After 25+ years of helping people use and experience the web, Internet Explorer (IE) is officially retired and out of support as of today, June 15, 2022. To many millions of you, thank you for using Internet Explorer as your gateway to the internet.
You hear that? That’s the cries of thousands of enterprise software engineers finally realising their garbage enterprise software doesn’t work anymore.
“You hear that? That’s the cries of thousands of enterprise software engineers finally realising their garbage enterprise software doesn’t work anymore.”
LOVE IT 🙂
Yes, it’s good that it’s over, but I think Thom has vilified the wrong group. The “software engineers” have always known that IE was garbage and for those of us who’s job was to support it IE was often the bane of our existence. About two years ago we lost a contract because a web application didn’t support IE and we had wrongly assumed that nobody would care about that given the availability of better browsers 🙁
Yes, I have to agree on this perspective. Getting users to change is far far harder than getting software to work. It’s always been that way.
A forum like this doesn’t reflect that because most here are early adopters. We are always looking for the next big thing or something better. But we do not even account for 0.01% of the total user space, and our opinions do not mean that much.
There will be bog ordinary day to day users looking for a way around this, and there will be someone who provides it to them, either maliciously or innocently. Just likes those users welded on to Win XP, Mac OS 9 or Linux 32 bit et. al…
Then on top of all that there is the issue of legacy apps that have hared coded links to launch IE as part of the help system. as hard as MS has tried to get Edge to hijack those requests, many still won’t open anything but IE.
Siemens has a web application (web server) that only works on IE. German software is really from the stoneage.
Unfortunately couldn’t cancel the contract. But violence should be allowed.
gfx1,
To my chagrin many of these network devices are still sold using ancient software long after it’s prime completely ignoring the evolution of HTML standards over the decades. I’ve got some network cameras and remove kvms that use active-x, ugh. At least the cameras are mostly just providing a feed once set up and the web port rarely has to be used.
I would say they are a good learning lessons to always go FOSS so that we can fix them, but in reality I already did learn this lesson long ago and I do try to go FOSS, but often there are no turnkey vendors selling FOSS products at all. It sucks when all the options are proprietary and you still have to shell out money for products that you know has these problems 🙁
I greatly suspect that Thom was mistaken, and heard the sound of their managers screaming at them to find a way to keep using ie.
This, 1000%
There is an IE mode in edge that renders in IE… so IE has died, long live IE in its new body.
Basically edge now has 2 engines the chrome engine and Trident.
Its drop dead simple to do. The rendering engine isn’t dead, just the most popular application that used it. The web controls already out there in all of the LOB enterprise aps will continue to work as always. If you really need it, you can create your own dumber, worse version of internet explorer in a day.
There’s also the Sleipnir browser and IE Tab extension for Chrome/Edge, amongst others, which both offer Trident rendering. So developers at Capita can continue as normal.
Good riddance…
x2
IE Mode in edge… still has the Trident engine in it, and can run ActiveX and all the other normal IE nonsense… so the only thing that is gone is the IE UI… Trident is still around as IE mode in Edge.
Come to the other side for a moment. Some corporations bought into ActiveX during the “nobody got fired for buying Microsoft” era and Microsoft just left them without an upgrade path. They did the same thing to Windows Mobile aka Windows Embedded Handheld users in 2020 and to DOS users when they didn’t provide a virtualized alternative to NTVDM for x64 versions of Windows.
Remember how real industries have service contracts and true long-term support? The IT industry doesn’t do that. Move fast and break things etc.
I get it that non-enterprise customers typically don’t receive much long-term support. Even car makers commit to making parts for non-commercial vehicles for a mere 10 years and that’s it (after that, you have to pull parts from another example of the same model).
But enterprise customers are used to getting long-term support. Why? Because replacing systems is obscenely expensive for enterprises and rewriting software is not only expensive but detracts manhours from other things. Most corporations don’t have a bunch of extra programmers sitting around so they are ready to rewrite complex codebases when things get deprecated. So, part of the blame goes to tech giants selling “enterprise” solutions without providing enterprise support.
CORRECTION: It seems ActiveX is still supported in Edge’s “IE mode” and you can also set websites to open in IE mode. So, in this case, an upgrade path has been provided by Microsoft and enterprise software that relies on ActiveX will keep working.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode
@Thom consider updating the article with this information.
I’m 100% sure the no NTVDM for 64 bit versions of Windows is because you can’t run 16 bit code natively once an x86_64 processor has been switched to 64 bit mode. Telling industries that still need DOS programs to run the 32 bit version isn’t exactly a tough sale.
Natively or not, it is doable.
