The Man At Microsoft Charged With Destroying IE6 458
Barence writes "The man in charge of Internet Explorer has told PC Pro that he's been tasked with destroying IE6. Internet Explorer 6 continues to be the most used browser version in the world at the ripe old age of nine. IE6's position as the default browser in Windows XP means many companies still cling to the browser. 'Part of my job is to get IE6 share down to zero as soon as possible,' said Ryan Gavin, head of the Internet Explorer business group. Microsoft has also been giving further previews of Internet Explorer 9, with demonstrations showing two 720p HD videos running simultaneously on a netbook, thanks to IE9's GPU-accelerated graphics."
IE6 is NOT the most popular web browser... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:IE6 is NOT the most popular web browser... (Score:5, Funny)
No, IE6 is the most common web browser, however (and directly because of the former) it is the least popular web browser.
Re:IE6 is NOT the most popular web browser... (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, they just have to issue a service pack which replaces IE6 by IE9.
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Our company has just rolled out a new intranets globally a change from each business unit doing their own thing. It STILL doesn't render correctly in Firefox.
Re:IE6 is NOT the most popular web browser... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the person they roped in to build the intranet included a few comments in the source code, specifically "Internet Explorer 6 is fucking terrible" "I had to hack this code to even get it to work" and an entire subfolder named "IE6sux".
So that's what MS has to deal with, corporations who figure if it ain't broke then there's no reason to fix it. Problem is, they don't actually realise what 'broke' is.
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Of course, they're going from one insecure browser (IE6) to another insecure browser (IE8) (gotta have ActiveX).
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The real problem is experts who don’t have the balls to stand up to the management, and tell them that they know better (after all, that is the reason the are paid, no?), and that if they hire experts to then not listen to them, they are idiots and will fuck up their company. So what is the reason again, to work for a boss who deliberately destroys the company? I would go straight to the big boss, and tell him that that idiot is fucking up his company, and list all the ways that he hurts him and costs
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Re:IE6 is NOT the most popular web browser... (Score:5, Funny)
The iTunes updater installing a completely unrelated program is a little different than Windows Update updating a Windows program from one version to another. :P
I noticed your name wasn't Bad Analogy Guy, so I felt it needed to be pointed out.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
IE 9 requires Vista, which came with IE 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Can't be that hard to rotate the last character of the product name by 180 degrees.
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EOL XP already... (Score:3, Insightful)
To kill IE6, kill XP. Here's how.
1. End all security updates for XP.
2. Wait for the first botnet to come up with a XP hack.
3. Say "Sorry, you need to upgrade. Now!" to the crying victims.
Re:EOL XP already... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EOL XP already... (Score:5, Insightful)
you forgot: 0. Design an OS which can viably replace XP. No, Vista doesn't count. 7 is getting there. Maybe.
Re:EOL XP already... (Score:5, Insightful)
7 is well beyond a viable replacement for XP in any useful category you can pick. The time to upgrade is here.
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Great, when the time comes to reinstall Windows on my dads laptop I'll install Win7.
Windows XP works nicely on a 1GHz Mobile P3 CPU and 512MB of PC133 RAM. Since 7 is a good replacement for XP, it will surely work just as fast as XP works now. Right?
Re:EOL XP already... (Score:4, Informative)
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I actually have Windows 7 installed in a virtual machine on a computer with 3x 700MHz CPUs (the VM has one CPU and 1GB RAM) and am trying to find settings that make it faster (since whatever is reasonably fast on a 700MHz CPU will fly on a 2GHz CPU) and also make the UI look more like 2000/XP, I don't like changes. This is for my eventual purchase of a new laptop when my current one breaks beyond repair because I most likely will not be able to find drivers for XP by then.
Win7 looks to me like an OK OS, tho
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You might get better performance in the VM if you give it 2 virtual CPUs. Depending on the specifics of your hardware, even if you use CPU affinity settings to force it to only execute on one CPU, you may find that concurrent processes get handled a little more gracefully.
Sorta like 'hyperthreading', but implemented in software.
Re:EOL XP already... (Score:5, Informative)
Right. Close, at least.
I know it's popular to slam Microsoft products, but seriously -- Windows 7 is much leaner than Vista was, and overall is pretty similar to XP in performance. It will run on a pentium 3 CPU, and it will run just fine with 512MB of RAM as well. Granted, you'd probably will need to turn of the Aero graphic acceleration on the desktop and some other eyecandy, but in general it's perfectly happy on a 512MB machine... Unlike Vista, which was pretty much a slideshow on anything with less than a gigabyte.
