to have to eventually upgrade their obsolete software.
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Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0 (Score:5, Informative)
Then install MultipleIEs [tredosoft.com], and you can have your IE6 still exist somewhere, while the main IE on the machine is 8 or 9.
Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft won't be the ones getting the angry customer phone calls. The devs of broken, backwards web apps will.
Now, is that a feature, or a bug?
Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand, some SAP products are locked into IE6 (so I have read.) It's ridiculuous that that's the case, but it is what it is.
Yep we have to keep IE6 on accountants' computers just for ACCPAC. That said we install Firefox on those and set it as the default browser.
A web developer says thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)
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If lazy geeks could be bothered to write the cost benefit analysis required to get rid of IE6/7 it would have been long gone. However shrieking about it on a web forum and ignoring the perfectly valid business case of 'it does what we want it to' accomplishes precisely zero.
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck IE6. Fuck it hard. Companies that have been dragging their feet on this for years need a hard kick in the ass, and this is how to do it.
If something breaks because of this, you only have yourself to blame. Anyone still running this shit intentionally knew they were on a path to pain.
And why are those systems unpatched ? (Score:5, Informative)
Because they are not running Windows updates. at all. And therefore this is not going to have an effect.
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Or it's my wife's computer and she just keeps dismissing ANY message that comes up without reading it.
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Every time Micros~1 updates IE, they fsck around with the defaults -- incorrectly, of course -- and I have to dive through half a dozen panes of preferences settings to bludgeon the thing back into submission. So, no, Micros~1, leave the damned thing alone.
(I also long ago uninstalled MSIE which, for some inane reason, is distinct from IE.)
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You gonna pay for new hardware for us?
Figured.
We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox user here. I do the same, locally rather than through Google instant, so my browsing habits are less exposed to the data miners at our favorite advertising agency.
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Neither has IE - they call them "Favorites" over there.
Awesome for web developers and designers. (Score:2)
Goodbye IE7/8 support!
Re:Awesome for web developers and designers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do they have IE9 for XP? Not last I checked...
Re:Awesome for web developers and designers. (Score:5, Informative)
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Well....
Shit.
Re:Awesome for web developers and designers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really: since IE 9 is not available for XP, there will still be millions of IE 8 installs around evem after a forced update to the latest version.
This is a major improvement over millions of IE6 and IE7 installs.
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Maybe they'll roll out an auto-update of XP to Win7? I wonder how they'll handle the auto-debiting of bank accounts.
Don't you mean IE6/IE7? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Microsoft chose not to support IE9 on Windows XP, so we're going to be stuck with IE8 for quite some time yet.
Mind you, this is still cause for some celebration, as IE8 represents major improvement over its predecessors. But it's not the fundamental fix to the Web that an update to IE9 would be. When Microsoft swallows its pride and ports it (or puts XP support into IE10), that will be cause for dancing in the streets.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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If you've got machines on a domain that aren't properly configured to a) Update automatically from an internally managed WSUS server on a regular basis and b) Set to suppress and/or reschedule automatic restarts out of working hours then frankly you deserve any data loss you get.
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Hmmm. When using a WSUS server, the behaviour you describe is typical of an update with a deadline. I suppose it is possible that someone at MS inadvertently configured a deadline on one of the WU updates.
Enterprise? (Score:2)
While I'm ok with this as an end user and I actively use chrome at home so I'm used to this, I can't help but wonder if this is going to either be a godsend or nightmare for the enterprise IT crowd. However, the shop I work in is fairly good about letting go of things such as the infamous IE6 and we've had very little issues with the latest.
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Any enterprise IT department worthy of continued employment will be running all Windows updates through their own WSUS server anyway and so will be free to leave their XP clients running IE6 if they so desire.
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Godsend longterm, but nightmate short term. XP really is an inappropriate os to use in 2011. No aslr, dep for all services, trim command, html 5, uac, default admin write, usb 3, the list goes on.
Even firefox and chrome run without dep, aslr, and other security features in XP. Management does not know this.
Upgrading an intranet to IE 8 will make it work in any future version of IE. All these things will make it a dream at work, but a nightmare for the bean counters and CFOs who are ignorant and demand the
OMG (Score:2)
Wow, this is going to be interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
after they have assured there are no issues
IE 6 is a very, very different browser from IE 9. We've had plenty of clients who can't move off IE 6 (or are in the middle of a large project to do so) because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly. I've seen MS make this type of mistake before - they don't see many public-facing sites using a technology, so they feel safe getting rid of it. Well, yes, very few public-facing sites are going to use crazy IE specific stuff, and most are (by now) going to be making reasonable efforts to work between browsers.