However, Microsoft likely thought it wasn’t worth the extra engineering time for a feature 99.9% of customers would never use
Microsoft already provided an “XP mode” in Windows 7 that utilized virtualization to give you a VM running Windows XP 32-bit, complete with NTVDM, so they have already done it. But then they got Apple envy and became convinced that screwing enterprise customers makes you look cool in front of the the cool kids.
When they ditched XP Mode they also made Hyper-V an included component of Windows. IIRC Windows 7 didn’t have Hyper-V, and at the time it was a separate product not available for desktop Windows.
Still, you have to license Windows XP (good luck getting a legit license in 2022) and set it up, so not the same.
All things considered, bashing MS for it’s backwards compatibility track record (especially when you compare it to competition) is quite funny.
Hell froze over for me, I’m defending MS.
@dark2 that is one of the reasons dosbox and freedos are important. Sure most of us use dosbox for games, but it is really nice to be able to run a 64bit system and still be able to run 16bit dos programs. Also ArcaOS will now run in 64bit and is amazingly stable if hardware needs to be replaced in a company where the software cannot be. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get Win9x stuff to work at all yet, but win3.1 running in it is amazing.
@dsmogor Windows backward compatibility has always been pretty random, mostly okay. Then they went and remove support for some of the most widely use copy protection schemes… Huge swaths of software no longer work in 10 Basically if you want to run those, you have to either rebuy them from a place like GOG that removes safedisc/securom, or you have to sail the high seas…
Yeah, but Microsoft not supporting DOS programs on Windows 11 is just people complaining for no reason. I’ve seen some really modern computers running DOS or FreeDOS for high precision manufacturing lines. The few people that REALLY need 16 bit support aren’t buying Windows 10/11/12 anyway so why should Microsoft put money into it? The other people can download their own virtualization software for free, etc.
By consumer standards, yes, but by enterprise standards, they are bad compared to IBM.
For example, Windows Mobile/Embedded Handheld and Windows CE got EOLed without any support or upgrade path. Windows Mobile was marketed until November 2010 (when WP7 got released), so that’s less than 10 years of support.
it’s been 27 years. and IE mode is a thing. That’s very long for any piece of software, or hardware, in almost any industry
IE will only completely die once MS deprecates CHM support and I don’t see it happening any time soon.
They killed off hlp files… just saying
I don’t understand what you’re saying. HLP files were killed almost two decades ago – Windows 2000 came with CHM.
MS stops writing new HLP files: 1998 or so
HLP viewer removed from product: 2006 (Vista)
HLP viewer no longer supported: 2013 (2012 R2)
MS stops writing new CHM files: 2010 or so
CHM viewer removed from product: …?
As far as I know, the authoring tools for CHM are no longer available: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/htmlhelp/microsoft-html-help-downloads . There’s a chocolatey package getting it from archive.org.
New applications released in 2022 continue to come with CHM help files.
Trident stays, period.
You just won’t be able to use it directly to browse the web.
BTW to anyone wondering why the linked blog entry has translations in Japanese and Korean, this is why:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/south_korea_activex_certs_dead/
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4bc4ri/japan_chose_activex_as_a_replacement_for_java/
Actually, its supported on win 8.1 until its EOL in 2023, Win 7 under service contract until 2025, and Win 10 Enterprise and LTSB until IIRC either 2026 or 2028, I can’t recall offhand.
So while its *nice its dead on consumer desktops its not gone just yet if one has to support businesses.
* the asterisk is because all we have done is replace IE with Chrome and replacing one monoculture with another? Not the smartest move. But sadly Mozilla has gone out of their way to run off as many of their audience as humanly possible with braindead decisions so I have a feeling its just gonna be “designed for Chrome” will replace design for IE.
It’s supported even longer: October 2031!
IE is a system level component of Windows Server 2022 and hence supported as part of the OS until Server 2022 goes entirely EOL in 2031.
bassbeast,
I agree, although when you say “will replace” I think it already has for most purposes.
https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
I don’t know there’s anything firefox could have done. I mean they were reliant on google for their income and there just isn’t a good business model for FF without a cash cow. Raising money with pocket ads or other hooks was always going to be unpopular with users no matter how they presented it. I still use FF because I don’t want to feed the chrome monopoly and FF is still the best alternative to giving google blanket power over browsers….
https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-says-update-to-firefox-extensions-api-wont-kill-ad-blockers/
I do feel that mozilla seriously misread the techie user base when they turned extensions into a walled garden and a pathetic one on android at that. Yeah I know the excuse is always the same “we’re keeping control to protect you from yourself” but honestly the openness and extensibility were firefox’s biggest pros for me and it is disappointing to see a pioneering open source project turn against owner control over their own browsers. It just felt like unnecessary friendly fire.
And for every user like you they lost, they retained 10 users like me who want a modern browser with proper sandboxing, proper threading, a modern rendering engine, and extensions that won’t freeze or crash the browser. Personally, Quantum was the Firefox that won me back after Chrome made VideoDownload Helper stop working with YouTube.
