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No IE7 For 2k, Now In Extended Service
Yankovic writes "Looks like MS will not support IE7 on Windows 2000. 'It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000... [S]ome of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.' While security fixes will still be available until 2010, I guess that means the only browsers with tabs for W2k will be Opera and Firefox." All the details about an MS product's fall into senility available at the lifecycle page.
My choice is to upgrade from Win2K to WinXP for IE?
Hah! I'll keep Win2K and Firefox, thanks.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Does that mean I'm stuck with Firefox, and cannot utilize Microsoft's intelligent autoupdate which automatically downloads security patches once every 3 days?
This raises an interesting question - Why/How can Firefox, which runs happily on W2K and others, offer better security, while IE cannot do the same on an OS developed by MS itself?
I'm sure Firefox will be laughed at if it said it could not develop a browser for Windows because some of the security work in Firefox relies on operating system functionality in Linux that is non-trivial to port to Windows.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Many people are sticking with Win2K because of the draconian licensing and validation process required with WinXP. They will begin to lose a significant portion of the browser market as people realize how easy it is to get Firefox and the benefits it offers over Explorer.
12:50 - press return.
"Besides, if we supported our products with our products, nobody would have reason to buy our new products."
Dramatized for your enjoyment.
So, Internet Explorer is no longer free, to get a secure Microsoft Browser (Yeah, I'm making a few assumptions here, but let's just live in the hypothetical word for a moment) I have to buy a new version of the OS? Or I can get a secure version of Netscape (That they call Firefox these days) for free. I wonder what I'll choose.
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Most normal users never upgrades their OS and a lot of geeks prefer 2k to XP.
I suppose they have to release something new in Longhorn, they could make the window borders even bigger and more ugly and cripple the performance a bit more but with all the things they've dropped from longhorn they need some killer feature like copying firefox tabs to justify forcing another pointless upgrade on the corporate world.
It's a good thing. Why? Well, if it needs the use of the service pack, that only seems to indicate that the browser is more and more tied in with with the OS (if that's even possible).
Like someone mentioned on slashdot before (paraphrased):
"I'd rather browse the net with a browser, not an operating system."
>And I still don't trust SP2 and all the crap it dumps on your box.
"Crap" like pop-up blocking for IE6, a better wireless manager, NX support, firewall on by default, etc? It blows my mind that all these windows users hate the system they use and complain when they get a bunch of needed features. Of course, there are issues with the update, but thats true of any modern OS.
If you're using windows XP you should have migrated to SP2 long ago if you cared about security and stability. Then again this is slashdot, enjoy your ill-informed karma whore points.
The IE rendering engine with most of the features people get all gushy about in the Mozilla/Firefox browsers.
:p
Funnily enough, one of the things most people love about Mozilla/Firefox is that they don't use the IE rendering engine - they use one that can cope with ancient 1990s technology like XHTML and transparent PNGs and CSS layout instead.
And, not to rain on your parade, a glance at the MyIE page shows that the wonderful features you're expecting me to be impressed by are... tabbed browsing and mouse gestures. Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned those are basic minimal features required for a browser to qualify as usable. I couldn't find anything there about a MyIE equivalent of Greasemonkey. Or Flashblock. Or EditCSS.
Seriously, you should give Firefox a try (or another try, as appropriate). It's got all the features people get gushy about in MyIE, and many more, and - as an added bonus - it doesn't use the IE rendering engine.
Microsoft has a history of being backwards compatible (even to supporting buggy behavior in newer releases), but you're really talking about forward compatible rather than backwards compatible. Apps written for Win2k will work on Longhorn/XP, but apps written for Longhorn/XP may not work on win2k. At what point is a company allowed to stop adding new features to old products? Newer versions of cars add satellite radio, GPS, and MP3 capability, but I don't see any car companies provided these features on older models.
Microsoft has one of the best track records in the business for backwards compatibility. ...except they don't. My employer guarantees 100% compatibility with 20 years of future products as a condition of sale. We have fully supported software that communicates with hardware that was made in the 1970s. IBM has that sort of track record of long-time compatibility and support for its mainframes too. That kind of track record for Microsoft would mean being obliged to offer support for stuff like BASIC on the TRS80.
.ini files and registry settings specific to legacy apps. You might never run the DOS version of Simcity from 12 years ago on your new system, but there is code in the current windows that was placed there specifically to make that one app run. All of that legacy support is quite a hodgepodge at times.
That being said, MS DOES put a great deal of effort into backwards compatibility--to the point of including a DOS emulator in NT4/2K/XP (WoWExec) that is so seamless most people would never think that the aforementioned OSes are no more compatible with DOS than Linux is (it just happens to have really good emulation). There is a blog by a microsoftie called something like "the old new thing" that explains the lengths MS goes to to maintain compatibility with popular legacy apps.
There are two problems with the efforts MS has put into legacy support: Firstly, it has done a lot to make their codebase cryptic, nearly unmanageable and sub-optimal. This is a problem the likes of IBM and my employer have to contend with as well, except that DOS and NT were not engineered with then intention of being the core of a product for decades. As a result, you get a massive blocks of code,
The second problem with MS Legacy support is that it tends to be rather selective. In the past, when there was a very popular 3rd party app that sold a lot of copies of Windows (certain desktop publishing packages come to mind) legacy support was done without question. when MS Office sales are slumping...well it looks like time to add a few more features that 0.001% of users asked for and use them as an exuse to break file format compatibilities. The thing about IE7 beig "too advanced" for anything older than XPsp2 is another one of those cop-outs. A little company and a non-profit foundation managed to make more secure browsers with innovative features that runs on multiple platforms and MS can't use their billions to engineer something that works with multiple versions of a SINGLE PLATFORM? Bullshit. They are trying to accelerate the elimination of Win2k because it is limiting their revenue potential.
I understand that legacy support is expensive and that MS is beter than a lot of SW companies like Red Hat (not that that is totally Red Hat's fault--they just don't have the resources). The difference is that Free software often continues to work on anything it'll compile on, and if you do have to upgrade you don't often have to pay through the nose for a highly disruptive upgrade. The IE7 compatibility issue is artificial--MS could EASILY make it run on win2K with its resources and say "there is no official support--use at your own risk". They just made design decisions to deliberately create critical dependencies on XPsp2. Even more than concerns about support costs, MS wants to boost stagnant OS sales.
Problem is, that makes IE7 an expensive browser for someone like me, whose only MS OS is win2K. Firefox is free in all senses of the word, so IE7 makes for a pretty weak justification for an OS upgrade when Firefox is much more convenient to get and I don't need to re-install my OS.