In actual benchmarks XP may edge it in certain areas (There's some CPU penalty for added functionality, of course), but it really is surprisingly usable on older hardware. Microsoft really did a pretty decent job on trying to turn the whole vista trainwreck around.
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But it doesn't have all the features of XP. Off the top of my head:
1. Non-customizable start menu like XP (yeah, you can type what you want, but there are advantages to having dynamic menus)
2. Tree Views don't have line options anymore (removed in 7, were still available in Vista) In fact, the whole operation of the Tree View of folders is totally fucked up now. It tries too hard to estimate what you want to do.
3. Movable address "toolbars" so you could customize the layout and look of your Explorer W
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Windows XP works nicely on a 1GHz Mobile P3 CPU and 512MB of PC133 RAM. Since 7 is a good replacement for XP, it will surely work just as fast as XP works now. Right?
It's odd. On one hand, you like your dad well enough to maintain his computer for him. On the other, you won't give him anything newer than 9 years old. My suggestion: go to Target, pick up an HP Mini with twice the CPU and RAM, a hard drive about 15 times bigger, and vastly better graphics. For $300, you can go back to passive-aggressively neglecting him for another decade.
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Anyway, Ubuntu 10.04 is just great and it is not getting worse.
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I don't get why this link requires https, seems kind of weird.
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-1 Flogging a dead horse! Everyone kept attacking Vista with the vague DRM claims without being able to back it up. That was what made me the most mad when I eventually and begrudgingly tried Vista only to find that most of the complaints that I read about it were crap. I found that I could rip CDs in MP3 format with Windows Media Player, I could rip DVDs and I could play pirated videos downloaded from the Internet (presumably - not that I actually did that!)
When you look at the specific claims people made
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Re:EOL XP already... (Score:4, Funny)
Pay google a meager sum to add some javascript that displays an "upgrade to IE9" link instead of google search for people still running IE6.
Do the same thing on Bing.
Sure, you could get around it with a user-agent switcher - but if you're savvy enough to do that, chances are you're not running IE6...
Re:EOL XP already... (Score:5, Informative)
Much simpler solution: Pay google a meager sum to add some javascript that displays an "upgrade to IE9" link instead of google search for people still running IE6. Do the same thing on Bing.
google already does that on youtube and google docs
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1. Or develop a small script for website users: Whenever you use IE6 you get prompted to upgrade.
2. Get is on a popular porn site
3. IE6 dead
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I would be willing to bet that Google search is used FAR more frequently than Youtube at work.... wait... oh.... yeah... good point.
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So in other words:
1. End all security updates for XP.
2. ?????
3. Profit!
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What the hell were you doing running SP2 this long anyway?
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There is a ton of enterprise software that is not approved to be run on anything newer than XP SP2. This is pretty normal lag for this sort of expensive garbage.
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Plus we probably can't afford all the new licences, since Obama-care has basically trashed our finances.
How has it done that? I am genuinely curious... My wife works for a hospital, too, but I haven't heard anything about trashed finances. If anything, things are looking up, as there will eventually be better insurance coverage for lots of the people who show up.
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Apart from the fact that people should run morally decent Free software and spread that gospel, how does other people running IE6 hurt me, you and the rest of mankind? (not a rhetorical question)
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Apart from the fact that people should run morally decent Free software and spread that gospel, how does other people running IE6 hurt me, you and the rest of mankind? (not a rhetorical question)
There's the vast number of botnets that operate by being able to easily infect home computers.
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4. Watch businesses go else where
Enterprises just got to XP a few years ago, it will be another 2-5 years before most of them are over to Win 7.
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The cost of the licenses is a tiny tiny fraction of the costs to update, probably below 1% for many Enterprises. The real issue is all the "Enteprise" grade apps that will work on nothing newer, the testing that has to go into each and every thing and the man hours dedicated to making this not kill your businesses productivity.
The Joker (Score:5, Funny)
Do you want to know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can't backup all the... little emoticons. In... you see, in their last moments, browsers show you who they really are. So in a way, I know IE, Firefox, Mozilla, and Opera better than Ryan Gavin ever did. Would you like to know which of them were crashers?
Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Insightful)
If IE9 is supposed to destroy the previous versions of IE then they better support IE9 on XP.
XP is still a solid operating system and currently has the highest market share.
