
Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE” - recycleme
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/07/02/internet-explorer-11-dont-call-me-ie/
======
tomelders
I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the
past. As such, they have a higher bar to jump over if they want me to
acknowledge that they have created a "modern" browser. They have to make a
browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability
and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been
and ever will be. And only then will I even consider giving them a ounce of
recognition.

Not that Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) cares what I think, but that's
the price I've set in order for MS to pay off the debt it's worked up over the
years as I wasted weeks, possibly months of my life getting things to work in
their turd of a.... a.... a looking-at-the-web-kind-of-application-thing. I
wont even call it a browser.

Or better yet, I wish IE was thrown away and forgotten about, and like
Voldemort, it's name would only ever be heard in hushed whispers lest it's
evil spirit be awoken. It would become a ghost story web developers tell their
web developing kids; "Be standards compliant, or IE6 will come and get
yoooOOOOU!".

But then I'm old and cranky. The kids will probably love IE19b Custard Pro
Home Edition and they'll rally behind it to get IE back to the number 1 slot
because it's somehow retro and cool, and I'll laugh in their spotty faces when
IE regains it supremacy and Microsoft turns around and shits in their stupid
faces all over again, and the internet becomes a desolate wasteland where Bing
is the only search engine and the top hit is always an Encarta entry.

Wow, I'm in a special kind of a bad mood today.

~~~
megaman821
I have cursed at working around IE quirks more times than I can remember, but
I don't dump all the blame on Microsoft.

Why is this the top comment, it is just a rant/whine? What other browser
released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern
web?

Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or
not, and by in large they haven't. Then it becomes Microsoft's fault for not
forcing them to upgrade. I don't think people need all their choices made for
them. Why is it not web developer's fault for continuing to develop for
outdate browsers? or computer manufacturers' fault for not loading a
different, more consumer oriented default browser? or the users themselves for
not taking a few minutes to update or download an alternative browser?

~~~
masklinn
> What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at
> all) with them modern web?

Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then
unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain
experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they
just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and
GP fears the same will happen again if they're allowed to gain dominant
position again.

~~~
encoderer
> Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then

I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than
I did.

Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a
time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have
a standard but then again, at least I had a _standard_. You can design for IE6
and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option.
Market share in the mid 90's IIRC.

The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of
course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we
DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one
curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.

------
bsimpson
I was at CES last year, and the showing of the IE team was my favorite part of
the trip. They were a bunch of younger guys who basically said "We know the
guys who used to work here did some terrible things in our name. We're
changing that, and we're here to tell you about it." They seemed like really
cool dudes.

I even went over to the mall to try a Surface when they came out. Then, I
realized Windows 8 is still Windows and walked out empty handed. The stuff MS
is doing with Metro and touch is really interesting (as were tablet PCs before
that), but I feel like they're still building on three decades of crufty
sands. It's time for their System 9 -> OS X transition.

~~~
chadzawistowski
Windows 8 may still be Windows, but WinRT is very much the System 9 -> OS X
transition. Windows 8 supports both the old Win32 APIs and the new WinRT APIs.

~~~
tracker1
That was going to be my comment as well... The WinRT kernel was started
"fresh" to be mostly compatible, without the weird crufty legacy support. I
think the biggest things holding back RT is that it's only on locked down ARM
platforms, and low-level SDKs aren't widely available.

I would speculate that RT will become the main windows kernel by Windows 10.
Then again, I'm less likely to even be running Windows by then (4-6 years).

~~~
bskap
WinRT isn't a kernel, it's a shell. It's like saying that Android is going to
replace Linux.

------
tracker1
"By finally removing the evidence of past mistakes..."

I think it's worth pointing out that these removed bits aren't evidence of
past mistakes at all. They're left over from a time before the standards were
defined by the W3C. At this point, and it is about time, they should rightly
be removed, and the standard/common way should prevail. That doesn't mean a
given feature was rooted in a mistake.

I think the biggest issue is you should only target a given browser when you
_have_ to. Once in a while you come across a bug that only presents itself in
a specific browser and version. A good thing about frequent/forced updates is
you have to support older browsers less and less. Unfortunately XP was locked
out at IE8, and Vista at IE9... Vista won't go away for at least 4-5 more
years. I think the biggest danger in the older versions of IE tied to windows
is that those people don't upgrade. It's just in the past 2 years that IE6 &
IE7 can safely be ignored.

