More correct albeit less clickbaity headline: recent builds of Microsoft Edge will uninstall any remnants of Internet Explorer from your PC and replace them with compatibility shims, so most legacy apps should continue to work as-is.
On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicitly install 'Edge for Business'. Which you should.
christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Its so bombastic the US Justice department hauls your pepsi sipping CEO in for a round of slouching, hand-waving antitrust litigation but somehow you manage to make it out by smirking through interviews and the grace of a nation thats just awakening to the dawn of the internet.
then fast forward 20 years later, your dumpster-fire web browser with all its lock-in and exploits still exists in the OS but the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software.
So you sunset the horrorshow that was IE in favour of your competitors browser engine to power your new browser but the haggard burro of a thing you call an OS is so inextricably encumbered by your blues-traveler era nineties myopia you now need a team of H1B's to start writing shims and the burger from lunch feels like its starting to come back up...
...now eight years later whatever frankenstein browser you convinced yourself was a good idea to build is still nowhere near as popular as your competitors, and thats after you added built-in gaslighting to your search engine to dissuade anyone from even searching for your competitors browser. you even came up with your own prefix to force links in your daytime infomercial of an OS to open directly in your new pet browser but people still dont want to use it. heck, you routinely reset their default browser and the only thing its managed to do is galvanize what by all indicators is a nearly white-hot detest for your pet chrome that has 45 seconds of unavoidable fullscreen lecture on first load, built in ads and tours, and a weird buy now pay later feature.
Personally... I absolutely understand exactly how they ended up in this situation. There are actually several good reasons to embed the browser into the OS, the top two easily understood ones are...
---
1. They've put a lot of work into the browser, and they've shared many components of it with other tooling. EX: Internet EXPLORER and EXPLORER the file system browser don't share their name by mistake. They're so similar I can load the same COM addin in both.
2. From a pure usability perspective, it makes a boat load of sense to prevent a user from accidentally uninstalling the last browser on the machine. When dealing with edge cases and possible support calls, making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable. Safari is also not removable... for similar reasons.
---
Further - I think it's actually a fairly good credit to MSFT that they're bothering with shims at all, and are maintaining a good chunk of compatibility for applications that were written literally decades ago.
Both Google and Apples's approach to this would literally be: "We're so sorry, that's no longer supported and you're f*#$ed. Go upgrade, get your vendors to upgrade, or eat shit."
MSFT isn't writing shims because they still need them... they're writing shims because they have enterprise customers who want them, and they actually give a fuck about that.
> inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS
Well, it's kind of explicable: It was at about that time Microsoft rolled out HTML Help, so they needed an HTML rendering engine on every PC to be able to read the documentation.
Using a web browser as your native app's rendering engine is what all the cool kids are doing these days, so in a way they were just 15 years ahead of the curve.
> christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination?
Elsewhere on HN: Everyone should be forced to install Chrome because I can't be bothered testing against Safari and Firefox.
but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any
attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination?
Was Internet Explorer ever actually a core and critical part of Windows? Sure, Microsoft claimed that it was. But of course, they would have done that, given that the alternative was to admit that the Justice Department's argument was correct, and that Internet Explorer was being bundled in an anti-competitive manner to deprive Netscape of sales.
> can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out
Yup. And I can also imagine all the reasons why you dislike (to various extents, from mild to extreme hate) that. Yet, at the time, everyone was trying to do the exact same thing: capture the desktop. The mechanisms were different, but the end-objective all the same.
There is an alternate universe where we're all running JavaStations. I kinda like this version...
Hubris? No such thing at that time. They had to find a way to get things done, which were breaking all the time. Imagine node breaking something every release but a web browser. There was little choice then, compared to too many options today. Firefox was able to be a bit more of a stable presence than the rest in that time.
Devs had to manage every incompatibility between every tag implementation in every browser, especially ways to gracefully downgrade for older and older versions of IE especially in early B2B SaaS. Ironically, these skills have turned out to be incredibly valuable now for other applications for optimizing user experiences even if they're anonymous.
It was that way for a long time that made browser makers learn the hard way why compatibility was a good thing and would not be less competitive.
Looking forward to safari is everything on iOS going away soon.
Thankfully such opinions of the past have to live with the fact that modern javascript apps in many ways, with AJAX calls were invented by Microsoft, no less for the online version of Microsoft Outlook.
>the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software.
One of the marketing style slagging quote, "Internet Explorer. The most used browser to download another browser." I remember the first time a buddy said that to me, and it has aged oh so well.