Sure, some people are still whining their crappy extensions stopped working and they would prefer that Firefox became the next IE, aka based on an old codebase, slow, mostly single-threaded, crash-prone, more easily exploitable, and with plugins given free reign to freeze or crash the browser, but we all know who these people are: The same 1%ers who doomed Desktop Linux to irrelevance with their antics. So, I choose to ignore them, and I am glad Mozilla did too.
kurkosdr,
I really wish that were true, but mozilla has been bleeding it’s user base, which I am saddened by much more than most.
The goals of a modern robust sandboxing multithreading rendering engine are not in conflict with ownership rights. I was always supporter of application sandboxing, but it must not be designed to take away owner control.
Extensions can be extremely useful to those who want them and with all due respect what you just said is a total strawman. Most of us are not against browser evolution, but it needs the be done for innovation and not brought down the doom pit of walled gardens that actually takes it away. 🙁
Say what you will, there are so many of us who turned to firefox when it was the encapsulation of FOSS openness and owner empowerment and it was under that philosophy that firefox became the great browser. And now after pivoting away from these core values for some years the user base is almost entirely within the margin of error. Frankly mozilla cannot afford to loose more users over completely unnecessary friendly fire. If it isn’t already too late, they need to do more listening to their long term users and less dictating as to what features owners should and should not be allowed to have.
Yes they are, if by “ownership rights” you mean “being able to run my crappy old extensions”. What made pre-Quantum Firefox run your crappy old extensions was the act of retaining the same old codebase and same bad design decisions that made Firefox single-threaded, lacking true sandbox, crash-prone and exploitable.
The big exodus from Firefox happened when people realised it was the new IE, and quite frankly it was. I personally stopped using Firefox as my primary browser when Chrome felt faster on a netbook with an Atom N270 CPU and 2GB RAM than Firefox felt on a laptop with a Intel i5-5200U and 8GB RAM. You see, Firefox froze every time it had to run a piece of JavaScript while Chrome didn’t. Once I realized that, I left for Chrome and didn’t come back until Quantum. And you guys wanted Firefox to keep being the IE forever so it can go to the 1% of Desktop Linux. Misery loves company, I guess.
Also, shouldn’t the presence of ublock origin, h264ify and VideoDownload Helper prove to you that powerful extensions can be written? What exactly can’t be done by the new plugin system that is not something terribly bad from a security perspective? I am all ears. But, “muh ownership!”. Well, you 1%ers can fork the old Firefox and maintain it, as per the open-source license, literally nobody else cares.
kurkosdr,
No, that is the staw man, you don’t speak for me with this false argument about what I want firefox to be: not one of those things is true.
Well, the user charts don’t show a single moment they fell from grace, just a continuous downfall, something that was never helped by mozilla’s shift towards “we know better than our users” position over the years. You are absolutely free to defend their policies, but I do fear it may end up existentially killing them. Then who wins?
I’m glad those are available (although I do find it ironic that you’d specifically highlight a plugin that notoriously requires an external binary companion app for full functionality). However you aren’t addressing the walled garden. I wouldn’t condone coercive walled gardens through apple/google/microsoft/etc, and it sure would be hypocritical of me to condone it from mozilla. It is bad for FOSS to move into walled garden territory without letting owners have the key on their own machines.
This is a terrific discussion to read, but it’s sadly a wider reflection of the foibles of a capitalistic system.
We all want choice, freedom of choice ( even if it’s synthetic ) and multiple options, but we all want the perceived best option and that usually means we are influenced by the marketplace. I think Mozilla has lost out trying to walk that tightrope, it’s got it just wrong, not one way or the other, as a result it has done just enough to be lose the traditional user base and not nearly enough to win in the world that sits on the other side of the fence. We do not even need a deeper technical debate to see what has gone wrong, we can read it on the cover!
In fairness Mozilla is not alone in this regard, it’s a fate shared by many similar projects as they compete for oxygen.
cpcf,
Yeah, at times I argue “for” the free market and other times I argue “against” it, which would seem like flip flopping at first glace but my position is a bit more subtle. I find we need to balance between extremes which requires constant deliberate adjustments in all directions at different times. A static policy, no matter how well intentioned, is always going to have some imbalances that can accumulate over time.,
I’d compare it to balancing a stick, only minute adjustments are needed to keep it balanced but the more we allow it to fall off center the greater the magnitude needed to keeping it from completely collapsing towards a total monopoly or autocracy. Once it gets to that point our so “free market capitalism” becomes little more than a facade.
You are right.