I remember the IE4-6 days... back then, IE was better... Where they deserve
the vitriol is when it comes to letting their browsers stagnate for close to 6
years. And finally, with IE10/11 are they even catching up. It really bugs me
that they put so much attention into accelerated canvas support before they
finished a lot of CSS features that are more likely to be used. Gradients for
example, the old ie gradients + rounded corners is broken even IE9, not sure
about IE10-11 as I've taken to using SVG gradients as they are more consistent
everywhere.

It also sucks that running multiple versions of IE is pretty much impossible.
ex: the scripting engine is always the newer version, so even using multiple
IE's a live bug on the real version may not present itself.

I know how/why we are here, that said I still don't think that we should call
decisions past that weren't thought of by anyone as mistakes at the time as
such now. I remember the v4 browser days (IE4/NN4 not HTML4), it wasn't near
as pleasant as now even with IE8-10.

~~~
com2kid
> Unfortunately XP was locked out at IE8, and Vista at IE9...

I am on a laptop with a dedicated GPU and Windows 7, I am locked into IE9 due
to driver issues.

(I'll admit this is partially HP/AMDs fault for having cruddy drivers!)

------
Someone
I foresee a funny side effect: IE 11 users visiting old sites will get "This
site is best viewed with Internet Explorer" messages.

~~~
sliverstorm
This actually happens.

------
Aardwolf
If they change the UA, why didn't they take this opportunity to get rid of
these ridiculously long UA's that mention competing browser brand names, and
just make their UA string the following:

"Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0"

~~~
resu_nimda
Not being very familiar with browser standards, I found this bit pretty funny:

 _navigator.appName is now set to “Netscape”

This may seem like a sneaky attempt to trick developers, but this behavior is
actually specified in HTML5._

~~~
eCa
This seems like a way to force developers to use the correct way to detect
which browser is used: Check for the specific thing you want to do.

~~~
sp332
I thought it was because (when the standard was defined) some web servers
would only serve compliant content to Netscape browsers. edit: according to
aclimatt, it was used for frames detection.

------
portmanteaufu
TL;DR

MS doesn't want isIE() javascript functions to return true for IE11. While
feature detection is a better practice than browser detection, you can search
for "Trident" in the user agent string instead of "MSIE" if you must.

------
deathanatos
That User-Agent isn't really valid.

It's the "like Gecko". If you only read the BNF, then okay, it's valid. But
the various sections are supposed to have semantic meaning — they're supposed
to be products with optional versions and comments. Like,

    
    
      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0)
    

Means the product "Mozilla" with version "5.0", followed by a comment of
"Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0". Thus their UA of…

    
    
      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) like Gecko
    

…includes the products "Mozilla", "like" and "Gecko".

Like the article mentions, "like Gecko" has been done before:

> Safari was the first browser to add “like Gecko” so that anyone sniffing for
> “Gecko” in the user-agent string would allow the browser through.

And they put it in a comment, not as two separate products:

> AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko)

See
[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt).

------
hawkharris
I was impressed when I saw their well-crafted commercials explaining the new
IE, but I was still a little skeptical. I wanted to see some real action on
their part to compensate for all the development headaches IE has caused me.

With moves like this, it seems they're walking the talk.

------
t_hozumi
The root of the problem is not IE specific behavior, but lack of auto-updating
feature.

If MS doesn't remove a barrier between versions, nothing will change.

~~~
josteink
This was already addressed in msie10 or maybe possibly earlier. Auto updates
are enabled by default.

~~~
superuser2
... and every IT department is forced to deploy a Group Policy which disables
them.

~~~
sliverstorm
But they do the same for other browsers, so really it just puts everything on
the level.

------
louischatriot
That's very good news. Microsoft often get a lot of criticism for their
products, most on IE. But they are still able to make bold moves that go in
the right directions. That's not the case for all companies their size.

------
kyriakos
this is good news. it will no longer stop IE users from visiting those sneaky
sites who block users for using IE. it also makes it clear that Microsoft is
finally serious about making a good browser that people WANT to use. now if
they make their developer tools anywhere as good as firebug they'll have a
winner. hiring some of the firebug team might be a good idea.

~~~
dpratt
In all seriousness, I really do think that MSFT has an uphill battle when it
comes to having non-enterprise web developers adopt IE as their primary
platform for development. I'm sure that IE 11 is/will be a perfectly fine
browser and comparable to Chrome/Firefox, but they still have the requirement
that you must use Windows.

I have no problem targeting IE11 as an end-user platform for my apps,
especially now since it appears that it's a very good , if not great, browser,
but I have absolutely zero desire to use Windows as a day-to-day OS for
development. A large portion of the tooling that I (and I suspect a vast
majority of other engineers) require either doesn't exist on Windows, or if it
does, it's crippled or hacky.

Essentially, moving to IE over Chrome/Firefox nets me little to no appreciable
gain, and comes with a huge negative problem of drastically impacting my
productivity.