Intranet sites are a whole other kettle of fish; corporate programmers often target a single browser - and for many of them, that was IE for a long time. They got away with that from IE 4 to IE 6 because MS just added stuff. With IE 7 and, particularly, Vista, they started fixing insecure and non-standard behaviors - and that's part of why so many companies are still on XP and IE 6.
If MS does this, there will be a lot of pissed off people and gnashing of teeth. I'm not saying it's the wrong choice but "once they've assured there's no issues" sounds pretty silly.
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Many companies have lax or no update control, and many allow logins from home computers and what not. People will end up in a version they didn't mean to get and that will create work for other people.
Not end of the world, and again I'm not saying the decision's wrong - I just think they're crazy if they don't expect some significant problems and complaints.
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To be fair, the situation looked a lot different in 1998. I mean, look at what web standards defined in 1998 (almost nothing) vs. what managers demanded from these web applications (pretty much everything we have now, plus some other stuff).
So say you want a page that can update dynamically? What are you going to tell your manager: wait for some more tech to be invented and put into a standard? OK, fine - we'll just sit out for 5 years while we get trampled.
Oh, or we'll go "cross browser" and limit ourse
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I think you have a point. I wasn't looking back as far as to 1998, my bad. By the way, that was the year of IE5 and Netscape 4.
The dynamic you describe is real and happens all the time. Anyway, we're writing about web applications for an intranet so the case for native applications was not so desperate. Furthermore managers and developers should have started re-writing them in a cross browser way somewhere in the early 2000s, at worst in 2004 when Firefox was launched and gained traction among developers o
IE9 for XP? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? When did this happen?
As a web developer (Score:5, Insightful)
THANK YOU! The number of people using IE 6 and 7 is about to dramatically decline, which is roughly proportional to the number of headaches I will be getting on a daily basis.
Find the devil (Score:5, Informative)
So if you opted out before you're not going to get it. And I imagine you'll be able to back track anyway. Also they have "blocker toolkits" so you can really be sure.
Being "different" will bite MS in the ass... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of this -- I want earlier versions of IE to die a thousand silent deaths, but...
This will hurt some large enterprises who have specifically designed certain website features to work only in IE. Older versions of IE tended to have some quirky rendering behaviors and a lot of sites rely on those quirks. Taking the browser directly to the latest IE will render things in IE "Standards" mode which will break some of these sites.
They better read up on how to explicitly set IE rendering modes:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).aspx
Three ways to do this: 1) do it in the page body with a META tag, 2) do it in the HTTP headers with the X-UA-Compatible header, or 3) push a GPO update to your internal IE clients that forces the browser to render the sites you specify in "IE Compatibility Mode".
rolling out IE9 (Score:4, Informative)
IE9 still limited to Vista/7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad that they're still not backporting IE9 to XP, which continues to have a massive market share, especially on the corporate desktop. This really annoys me as a web developer, since it means that until after 2014 (when XP support officially ends) we cannot use CSS3 features and SVG images and expect them to work for everyone.
*Yes, I know, graceful degradation. But management wants those nice rounded corners and drop-shadows to appear in IE8, not just Firefox and Chrome. Using css3pie helps a bit, but it's not bug-free, and in many cases special debugging still needs to be done for IE. And I don't know of any effective workaround to display SVGs in IE8 without making everyone download a plugin.
YES! (Score:3)
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
And what browser do you use? Firefox? Chrome? both of those already do this. This is actually a good idea. I know that at both my office and my parents house that if a screen comes up asking them to update, it's *close* "I'll update later"... this will go on until I manually run the updates because they don't want updates taking time away from facebook or shopping online. Automatically updating like this will silently fix issues, which is a good thing for the bulk of the population that still uses IE.
Re:For your own good (Score:4, Insightful)
Hum, last I saw, Firefox only auto-updates if you authorizes it. (What, by the way, I don't do, on any of my computers, for reasons that are completely different from not trusting the updates.)
I welcome the news of no more IE6, IE7 and IE8. But the means aren't good (well, I don't depend on Windows personaly, so I don't relly care - the IT of my workplace may think differently).
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Interesting)
I just got moved up to IE8 at work. It was IE6 for years, moved to 7 in September. That choice is made by the IT department, and they have to confirm that there aren't issues with the various bits of software being run on the Intranet.
Not everyone uses their computers exclusively at home / at a coffee shop.
And no, we can't just use portable Foo on a USB drive.
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The software on your intranet must be a load of crap when it required them until last september to get compatability with IE > 6!
You'd be surprised at the quantity and degree of crappiness internal business-specific applications can get when no one wants to spend the money to develop properly.
Re:For your own good (Score:4, Interesting)
There's still the issue of the differences between IE 8 and 9. There's a few issues with some of our toolkit that just can't be fixed without forcing IE 9 into IE 8 standards mode. Granted, it's just a matter of sticking a meta tag in the header, but, funilly enough, if you don't make that meta tag the FIRST meta tag, IE 9 throws a MAJOR wobbly and won't execute it, or any of the other command meta tags. And will still run the controls wrongly.