No one is going to upgrade their OS just because there is a new browser from Microsoft.
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Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox 4.0 will support Direct2D and DirectWrite API when available.
Firefox 4.0 will work on XP.
The real problem is there 'lack of will' on Microsoft's part and not a 'technical reason' as they would like us to believe.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox 4 will work on XP, but without either of those APIs. But if you take away the hardware acceleration of IE9, it's just IE8 with better html5 support. They've publicly said they just want to throw away most of the IE rendering and JS execution codebase and go for something new in IE9.
Also, XP is ten years old. What version of Firefox will installs on Debian Potato/Woody?
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:4, Interesting)
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So what? Just another Service Pack.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:4, Insightful)
"But it'll be EOL in 2 years"
"Yeah beside the point, but how about we release a service pack completely re-writing the graphics APIs"
"..."
"That way people can run IE9 on windows XP. You see people won't need to upgrade to our new OSes"
"..."
"Everyone content with a 9 year old operating system can keep using it if we add new technologies. It saves them buying a completely new OS."
"..."
"Yeah sure ok we may be breaking some older systems with a service pack that completely screws with the graphics layer, and yeah it'll cost a few thousand manhours to write the code, but think how happy our clients will be when we remove all incentive for them to upgrade by backporting our great new features into the old dog."
"..."
"..."
"Get out. NOW!"
"yessir"
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XP has been a borderline mess since day one. We simply learned to work around its problems. Default admin user, no UAC, fisher price colors, a security nightmare that requires several types of anti-virus strategies, and lack of some basic features like native DVD burning or large file support for its zip handler. I avoid XP like the plague. Vista post SP1 is so much better of an OS its not even funny. Win7 vanilla is just as responsive on old hardware.
Sorry, but this revisionist love-affair people have w
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Uses, or requires? It should be trivial to NOT require those technologies.
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It's not stupidity. Somehow every other browser maker manages to get by on XP and do so with good performance, yet it's too much for Microsoft the MAKER of the OS itself to figure it out? Believing that story is "stupidity".
If XP doesn't support the acceleration then you just write an emulation layer for that part and tell people that the XP version of IE9 is slower and they should upgrade windows to get some awesome speed boosts.
Whichever way you spin it Microsoft is doing this by *choice*. They *chos
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Insightful)
The other browser makers have a vested interest in as wide a level of compatibility and interoperability as possible. Microsoft's vested interest is the exact opposite. Microsoft needs to have the killer app that will drive everyone towards the latest version of its operating system.
Of course, unlike even a few years ago, the growing success of third party browsers means that the chief piece of software that could drive users hanging back into upgrading is being removed, while at the same time that newfound competition in the browser market means Microsoft is less able to use the old tactic that worked so well with IE6 in deliberate non-compliance and incompatibility, because to do so would in fact now likely cost it even more market share in the browser world.
Three words: Google Chrome Frame (Score:3, Informative)
[Lack of IE 9 on XP is] devastating to we developers who now confront the reality that the so-called "HTML5" revolution is, in reality, going to take 3 - 4 years more to arrive
Google provides a downloadable browser helper object that enables all HTML5 features in Internet Explorer. It's called Google Chrome Frame.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Insightful)
a decade-old, non-current OS
Your points are generally valid, but let's skip the exaggerations. I'll quote from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] to make things easy:
So according to the above, Windows XP is, at most, 3 years past the time it was last sold retail. To use a car analogy, if you bought a new car off the showroom floor a few months after at the end of the model year, did you buy a used car?
But even that is overly-simplified. The real world is always more nuanced and complex that, particularly with respect to enterprise customers. For that, you can consult the microsoft site, or talk to your sales rep.
So no, XP is not a decade old. More importantly, XP (and IE6) is very much in use and relied on.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Informative)
People who bought XP in 2008 were not getting XP SP0, but XP SP3... which is supported until 2014.
Don't let that important detail slip by.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, make it possible to keep IE6 installed for the Intranet. I suspect that most current IE6 deployments are corporate networks where IE is required for the Intranet, and therefore used everywhere. Make IE8 able to install along side IE6, but designate some domains or IP ranges for use by IE6. When you click on a link, it opens in IE8 by default, but if it's on one of the IP ranges designated as your corporate Intranet (configurable when you prepare it for installation) then it loads with IE6. Or just uses the old rendering engine. For bonus points, uses the old rendering engine in a sandbox where it can't escape even if it's completely compromised.