FWIW, the extensions I really liked were indeed very dangerous and those same features could be exploited by attackers using malicious extensions. Ideally there would be a super hard to perform action that would allow a user to accept the risk of these extensions, but disallow by default. Kinda like most mobile operating system applications permissions. But I guess that would have been too difficult or something. Ah well. I’d prefer my Relatives not get hacked on the daily, over a few useful extensions.
What do you mean by “walled garden”? You can sideload extensions on Firefox just fine. “Walled garden” isn’t a synonym for “something I don’t like”…
PROTIP: Most users don’t care about obscure extensions. Even if they are somewhat aware that extensions are a thing, they probably know about Grammarly and unlock origin (and VideoDownload Helper if you are really lucky), but not obscure extensions that failed to make the jump to Quantum. The reason I am making this comment is because I am tired of 1%ers who think their weird nerd crusades matter. They don’t.
Firefox declined because Chrome was so much faster and crashed less often, and Quantum arrived too late. Firefox is a good browser now, but the user perceptions are different. Unless Chrome does something very stupid, inertia does it’s job like it always did.
What extensions? Care to name a few? I haven’t heard of a single extension that cannot be done on Quantum and are actually useful and not dangerous.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Indeed, I don’t mean to imply otherwise. Platforms could ban features on account that they might be used by malicious actors, but they’d also be banning the legitimate uses too. Something as basic as being able to inspect/change HTML is both useful and dangerous depending on whose code you are running. Unfortunately when you ban everything that might be abused, you end up banning legitimate uses too. So at the end of the day I feel the browser’s responsibility is to provide tools and empower owners to make the best choices for themselves rather than dictate what owners are allowed to do on their own devices.
I agree with that. I’ll go further and say that I am ok with a store containing only vendor approved applications, so long as the owner isn’t forced to use said store. That’s the crux of the walled garden problem.
I don’t think it needs to be mutually exclusive though. Many platforms can and do offer safe experience for the masses by default while also giving owners the right to install their own software at their own risk. No need for controversy IMHO.
kurkosdr,
Unless mozilla has changed it’s position then no that is not allowed with the regular version of firefox. Yes I am aware that mozilla has hijacked the term “sideloading” to include any extensions signed by them that get installed manually. but it is still a walled garden because mozilla overrides the owners authority in controlling what can be installed.
It will remain a walled garden until owners can privately choose to install their own software without mozilla blocking them. You can debate mozilla’s semantics however you want to but for the record my interest is in the owner rights themselves rather than any superficial naming semantics over those rights.
Well, to be fair though I didn’t bring up any obscure extensions.
This may be pointing out the obvious, but the whole point of extensions in the first place is to customize the browser around individual needs, which in many cases will be too obscure for Mozilla themselves to cater to. So long as owners have the right to install home grown and/or 3rd party extensions then it can really help mitigate the “one size fits all” problem.
It seems you are still trying to pursue a straw man argument with me. I have never had a problem with mozilla evolving firefox and/or developing new APIs. I expect new ones to be flexible enough for our needs and not to get in the way of innovation but I don’t oppose new APIs.
Ok, that’s bad.
kurkosdr,
Ok, I didn’t realize we weren’t all on the same page about it.
I don’t remember exactly when it actually got rolled out, but here’s a link when mozilla announced its walled garden intentions (my terminology, not theirs) and justifications in their own words:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing-safer-experience/
In particular…
I’m sorry but you are just straight up factually incorrect. Before they killed the extensions they were at 12%, where are they now? Less than 4%. Its just a shame I can’t find that graph someone made showing Firefox from its release as Phoenix to today because on that graph you could tell almost to the day exactly when they killed the extensions and the day they released the “I’m just like Chrome!” UI changes because both caused it to drop like a stone. In fact I don’t think they’ve had 2 months in a row of positive growth in all the years since, its just been a hockeystick going ever downward.
So while you may like the modern Firefox? The numbers tell a different story and to steal a line from my favorite TV show as a kid “Its Dead Jim”
Internet Explorer was my first browser, I even somehow feel sorry that it is no longer supported.
As usual, Thom’s Twitter-sized hot-take completely disregards years and years of history and a complete understanding of how large enterprises work.
It’s not really someone’s fault they have this opinion, it’s just a sign that there is a lack of any real world perspective on this issue.
Can you imagine the hell some of those support staff will go through in the coming weeks and months, maybe that legacy app that no longer works is / was the current chairpersons baby!
For quite a few years I worked for a rather famous media mogul, he had a favourite laptop that went with him everywhere, a Compaq Dos box, that had some proprietary batch files he’d run on spreadsheets that were sent to him as comma delimited. We had to keep that gadget running decades after it had expired, because he used it and trusted it to make him money! I thought it was weird as hell, then I came across this story, https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11576032/mclaren-f1-compaq-laptop-maintenance
Now, how can I criticise the mogul, when a modern high tech company like McLaren was still using the same type of laptop to fine tune supercars!