For those who experienced IE being forced on computers, simply entertaining the idea of it being forced off computers without choice is not just click-baity but also a special coming full circle moment.
Besides, every step towards an OS being something a user doesn't own or control, either for their own good, or users who can't help themselves, is another step towards lasting demand for usable Linux. '
It's nice that Ubuntu is starting to feel like MacOSX when it started to become usable for the many and not just the few.
If people have genuine use cases (or even simply have a preferred remembered experience experience for how something complicated works like an elderly person) I see no reason why they "should" upgrade, and why instead we shouldn't at least try to provide those users a mediocre amount of support.
For the average Grandma who just wants to use Hotmail and Facebook, learning Edge is actually a monumental undertaking
I'd much rather Grandma have to learn to do something slightly differently than to hear about how Grandma had her bank account information stolen by some JavaScript malware.
For those with genuine use cases (I.e. ancient software that doesn't even work with the compatibility shims) I agree that there should be some way to run IE11 and older (and with only themselves to blame if they get pwned by ignoring the risks).
On my grandmother's computer I did the "install this site as an app" function for the sites she uses and they open up in frameless windows. The only browser controls available to her are back and refresh. Highly recommend.
No. IE needs to be renamed "ActiveX Web App Engine" and no longer be associated with the concept of an Internet browser.
Grandma can get an old iPad for Hotmail and Facebook, which is far safer, far less needing of support and what most people are using for those types of things anyway.
It's a good idea to move away from IE, but it's fairly easy to get around the block. When the Edge prompt comes up, roll over the Edge icon on the taskbar and use the X to close the prompt. Then, click on the IE icon to unminimize the IE window.
Other options include, but are not limited to:
* disabling the IE add-on that triggers the prompt (IEToEdgeBHO): you can disable it via group policy [0] or registry [1] and IE will function as normal, or
* running Internet Explorer without add-ons: iexplore.exe -extoff, or
* opening Internet Options, go to Programs tab, click "Manage add-ons", then clicking "Learn more about toolbars and extensions"
I've also seen other ways of launching IE using VBA or other legacy features. Some of these methods also work on Windows 11.
This is a serious problem for us in my business as our business banking software we are forced to use by our bank in mainland China still only works with IE. I spent an hour last night ultimately inputting shady commands into my registry, to try to force IE to open instead of being hijacked by edge. When an entire industry in a country refuses to upgrade what the hell? Of course I’m pissed the bank hadn’t upgraded but it’s infuriating that Microsoft breaks my processes without my permission.
Korea went deeply down the "custom security" rabbithole too, and many banks there still rely on activeX controls and custom encryption algorithms and other insane bullshit that actively impairs security. It seems to be a regional thing (or at least a developing-country thing).
This is not unheard-of in the enterprise world in the US either. To name-and-shame, Allscripts Enterprise EHR system still uses active-x controls and is still actively deployed in hospital systems.
The typical deployment will be a sandboxed VDI installation that isn't allowed to directly talk to anything except its EHR server and has to be connected via citrix or similar. It is still insane, of course, but the medical world is another one that moves slow. Probably some stuff in the financial sector too, they like that shit too.
I spent two years modernizing one of these IE only apps (moved to chrome/firefox). Sometimes the offending activex control is simply a xml component (literally parsing, xsl, xpath, etc stuff) of a newer version than what was built in at one time. Firefox and Chrome don't handle xml nearly as seamlessly as old IE did. But other times these apps require IE11, but it's actually executing the page in IE6 or 7 compatibility mode. That was the case with mine, Microsoft DHTML Behaviors, the horror, the horror....
I'm at a US government agency and the system that processes our time and attendance still does not work with Chrome or Firefox - I think it's some kind of security certificate issue? So they tell us to use Edge to fill our our time and attendance. I click some link from our internal home page and it loads up the page in "Internet Explorer Mode," complete with the blue "e" in the address bar.
It's bullshit "security" for banking, it could be that it depends on something that isn't emulated by Edge, like toolbars or some other form of deep browser extensions, not "just" ActiveX.
For all it's worth it could be something as insane as a kernel driver that assumes a certain IE build and hooks into it for "security". Never heard of such things in areas outside of gaming, but won't be remotely surprised. Banking industry is way more backwards than gaming, after all.
I sympathise with your frustration, but the blame is absolutely with your bank. I mean, finances are like THE thing to be security minded about - the fact they're still using IE is just unacceptable from any lens.
Sometimes the blame is regulations: too many hoops for banks to update their software easily and without adding stupid regulatory liabilities. Regulations added to protect the user, but perversely hinder the user.