The goal isn't to get rid of IE6, it's to get rid of IE6 from the Internet. If you can keep it around for the Intranet, but prevent it from being allowed to access any sites other than the ones designated as needing it, then that would be fine. Until, of course, those sites can be fixed, but the middle of a recession isn't the best time to ask companies to upgrade core infrastructure that still works.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked for a few companies who did this, but using Citrix to do this. So if you needed to access the IE6 only app, you used a shortcut on your desktop or something that would open a remote IE6 running in a controlled environment that only had access to the legacy app and nothing else. It was surprisingly easy to setup, too. Citrix (like WinServer2008 or X) lets you run remote apps as if they were local, so its pretty seamless to end users, and the client (as far as I know) doesn't even need to be Windows.
Pretty much the best solution in this case, or for any legacy app thats preventing you from upgrading or changing platform.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:4, Insightful)
They could do this if Windows wasn't a crappy product that has a browser tightly with the OS. Firefox (and many other sane software) can have multiple versions installed and used at the same time (the Firefox Portable Edition for example). But due to the way IE is "designed", somehow it needs to be "integrated" to work properly. That's why trying a IE beta is such pain, you are forced to get rid of your stable version and keep a unstable version that can break multiple things.
Re:Support IEX9 on XP (Score:5, Insightful)
NNNnnoooooo!!!!!!!!! ...death..gurgle...
I work at a company that operates exactly as you specify. Some intranet software requires IE6. And sometimes particular versions of it too. Then some department installs an app that requires IE7 and the intranet app breaks. In one case, a manager suggested everyone install a virtual machine to run the apps that require IE6. That's just ridiculous.
For some reason, corporate intranet software is always the worst-designed garbage. Killing IE6 will force these imbeciles to stop writing these garbage ASP+VB6 ActiveX apps.
middle of a recession isn't the best time to ask companies to upgrade core infrastructure that still works.
But the infrastructure doesn't work. Companies keep paying more IT staff to come-up with complex workarounds rather than fixing miniscule bugs. This will force the issue. It is happening anyway - soon we won't be able to get XP machines anymore. Already we have to pay to downgrade from Windows 7. Soon the hardware won't support Windows XP drivers.
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Because they can asume that they are working in a monoculture where they can be sure which versions of OS, browser and plugins will be already installed. This makes following standards less important in relation to other aspects (speed of development, features, etc.).
I think you are unde
With IE6 compatibility mode. (Score:3, Insightful)
IE6 will die ... eventually. When WinXP dies.
But Microsoft pushed for too many IE6-specific extensions for their development products.
Now companies NEED to run IE6 or spend time and money (and pain) re-writing the crappy apps that have evolved over the last 9 years.
To replace IE6, you need to wait for WinXP to die or you need to offer IE6 compatibility in the new browser.
Re:With IE6 compatibility mode. (Score:5, Funny)
... or you need to offer IE6 compatibility in the new browser.
Is that what they call brokewards compatibility?
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What's the problem using Firefox, Chrome, or Opera for browsing and using IE6 for those applications that require it?
It almost seems as if people are deliberately avoiding the easy and obvious solution so they can complain about MS.
Don't need IE6 on XP (Score:3, Informative)
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No one is going to upgrade their OS just because there is a new browser from Microsoft.
But that's what they are counting on. There's no money in providing a free browser upgrade for XP users. Recommendation: Firefox.
IE6 is most used? (Score:2)
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What statistics show it as most used browser? All the ones I've seen it's way below firefox.
Firefox total, or a specific version of Firefox?
Let people run IE7 on Windows 2000 (Score:4, Insightful)
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If they really want IE6 usage to reach zero, the people at MS will have to swallow some pride and realize that there are some of us who refuse to 'upgrade" like little sheep.
Refuse is absolutely the right word. Win 2K? Seriously? An eleven-year-old OS? You're not being sensible, you're being ornery.
But hey, if that's what floats your boat, go ahead. I mean, there are still people running vintage Amigas and crap ("Way ahead of its time!", yeah, we can hear you.) But realize that you are a dwindling minority. You guys are outnumbered by Android and iPhone users these days. It's time to embrace your minority status.
Why didn't they think of this before? (Score:4, Funny)
GPU-accelerated graphics? What a concept!!!