Just for reference, if anyone else has wondered why their code won't work in IE 9 but does in 8, the meta tag is <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8" />
it's amazing how many extra tags, conditional comments and js hacks have to be implemented just to accommodate Internet Explorer. And yes, many corporate networks still have 10 year old code that only runs in IE 6, that is the crux of their productivity suite. It's an utter shambles honestly. And MS is entirely to blame.
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I know many Corporations that have in-house applications that can ONLY run on IE6. Often these legacy apps are extremely important for the company and are non-trivial to update to more recent browser versions. (or, the company does not have the resources to work on this)
For many corp's this will be an IT nightmare.
(however, I mean really, these Co's have had 20 years to upgrade these app and they have chosen not to, so at some point maybe a 'stick' is needed)
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For your own good (Score:4, Informative)
If they've got any sense at all they'll be using WSUS - can Microsoft override this? I wouldn't think so.
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For your own good (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you fail to realise just how much money has been sunk into these decade old systems.
It's hard to justify spending potentially millions of dollars on an upgrade when:
1) The system works now just fine.
2) The upgrade does not necessarily add features or make it work any better.
3) The entire saga is classed as a discretionary spend.
As for the rest of your post:
- Designing a system based around a product of the biggest software company in the world who are leading the internet browsing industry in every factor is in no way a "stupid investment". Heck the fact these systems work now 10 years later is a testament to the good investment it is. Designing a system now with IE6 support would be a stupid investment.
- How is IE6 representative of the titanic? The systems work. They continue to work. IE6 continues to run. For the most part subsequent versions of IE even provide dedicated compatibility modes to help keep them running which works well in many cases.
I hate using IE6 at work as much as the next guy but don't come in all high and mighty and pretend you wouldn't have made the same decisions at the time given the information you had at hand. If you did, likely you wouldn't be working at the company anymore.
Re:For your own good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dumping the worst browser in the world for the second worst browser in order to use the worst intranet platform in the world... When will they be upgrading from ME to Vista?
Re:For your own good (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, by 2014 we'll all be using Linux.
But it'll only last for a year, by which time we will have adapted to naturally process pure, immaterial data, freed from the unavoidable constraints of software.
No! It is a bad idea!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a web developer who actually LIKES IE 6 & IE 7.
If a client wants IE 6 compatibility, I get to charge them a significant premium. Please MS, don't do this.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:No! It is a bad idea!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, Firefox and Chrome don't break the system when they update and if they do, it only takes a minute to uninstall and reinstall the desired version. It is also very easy to opt out.
Internet Explorer upgrades are not something to be taken lightly, because:
a) They can affect the Windows shell
b) Programmers may be (correctly or incorrectly) relying on behaviour of its APIs
Internet Explorer upgrades can break shit.
Another example, I have noticed that adding IE8 to an older Windows XP computer slows the whole system down. (That sucks when you don't even use the browser)
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly you've never been involved in trying to get rid of an app like that.
It's mission critical, covers a bunch of use-cases that nobody can remember but that are absolutely vital to like two people (but affect millions of dollars of business), and almost nobody who fully understands it is still around. It's impossible to gather requirements because the application has so many exceptions and one-off fixes and tweaks as to make it impossible to know what all it's supposed to do.
I've been on a couple of projects which tried to replace legacy, in-house apps ... it's often a very expensive, time-consuming process that leaves you with a solution which does a fraction of what the original did and leaves the users miserable that they've been "upgraded" to a tool which doesn't do the job.
Sadly, once you have that kind of software, the process of getting rid of it is often damned near impossible. At the very least, it can be prohibitively expensive ... who wants to spend $40 million to end up with software that does less than what you have now?
Nobody sees it as investing in moving away from old creaky technology, they see it as spending money on something they already have. Hell, I've seen someone go through a multi-year process, tens of millions of dollars, huge amounts of man-power ... only to decide that the twenty-year old app that runs on the mainframe is still a better solution because it covers all of their use cases and the users are comfortable with it.
It gets even worse if you try to replace purpose-built with something that does 'most' of what you need. The users won't touch it because they think it's cumbersome, and missing features they can't live without.
Yes, it is short-sighted to not get rid of it, but the sheer cost and amount of pain in ripping it out can make the alternative seem more attractive.
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
Conversely, if you can actually do a good job and replace their old software with new software that does the job better, you're sorted.
I replaced a monstrous thing that was a custom facade on a UML modeller with integrated CVS handling with a couple of Eclipse plugins, a small Java program and a few shell scripts. Their startup time went from 15 minutes to 60 seconds, all their basic operations are at least an order of magnitude faster, the editor is WYSIWYG instead of having to paste HTML in from Dreamweaver, and it uses autocomplete to place links instead of some horrendous wizard where you have to find the thing you want to link to in a tree view.
