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)
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!
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.
A web developer says thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly?
Fuck 'em. They deserve the headache.
Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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: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:Awesome for web developers and designers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do they have IE9 for XP? Not last I checked...
Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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?
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.
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:And why are those systems unpatched ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh god that was so hard [microsoft.com]. Upgrade already. XP is old-n-busted. Windows isn't my favorite, but 7 gets a lot of things right.
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.
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.
Re:And why are those systems unpatched ? (Score:2, Insightful)
While I will admit that calling them "Micros~1" is slightly less lame than calling them "Micro$soft", it's still childish and really sticks out in your post, causing most of us to dismiss you as a brash buffoon who is just too stubborn and stupid (not "and/or stupid") to perform basic computer maintenance from time to time, yet feels the need to complain about it loudly on the internet.
Re:For your own good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Enterprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 their bonuses. Corporations have been too cheap for too long. You cant not invest and expect more cash to keep coming in
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.
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:No! It is a bad idea!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:For your own good (Score:2, Insightful)
The big difference would be that the makers of Chrome and Firefox appear at least halfway competent in matters security and standards compliance, and few would distrust them implicitly in that regard
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.