IE6 "Compatibility Mode?" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem, in the simplest terms, is that there are too many IE6 only sites and applications that are currently working "well enough", particularly internal to companies, and mucking with something that works already is a non-starter for many management types. No matter how much sense it makes to us, to them it's just money spent and risk taken to get back to where they currently are, functionality wise.
Could IE introduce a sort of "browser virtual machine" where IE9 would start up what would internally amount to a sandboxed version of IE6 if it ran into an IE6 only site? (Of course, that begs the question of recognizing such a site, but presumably Microsoft would stand some chance of recognizing such behaviors since they created IE6 to begin with.) If you can't kill the old applications, you've got to work with them if you want to kill IE6 - perhaps IE9 could borrow a page from the VMWare/VirtualBox world and sort of do a "browser within a browser" to try and maintain compatibility while isolating the IE6 badness from any sane webpage? OSX provided a bridge for old Mac applications when they appeared on the scene which amounted to an old Mac within the new environment, so perhaps that's another possible model.
Dunno if it's workable even in principle, but I don't see how else to move stubborn IE6 users.
You must be new here (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when did Microsoft start caring about backward compatibility? Do you even know who we are discussing here? Microsoft has been rather craven about forcing users of its applications to upgrade. They don't make money by allowing people to stay with older operating systems and applications. And now that Apple has passed them in market capitalization, the heat is on to
Re:You must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when did Microsoft start caring about backward compatibility?
Wait, what? When did Microsoft stop caring about backwards compatibility? Backwards compatibility was, for many years, the greatest asset that Windows had, and IMO is the biggest reason that it became as widespread as it is. It's also the source of many of their biggest security problems.
In fact, in the last few years (with the end of the 9x series kernel, the introduction of XP SP2, the introduction of UAC, and the removal of the 16-bit subsystems in the 64-bit versions of Windows), they have shown a willingness to break backwards compatibility that they had basically never shown a decade ago.
Forcing upgrades is a different matter, and is more concerned with forwards compatibility, which doesn't really have any bearing on this discussion.
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Many applications enterprises use are very niche market expensive and only supported on XP SP2 or older. It has always been like that, Enterprises are typically the last to move to a new OS, most of them out right skipped Vista.
First HTML 4, then HTML 5 (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep hearing about how IE9 will support HTML 5. I would much rather hear about how it will fully support HTML 4 and CSS 2. I'll even settle for its supporting 95% of HTML 4 and CSS 2.
I keep hearing about how IE9 will support HTML 5 media elements like <video> and <audio>. I'd much rather hear about IE9 correctly rendering nested, cascading <object> elements as HTML 4 describes.
Get the HTML 4 stuff working before trumpeting about HTML 5 functionality, please. God knows you've had enough time.
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While they're at it, DOM Level 1 support would be nice. It's only a year older than IE6.
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I just tried a couple quick tests of two irritating shortcomings which I had remembered off the top of my head: the <object> element and 'inherit' as a CSS property value.
They actually do work. So I retract my complaint. I can only offer the meager defense that I tried those things many times as various IE versions appeared over the years, including in recent years. But clearly not recently enough.
Maybe when he's done with IE6 (Score:2)
he can work his way up through the newer versions...
I've been thinking about advances lately. (Score:2)
If only we have the more efficient software of the past running on the hardware of today, it might not feel that the user experience is slowing down.
There is a saying, "if its not broke don't fix it" but teh software industry doesn't follow that. Instead the software industry figures that any more speed and resources is only for teh developers, not the users.
Dumb Demo... (Score:5, Insightful)
demonstrations showing two 720p HD videos running simultaneously on a netbook, thanks to IE9's GPU-accelerated graphics
How about demonstrating flawless backwards compatibility with ancient activeX plugins on Oracle financials running under winXP...
Charged with destroying IE6? (Score:2)
Think he'll get off?
Easy! (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Go to the head of the Office business group.
2. Make sure they drop support for XP in the next version of Office.
IE 6 won't die until XP dies. XP won't die until Office won't run on it.
Going after the users is the wrong way. (Score:5, Insightful)
GO after vendors that still require there users to us IE6 in the work place.
Once it's not in the work place, it will leave the home.
I would love to get rid of it at work, but vendors(I'm looking at YOU Oracle) still have apps that require it.
There slated to get rid of it, but not for 2 more years.