That's really on your bank for insisting on using technology which has been sunset for many many years though.
I would contact them and tell them you're considering switching. If they're anything like the banks in North America they'll be freaking out trying to give you deals to stay. They did this for me when I told them that I would switch over trying to force SMS-based 2fa on me.
I'm really not sure about the economic situation in China right now but since they hiked the interest rates banks have been extremely competitive in terms of signup offers here in the past few months. Might be worth considering!
This change has been announced long ago. IT should have identified this issue and taken the steps to enable IE mode on Edge for this specific site a year ago.
Perhaps a virtual machine running windows with the compatible version of IE just for this purpose would be a good option. Take snapshots after it's setup correctly so any sneaky update shenanigans MS pulls can be reverted.
On VirtualBox it's easy to set the disks as immutable. The machine will come up, write to the disk and, when you reboot, it'll be back into the original state.
More than once I updated the VM only to realize I forgot to make the disk mutable.
I recently switched to Edge and have been mildly surprised, after turning off all telemetry, having sleeping tabs built-in, which actually work much better than Chrome's and Firefox's (also considering 3rd party extensions), and my browser RAM usage dropping to a "measly" 800MB with 100 tabs open and a non-noticeable delay when I switch to a sleeping tab, seems a much better alternative than using Chrome. Plus sidebar tabs are a huge plus.
But the problem is the old webview crap based on IE is still embedded in the system everywhere. Only yesterday I got a popup from something with the "image missing" icon that clearly originates in IE.
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On Windows Server platforms, where IE11 is still inexplicably the default experience even in the most recent 2022 editions, you can still enjoy its full functionality, until you explicitly install 'Edge for Business'. Which you should.
christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Its so bombastic the US Justice department hauls your pepsi sipping CEO in for a round of slouching, hand-waving antitrust litigation but somehow you manage to make it out by smirking through interviews and the grace of a nation thats just awakening to the dawn of the internet.
then fast forward 20 years later, your dumpster-fire web browser with all its lock-in and exploits still exists in the OS but the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software.
So you sunset the horrorshow that was IE in favour of your competitors browser engine to power your new browser but the haggard burro of a thing you call an OS is so inextricably encumbered by your blues-traveler era nineties myopia you now need a team of H1B's to start writing shims and the burger from lunch feels like its starting to come back up...
...now eight years later whatever frankenstein browser you convinced yourself was a good idea to build is still nowhere near as popular as your competitors, and thats after you added built-in gaslighting to your search engine to dissuade anyone from even searching for your competitors browser. you even came up with your own prefix to force links in your daytime infomercial of an OS to open directly in your new pet browser but people still dont want to use it. heck, you routinely reset their default browser and the only thing its managed to do is galvanize what by all indicators is a nearly white-hot detest for your pet chrome that has 45 seconds of unavoidable fullscreen lecture on first load, built in ads and tours, and a weird buy now pay later feature.
Personally... I absolutely understand exactly how they ended up in this situation. There are actually several good reasons to embed the browser into the OS, the top two easily understood ones are...
---
1. They've put a lot of work into the browser, and they've shared many components of it with other tooling. EX: Internet EXPLORER and EXPLORER the file system browser don't share their name by mistake. They're so similar I can load the same COM addin in both.
2. From a pure usability perspective, it makes a boat load of sense to prevent a user from accidentally uninstalling the last browser on the machine. When dealing with edge cases and possible support calls, making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable. Safari is also not removable... for similar reasons.
---
Further - I think it's actually a fairly good credit to MSFT that they're bothering with shims at all, and are maintaining a good chunk of compatibility for applications that were written literally decades ago.
Both Google and Apples's approach to this would literally be: "We're so sorry, that's no longer supported and you're f*#$ed. Go upgrade, get your vendors to upgrade, or eat shit."
MSFT isn't writing shims because they still need them... they're writing shims because they have enterprise customers who want them, and they actually give a fuck about that.
Well, it's kind of explicable: It was at about that time Microsoft rolled out HTML Help, so they needed an HTML rendering engine on every PC to be able to read the documentation.
Using a web browser as your native app's rendering engine is what all the cool kids are doing these days, so in a way they were just 15 years ahead of the curve.
This was uncalled for. You could’ve just said engineers.
For those of us in an unending battle with a broken immigration system every day of our lives for over a decade, this really rubs the wrong way.
Elsewhere on HN: Everyone should be forced to install Chrome because I can't be bothered testing against Safari and Firefox.
Yup. And I can also imagine all the reasons why you dislike (to various extents, from mild to extreme hate) that. Yet, at the time, everyone was trying to do the exact same thing: capture the desktop. The mechanisms were different, but the end-objective all the same.