~~~
jeffasinger
Developing for IE10 kind of makes sense right now, if you're on a windows
machine. IE10 is one of the most picky browsers about certain things, so you
can catch potential problems early by doing that.

------
shayonsengupta
Internet Explorer doesn't need to worry about this. No one ever calls them.

------
thesis
Really tired of all the different versions of IE. Why oh why can't it just be
"Internet Explorer" without all these individual versions that pigeonhole
themselves?

~~~
venomsnake
Because of the "brilliant" decision to integrate the IE engine way too deep
into windows to the point of unseverability.

So you get one-two IE versions per OS lifecycle. Enjoy ...

~~~
comex
I like how this was such a big issue when Microsoft did it, but nobody cares
that there is a systemwide WebKit.framework on OS X that various applications
use internally. I know there are some differences, but it's pretty much the
same thing.

~~~
TylerE
Maybe because Webkit is open source and was developed independently?

~~~
ksk
What does it being open source have anything to do with it? People didn't like
it when MS did it because it introduced additional unwanted bloat in the OS
that was annoying to decouple.

~~~
TylerE
That's not what I remember. It was more about it having remotely-exploitable
vulnerabilities without being uninstallable.

~~~
ksk
You're incorrect. And technically speaking the browser wasn't integrated with
the OS (and never was), it was the rendering engine (shdocvw.dll and
mshtml.dll). The Windows UI featured HTML elements that the OS rendered via
this. The rendering engine is not itself connected to any TCP/IP stack, so
remote exploits are impossible. But ofcource if you went to web sites with
malicious HTML you could get ownzored because of bugs in the rendering engine.

Also you could delete the browser (iexplore.exe) but not the engine as the OS
relied on certain UI elements that used this engine. Ofcource if you went
ahead and deleted the DLLs anyway, you could make the OS work without the
added HTML UI layer (as the judge in the MS antitrust case demonstrated). One
could argue that this wasn't the "full" Windows experience but hey.. all that
is water under the bridge now. The case is resolved and MS got slapped with a
hefty fine.

~~~
Hrundi
> ...But ofcource if you went to web sites with malicious HTML you could get
> ownzored because of bugs in the rendering engine.

It's funny, when the Windows source code was leaked (opened?) in 2004[1],
folks soon discovered a vulnerability in the BMP renderer[2].

[1]
[http://slashdot.org/story/04/02/12/2114228/windows-2000-wind...](http://slashdot.org/story/04/02/12/2114228/windows-2000-windows-
nt-4-source-code-leaks)

[2]
[http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1009067](http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1009067)

~~~
ksk
I doubt it had anything to do with the source leak. Most security bugs these
days are found via automated means - fuzzing, fault injection, etc.

But OTOH these bugs become useful in other ways. I believe there was an ios
jailbreak method where you simply visit a website on your iphone
(jailbreak.me? .com?) and your device is rooted/jailbroken due to a bug in
Safari's PDF renderer.

------
cpeterso
IE's "like Gecko" string is to more closely match WebKit's UA string (e.g.
"... (KHTML, _like Gecko_ ) ..."), not Firefox's.

------
IzzyMurad
It's not a matter of the browser features anymore, but rather the company
behind it. Say we all switch back to IE11 tomorrow... I am pretty sure
Microsoft will abuse its power just like they did during IE6 era.

------
tcfunk
The problem with Internet Explorer is fragmentation and length of life for
versions.

IE11 could be the greatest browser in the entire world, and it wouldn't matter
until people are able to use it on Windows XP/7.

~~~
wluu
Well, IE10 which shipped with Windows 8 eventually made its' way to Windows 7.
And from what I've read, IE11 will also make it to Windows 7.

Support for XP is ending on April 8th, 2014 at Microsoft. So there's no chance
at all that IE11 will be ported on XP.

------
adamconroy
Why do they even call it 'internet' explorer? It really is just a 'web'
explorer isn't it?