Corporate users (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember back when Microsoft was begging people to use IE6 and write apps to its API. In spite of all of the advice not to go down that path, some IT people did just that. They staked their reputation on that move. And now Microsoft expects these people to go to the BOD and say, "Remember how I begged you to go with IE6 a few years ago? And even though it was going to cost us a bundle in training, tools and development costs, it was going to be worth it. Because Microsoft promised us it was. Well, now they say we've got to spend a bundle more to undo all the crap we did. I know. They lied to us once. But we can trust them this time. Really. They wouldn't do it again, would they?"
The people responsible for tying their companies to IE6 have made it a few steps up the management ladder. If you thought they had some pull back when they made that fateful IE6 decision, what sort of power do you think they have now? Microsoft wants these people to make what could be a carer limiting (or ending) move. They'll have to admit that they bought the Microsoft sales pitch back then, cost the company a bundle of money, and now it looks like it was money down a rat hole. Gavin needs the trust and good will of these people if he ever expects them to buy the next Microsoft package. This doesn't look like a smart way of doing it.
Karma is a bitch... (Score:5, Insightful)
Karma is a bitch...
I expect they are now regretting that the barriers they put in place to prevent IE6 being displaced by Firefox, Opera, and other browsers is now effective at preventing IE6 from being displaced by another browser from themselves.
-- Terry
What barriers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Including IE in Windows and making it the default browser isn't a barrier to using another browser. If it were nobody would be using other browsers today.
Re:What barriers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Including IE in Windows and making it the default browser isn't a barrier to using another browser. If it were nobody would be using other browsers today.
You clearly don't remember this, but from IE4 to IE6, Microsoft tried as hard as they could to push web developers toward proprietary technologies that were only compatible with Internet Explorer. They went out of their way to make IE's rendering engine try to guess what developers might have meant when writing sloppy non-standard code, which resulted in web sites that were designed exclusively for IE not working in any other browser (and being an enormous pain in the ass to fix). Also, because IE's support for the standards that other browsers were trying to implement was so shoddy, web sites designed for other browsers wouldn't work correctly in IE (also an enormous pain in the ass to fix), so there was a huge disincentive for developers who used IE as their primary browser (because it was bundled with Windows) to even try to support anything else.
With ~90% market share, Microsoft decided that IE6 was "good enough" and shut down development. But IE6 wasn't good enough, and somebody decided to take the Mozilla Suite, strip out all the non-browser stuff (the email client, the address book, the WYSIWYG HTML editor, the IRC client, etc. etc.) and try to make a stand-alone browser people actually wanted to use. And, after awhile, people started using it, and Microsoft was embarrassed.
So, they tried to clean up a few things with the release of XP Service Pack 2, then began an active attempt to make a browser that doesn't completely suck ass. They're years behind, and they know it, but they're slowly attempting to catch up. They also know they're not the leader of the pack anymore, so they have to cooperate with other browser developers and play the game on their turf, which is a weird thing for Microsoft to be doing.
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simple... Send out a security update that renames it to Virus Inviter or Security hole, or Pwned or ... you get the idea...
Wouldn't do anything, users don't read.
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Part of my job is to get IE6 share down to zero as soon as possible
We love you already, man!
Indeed. Godspeed, Ryan Gavin, godspeed.
Re:m$ and browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
Proprietary software and PROPRIETARY HARDWARE.
I didn't think BSD and Webkit were proprietary software and I certainly didn't think that x86 was proprietary hardware either.
Apple's been promoting a browser-agnostic web experience. They are better. They're contributing to open source. That does make them infinitely better.
When MS ships something like WebKit, Darwin or Grand Central Dispatch, we'll talk about who's better than who in the software field.
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It is called KHTML kiddo, Webkit is an apple rebrand job.
Re:m$ and browsers (Score:5, Informative)
KHTML was an underachieving render engine a decade ago, with little users and little developers. Now, WebKit is the world most advanced and most used web rendering technology out there, used by leading companies such as Nokia, Google, Adobe and even Microsoft to deliver web pages with speed and standard compliancy.
WebKit was the first web rendering engine to support a bytecode interpreter for Javascript, significantly increasing performance. They had support for HTML5 video back in 2007. It was the first engine to fully pass the Acid3 test. They created the basis for CSS transitions and animations, and relayed their concepts back to the W3C so other browsers can benefit from their work as well.
Long story short, WebKit is awesome. Sure, KHTML was the foundation for it, but KHTML never was what WebKit is today.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know A pretty good start would be if *every* Microsoft site did browser detection, and anyone running IE6 was put in a redirect to a download for IE8. That would make it pretty clear that Microsoft considered it dead.