There is an alternate universe where we're all running JavaStations. I kinda like this version...
Devs had to manage every incompatibility between every tag implementation in every browser, especially ways to gracefully downgrade for older and older versions of IE especially in early B2B SaaS. Ironically, these skills have turned out to be incredibly valuable now for other applications for optimizing user experiences even if they're anonymous.
It was that way for a long time that made browser makers learn the hard way why compatibility was a good thing and would not be less competitive.
Looking forward to safari is everything on iOS going away soon.
Thankfully such opinions of the past have to live with the fact that modern javascript apps in many ways, with AJAX calls were invented by Microsoft, no less for the online version of Microsoft Outlook.
One of the marketing style slagging quote, "Internet Explorer. The most used browser to download another browser." I remember the first time a buddy said that to me, and it has aged oh so well.
Deleted Comment
To top it all off, the next generation of techies think the company that did this is one of the good ones and voluntarily use their software(VSCode?).
> daytime infomercial of an OS
I'm not sure how you managed to write this post but I'm totally on board with the linguistic energy of it
*most*
I recently had an issue with MS deleting IE and a corporate legacy app not working.
Besides, every step towards an OS being something a user doesn't own or control, either for their own good, or users who can't help themselves, is another step towards lasting demand for usable Linux. '
It's nice that Ubuntu is starting to feel like MacOSX when it started to become usable for the many and not just the few.
Deleted Comment
... have done a long time ago.
For the average Grandma who just wants to use Hotmail and Facebook, learning Edge is actually a monumental undertaking
If your average grandparent runs Windows Server, learning a new browser every now and then would be the least of their problems, IMHO.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...
I'd much rather Grandma have to learn to do something slightly differently than to hear about how Grandma had her bank account information stolen by some JavaScript malware.
For those with genuine use cases (I.e. ancient software that doesn't even work with the compatibility shims) I agree that there should be some way to run IE11 and older (and with only themselves to blame if they get pwned by ignoring the risks).
I don't know what value of "grandma" is subject to being averaged, but this feels needlessly hyperbolic.
The most important items are all pretty close to their old positions. Odds are she is going to Yahoo to search for Hotmail or Facebook anyway.
Grandma can get an old iPad for Hotmail and Facebook, which is far safer, far less needing of support and what most people are using for those types of things anyway.
Other options include, but are not limited to:
* disabling the IE add-on that triggers the prompt (IEToEdgeBHO): you can disable it via group policy [0] or registry [1] and IE will function as normal, or
* running Internet Explorer without add-ons: iexplore.exe -extoff, or
* opening Internet Options, go to Programs tab, click "Manage add-ons", then clicking "Learn more about toolbars and extensions"
I've also seen other ways of launching IE using VBA or other legacy features. Some of these methods also work on Windows 11.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/ie11-dep..., CLSID: {1FD49718-1D00-4B19-AF5F-070AF6D5D54C}
[1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/23/internet-explorer-users-wi... (the key type is String)
https://palant.info/2023/01/02/south-koreas-online-security-... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34231364
https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...
This is not unheard-of in the enterprise world in the US either. To name-and-shame, Allscripts Enterprise EHR system still uses active-x controls and is still actively deployed in hospital systems.
The typical deployment will be a sandboxed VDI installation that isn't allowed to directly talk to anything except its EHR server and has to be connected via citrix or similar. It is still insane, of course, but the medical world is another one that moves slow. Probably some stuff in the financial sector too, they like that shit too.
For all it's worth it could be something as insane as a kernel driver that assumes a certain IE build and hooks into it for "security". Never heard of such things in areas outside of gaming, but won't be remotely surprised. Banking industry is way more backwards than gaming, after all.
I would contact them and tell them you're considering switching. If they're anything like the banks in North America they'll be freaking out trying to give you deals to stay. They did this for me when I told them that I would switch over trying to force SMS-based 2fa on me.
I'm really not sure about the economic situation in China right now but since they hiked the interest rates banks have been extremely competitive in terms of signup offers here in the past few months. Might be worth considering!
Well, I don’t think they can refuse to upgrade any longer if it doesn’t work, right?
Brings me back to the days of having to support IE6 for a client website when everyone has moved on from IE6. That shit was a dog to support
More than once I updated the VM only to realize I forgot to make the disk mutable.
But the problem is the old webview crap based on IE is still embedded in the system everywhere. Only yesterday I got a popup from something with the "image missing" icon that clearly originates in IE.
Not a major difference - Edge is based on Chromium.