~~~
joenathan
Why do they even call it Firefox? Where's the fox on fire?

~~~
adamconroy
Well firefox is obviously just an arbitrary name. IE is attempting to be a
name that means something, except it's a misnomer.

------
wnevets
Good thing for the internets

~~~
themstheones
I can't see why anyone in their right mind would be downvoting this comment.
You can't down vote the truth.

~~~
wnevets
I agree.

------
jtms
I wont be calling it at all

------
Toshio
Correct me if I'm wrong. If a web developer is hell-bent on detecting ie, they
could look for the presence of the activex API (like jQuery currently does in
order to provide a uniform AJAX interface).

~~~
ajross
Of course. They're not trying to make it _impossible_ to detect IE. They're
trying to make sure that all the "IE mode" quirks and workarounds out there in
the wild don't get triggered on IE11 and break things.

Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or Gecko
and they want to take advantage of all the standards-compliant layouts that
developers are producing. But the only way to do that is to break with the
past and _not_ support all the madness inherited from legacy IE versions.

~~~
dualogy
> Basically, they're moving to a standards-compliant model like WebKit or
> Gecko

I think that was the professed and proclaimed goal for every IE version since
8, or maybe even back at 7? I keep hearing that for years, and what this
intention delivers in the end is yet more "IE modes":

 _n_ "browser modes" times 2 "document modes". Quirks mode. "Compatibility
view."

So for IE 11, web developers would have two choices: test your page in a total
of 10 IE mode-combinations. Or just serve "the Crawler/Geocities version of
our site" to IE users no matter what version they're using.

Which is of course what MS/IE wants to avoid. But hey they could just pull an
"Apple Inc." and license WebKit, or pull a "Google Inc." and make your browser
auto-updating. Without prompts, progress indicators or restarts, just as
invisible and efficiently as Chrome does by default. Presto, no more headaches
with IE for BOTH users AND web devs. Maybe some MS egos would get a little
dent, maybe some enterprise consultancy shops would have to cut down on man-
days sold for IE-specific work. Ah yes. I can see why IE won't go this way any
time soon---or only way after it has been finally and fully obsoleted even in
the remotes of backwater net-cafes and even the slowest of Enterprise-IT
depts...

~~~
hackmiester
Couple of corrections.

\- Apple didn't license WebKit. Apple created WebKit, by forking Konqueror's
engine.

\- Chrome doesn't update without restarting. (Unless you mean restarting the
machine, in which case, of course not! What kind of browser would require a
machine reboot to... oh.)

~~~
dualogy
> Apple didn't license WebKit. Apple created WebKit, by forking Konqueror's
> engine

Of course, you're right. I was typing this faster than I was thinking..

Anyway, MS shouldn't even _think_ of pulling something like this, on second
thought---because rather than a render-engine replacement, it would end up as
yet another "mode" in IE..

> Chrome doesn't update without restarting

Of course the binary cannot replace itself while running -- ((although with
each tab being its own process and their highly persistent statefulness they
might consider silently "rebooting" background tabs)) -- but, well at my end /
from my experience, Chrome doesn't restart itself and doesn't prompt about
restarting, in most cases -- rather seems to wait until the next time it is
restarted by the user. Maybe I get that wrong, but if my memory recalls this
as Chrome's auto-update user-experience, that's a feat one way or the other..

~~~
stan_rogers
Chrome will display an update arrow on the menu/address bar. If you haven't
restarted in a while, it will eventually become a rather insistent red.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Wow, you mean you've had the patience and lack of ADD to wait a certain period
of time without clicking the arrow? You're zen, my friend :)

------
marizcombinator
Just use webkit already...

~~~
recursive
Fix the old bad monoculture with a new shiny monoculture.

~~~
RyanZAG
I'd take a mono-culture over terrible IE (6-8) any day of the week. The
problem was never a mono-culture - the problem was IE6 was closed off to non-
windows OSes, and stopped progressing. If IE6 had been available as a portable
open source project that could be run on linux/android/anything and had
continued to include new features, we'd all still be using IE.

The problem with IE was failure to provide value, and nothing at all to do
with some mythical 'mono-culture' argument. You can say that a mono-culture
encourages something like IE6 - but since Webkit is open source, that can't
actually happen.

~~~
underwater
IE11+ changing rendering engines wouldn't magically fix all the IE6 - 8
installs out there. Wishing that history had played out different isn't really
productive.

------
Fuxy
Well that's nice and all but removing any way to identify it's IE 11 sounds
like a bad idea tome. I don't quite thrust them to not make any more mistakes.