They don't even mind that I left a whole bunch of features out, because they were there to compensate for the incredible suckitude of the original solution. The only thing they'd really like is a few more GUI widgets, but they have a good (self-maintained wiki) manual and nice friendly shell scripts and really, the tasks the GUI would be for are a minor part of their work - the bits that consume the time are already wrapped in GUIs. I just view it as a minor anxiety with command lines - a GUI wouldn't make anything more robust, or even easier to use (really - just LOOK easier to use), and it would make things harder to debug when they do go wrong.
Just the savings on not having to pay the support licenses for the horrible proprietary Java CVS server they were using has paid for the time I spent on it, and then some. The increased productivity is just gravy. I get about 1 support call a month for it, usually asking for a change to one of the XSLT sheets because they need their templates updating.
The key is not to look at what the old app does and try to replicate it exactly. If you take a step back and work out what the actual requirements are, you'll end up with a better product that the users actually want. The old application can help considerably with that - usually the thing that frustrates them the most is the thing that wastes most of their time and needs to be made the most streamlined or even automated away. For this app, that was the linking - instead firing up a wizard and making of a whole bunch of clicks in a tree view, you now just type the first few letters, hit ctrl-space, and find the item you wanted to link in a menu with the mouse or keyboard. And you can actually copy and paste the links now, which you couldn't do in the old version.
So there are definitely benefits. Fortunately, the manager of this team could see that. Even better for me, he's now become greatly elevated in the hierarchy, carrying my reputation as a miracle worker with him...
Not the same scale though.. we're talking in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of millions.
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Re:For your own good (Score:4, Informative)
And then we can finally stop the H264 vs WebM battle, because IE9 will only support H264.
Internet Explorer 9 supports both H.264 and WebM. No other video codecs are supported by IE9. WebM support is added by installing the media foundation components:
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf/ [google.com]
You can test WebM support in IE9 with Microsoft's IE9 test drive video support demo:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/videoformatsupport/default.html [microsoft.com]
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
IE has been getting a lot better, and the more sane release schedule was becoming more and more of a selling point over Firefox. Funny how the browser field has shifted. It used to be Firefox for the smart people, Opera for the independent smart people, and IE/Safari for the people that didn't really know how computers operated.
Now, IE and Safari have improved, Firefox is squandering it's lead, and Chrome is on par with Firefox, and Opera is still the Ron Paul of browsers. There's no obviously bad browser anymore, but we also don't have an obviously superior browser.
Re:For your own good (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no obviously bad browser anymore, but we also don't have an obviously superior browser.
As a developer, I strongly disagree there. IE has the same problems it has always had: everything works in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, & Safari but oh, surprise surprise, it doesn't work in IE. Always have to code something special, even with widely supported Javascript frameworks, there are needed tweaks nearly every time, just for IE.
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Re:For your own good (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted I'm not a web dev so I could be way off on this.
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Informative)
One thing that makes a difference between FF and IE pushing upgrades, if I have IE6 installed on my machine, it's because there's some horribly written intranet site that will only work in IE6. I'm not saying that every IE6 user can use that excuse, but there exist some number of us for whom it is true. Do they have a way to force a downgrade or install versions side by side?
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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>Do we want to call MS Big Brother over this, when they're following the example of Firefox?
Sure. Firefox isn't integrated into the OS in the way IE is, for starters. And what this means is that I haven't upgraded IE for some time now because it broke one of the widgets I use on my Win7 desktop. Firefox doesn't do that sort of thing, because it can't, so there's not an issue with beaking stuff outside of itself.
I guess I might as well mention while I'm here that I haven't upgraded to the latest Firefox e
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What about all the companies that use older versions of IE because of compatibility with their own proprietary web applications?
Simple: they'll disable the automatic update, by force if necessary.
Realistically, though, these users tend to be behind corporate firewalls with lots of antivirus protection and a forced patch schedule, so I doubt Microsoft is too worried about them contributing significantly to continued security holes thanks to IE6. This is an update to save the clueless from themselves.
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How about reading the article before commenting on it?
"While the benefits of upgrading are numerous, we recognize that some organizations and individuals may want to opt-out and set their own upgrade pace. One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule. The Internet Explorer 8 and Intern
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if it's web base and only works with IE8 i wouldn't call it "software" but rather a bandaid
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Wait, did you really write "IE8" there? Not "IE6", but "IE8"?
If so, what you're saying is that you've got some web developers that wrote an app that only works with a specific version of a specific browser, no earlier than 2009.
Where did you get those folks? I thought it was already a hanging offence by 2006 or so.
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You can remove Safari on OS X, or IE on Windows. But you can't remove WebKit on OS X, or Trident on Windows.