
IE is a 'compatibility solution', to be used selectively, warns Microsoft exec - bpierre
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-security-chief-ie-is-not-a-browser-so-stop-using-it-as-your-default/
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pjc50
It's a profound irony that one of the companies whose web strategy is now
badly affected by Microsoft's early-2000s monopolisation incompatibility
efforts is .. Microsoft. It's as if Fairchild hadn't been able to move their
HQ off their Superfund site and were stuck there complaining about the cost of
employee gas masks.

~~~
skc
I think what's ironic is everyone claiming Microsoft was going to ruin the web
back in the day and ended up supporting the very parties that actually did end
up ruining the web.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment. Old IE really did hold back
technological progress for a long time. Who knows where we’d be today if not
for that.

~~~
eli
They did a lot of things that weren't approved by a standards committee but
many of them were genuinely progressive. You can draw a straight line from
IE4's DHTML to today's modern web apps.

~~~
cpach
I believe a lot of good things has come from Microsoft. But their business
practices and extremely dominant position during the late 90s and early 00s
was quite unpleasant IMHO.

It’s a totally different story now that Satya Nadella is CEO. I have a lot of
respect for him and all the good news that has kept coming after he took the
helm. I would go as far as to say that he saved Microsoft from eating itself.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I disagree profoundly, but that's because I work with Windows every day and
Nadella has helped turn it into a horrible garbage fire of a product with no
QA, user-hostile features, and a bunch of crap nobody asked for. Say what you
will about Balmer, but Windows was a better product under him.

~~~
cpach
I hear ya. Windows 10 has it’s fair share of rough edges, that’s for sure.
Personally I prefer MacOS X whenever I can choose freely.

When it comes to Windows though, the two main thing that makes me prefer Win
10 over Win 7 are these: a) WSL. For those not familiar with it let’s you run
Linux binary executables (in ELF format) natively on W10. (And also on Windows
Server 2019.) All (or nearly all?) packages from Ubuntu are available. Super
neat, IMHO. b) Lots of handy Powershell cmdlets that are not available in W7.
Let’s you configure printers, ACLs, etc via Powershell.

So for all its warts I wouldn’t want to revert to W7.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Undoubtedly a lot of the base components of Windows are better now, it's just
that they're buried under a lot of crap, like the crappy new control panels
that are slower and have fewer options, or the start menu that breaks if you
sneeze too close to it and contains ads, or the forced updates that break
stuff all the time.

~~~
cpach
Yeah don’t get me started on the Settings app. It’s a total train wreck. It
could possibly take Microsoft years to sort it out.

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chrismorgan
> _" As you can see, by going with the 'technical debt by default' approach,
> we ended up in a scenario whereby if you create a brand-new webpage today,
> run it in the local intranet zone, and don't add any additional markup, you
> will end up using a 1999 implementation of web standards by default.
> Yikes."_

Meanwhile, Outlook and Windows Mail are even worse than this, using the MSO
renderer and editor (essentially: Word) in all versions except Outlook 2003
(in which version they switched to the IE renderer and editor, but then
regressed to MSO in the next release for terrible reasons).

That MSO menace is _unconditionally_ stuck in a _buggy and incomplete_
implementation of _1997_ web standards. (As an outsider, I say that it appears
to have been treated entirely as a black box for the last two decades; I am
aware of no changes beyond supporting high-DPI displays, if you wish to count
that.)

And this is what they are still actively advocating for email.

I wish they would apply this same reasoning to the MSO renderer. I hate it and
the decision to go back to it in Outlook 2007 with a passion exceeded by
little in the tech industry. With it they have singlehandedly manufactured
jobs for tens, nay, _hundreds_ of thousands of software developers and hacks,
and held back the entire email space with their stranglehold by at least a
decade. It’s _that_ bad.

~~~
kgwxd
One upside to that is people don't try to get too fancy with HTML emails. IMO,
email would be much better off if it had never supported HTML. Things are
getting worse with the current trend of supporting emoji in the subject. My
gmail web inbox looks like a GeoCities page.

------
userbinator
There are many people for whom the UI is the only reason they continue to use
IE, so I wish MS would just take whatever new rendering engine they now have
and give it the same UI that IE always had --- they would certainly win back a
large portion of the userbase who are irritated by the combination of either
the familiar and comfortable UI with sites that don't always work, or sites
that work but an annoying dumbed-down UI. Edge was from the beginning looking
too much like a horrible Chrome clone (which it is sort of turning into
now...) Not happy with the browser situation in general these days...

~~~
cm2187
For me the only use I have for IE is as a .net control to be able to access
and manipulate the DOM in .net, for small web scrapping toy projects. I doubt
the new Edge will be integrated as well as IE was (if integrated at all), so I
will miss that when it is gone.

~~~
cheschire
Check out Blazor[0], and you can touch the DOM through JS interop.

0: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/razor-
component...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/razor-
components/javascript-interop?view=aspnetcore-3.0)

~~~
cm2187
I will certain look at Blazor when it has matured for creating websites, but I
am not sure you can use it to scrap a third party website.

------
bane
Lots of shade being thrown at Microsoft, I don't think it's wrong to do that,
but I also think that the real problem is being completely ignored --
corporate IT departments that demanded (still demand) IE due to some kind of
"security policy".

A few of the places I've worked at had very strong policies about what
software was installed on the corporate boxes, and IE was almost universally
pushed due to "security reasons" even when it was widely known to be
significantly less secure than any concurrent competing browser.

The thing I think about here is that the reason these enterprise websites are
broken is _not_ that they're compatible with IE, but that _IE_ wasn't
compatible with web standards, and thus sites were hacked at to fit within
IE's brokenness. And now the entire world has moved to better conformance with
web standards and organizations are stuck with what was an unsecure web
browser years ago, and is getting even more unsecure going forward.

Corporate IT Security departments of old get the blame in my book. If they had
simply said "nope, IE is not secure, it is not permitted on our systems" the
world would literally be a better place. Instead they sent a strong demand
signal that Microsoft simply fulfilled.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
It isn't really about bugs in the application, it's that IE has fine-grained
security controls and they are easily configured via GPO.

------
kbumsik
IMHO, MS should have rebranded Edge as IE and the current IE's name should
have been "Legacy Internet Browser" or something like that at the beginning.

If one of their chief would say not to use IE, why MS would make it a
virtually default browser at the beginning? (to be clear, most of South Korean
websites were marked incompatible with Edge and forced users open those
websites on IE when launching Windows 10.) MS was not brave enough so they did
terrible marketing stretagy around Edge.

It is sad we lost one of few modern web engine.

~~~
smadurange
Indeed. I for one was very excited about Edge and desperately wanted a new
browser engine.

------
thewhitetulip
How ironic that I read this at work in IE because I don't have any other
browser

~~~
raxxorrax
There are portable versions of all major browsers. So if it is admin rights
stopping you...

~~~
acdha
At security-conscious organizations they will report unapproved binaries or
block execution of anything which isn't on a whitelist.

~~~
christophilus
I find it ironic that security-conscious organizations run outdated and
insecure browsers.

~~~
acdha
Me too, but welcome to enterprise IT. There's a certain logic in some cases
where it's also just tightly locked down so you avoid people hitting un-
whitelisted parts of the internet.

------
obenn
It’s worth it to not he’s not using this as an opportunity to push Edge, and
in the article even recommends people to use any modern browser they choose.

------
wim
People won't be able to "browse" a lot using IE much longer anyway. Slack, for
example, seems to drop all IE support next month, and I don't think we'll have
to wait as long as with IE6 this time before most apps drop support.

~~~
alexandernst
At our company we have a complete IE-no-no rule. No matter how much the client
is willing to pay us.

------
skybrian
Clickbait title. He didn't write "not a browser."

The original blog post is pretty reasonable:

[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-
Blog/T...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/The-
perils-of-using-Internet-Explorer-as-your-default-browser/ba-p/331732)

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Nor is he any sort of “security chief”

------
21
All aboard the Chrome train.

~~~
killyp
Firefox my dude. Has plugin support (uBlock) on mobile.

~~~
isostatic
Quite, Any browser that doesn't use chromium is the correct choice. Monopolies
are bad, and it's hilarious that people are celebrating one of the demise of
one most destructive monopolies of the computing age with "just use
$new_monpololistic_product, it will be different this time"

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
A lot of the same people decrying the Chrome monopoly never the less push for
more and more bloat in the web standard, thus helping to enforce that monopoly
by ensuring that hardly anyone has the resources to make a reasonable
competitor.

~~~
fnordsensei
Time to deprecate the web and start from scratch.

~~~
pjc50
Doing so today would only result in a worse and more proprietary product, I
suspect.

~~~
Retric
A worse standard is unlikely to win people over. Even a better standard is
unlikely to win.

Take HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, remove 90% of the cruft. Now, include what
people want like a much better table element that by default can handle
Adaptive screen sizes etc etc.

Chromium and Firefox are open source so you can probably get support in them
by writing the code yourself. But, good luck gaining traction.

~~~
marcosdumay
You'll have a really very bad time deciding what is cruft on those.

