Microsoft Sends Flowers To Internet Explorer 6 Funeral

Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."

Comments

Hate to speak ill of the dead, but...

[elrous0]

Considering the reckless life it lead, is it any surprise it finally succumbed to all those viruses?

Re:Hate to speak ill of the dead, but...

[teknopurge]

You think IE would have used some protection.....

Re:Hate to speak ill of the dead, but...

[jmactacular]

Reckless? Please. Everyone likes to hate on IE, but that's because we all have short memories. Back in the day, when IE 6 was released, it was easily the best browser around. And IE 5, and IE4. It is naive to think any software company can prevent every security hole at the time of release. There will *always* be a determined and clever attacker who finds a way after it enters the market. And being the biggest in the market obviously makes them the biggest target. IE also takes a lot of heat for "standards", but that's because sometimes they are inventing the thing that will turn into the standard, like the XMLHttpRequest object, the foundation of AJAX. Believe me, supporting IE6 in 2010 is the bane of my existence, but I don't think it's fair to assign blame years later, for something that was created so long ago. In fact, I am thankful they put so much work into backwards compatibility, otherwise I think things would be even worse. Ultimately, IE6 will be replaced by IE8 in the next 1-2 years as the corporate world rolls out Win7 deploys.

Re:Hate to speak ill of the dead, but...

[mdwh2]

Back in the day, when IE 6 was released, it was easily the best browser around.

IE 6? I was happily using Opera at the time.

Translation

[iamapizza]

And by "a little piece of IE heaven," they actually mean "any other browser".

Re:Translation

[amicusNYCL]

Not true. I actually know what the announcement is going to be, and it's going to make a lot of people who visit sites like Slashdot happy (or surprised).

Here's a hint: it's about supporting a standard that no one thought Microsoft would support.

Maybe a new version as well..

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

IE9 is entirely rebuilt with 100% HTML5 support. SVG support.

Re:Translation

[amicusNYCL]

I've already said too much. They're looking for me now, I can hear the helicopters.

Re:Translation

[PRMan]

it's about supporting a standard that no one thought Microsoft would support.

HTML?

Re:Translation

[omnichad]

That's OK, corporations are starting to move on....to Silverlight ;-)

Re:Translation

[plague3106]

Nothing wrong with that. SL will work on FF, IE or Safari, and on Windows or Mac.

Plus its a great way to use all those MS devs out there, who (like me) don't know Flash.

Re:Translation

[omnichad]

I agree it's an improvement. But why can't corporate types just use HTML/CSS/minimal Javascript and let their software run on ALL platforms? Why does the core of any web-based corporate software have to be some plugin-dependent binary?

Re:Translation

[HaZardman27]

For one, because Silverlight makes writing web-apps much easier.

Re:Translation

[Tumbleweed]

For one, because Silverlight makes writing web-apps much easier.

No, what you get when you use Silverlight are *Silverlight* apps. There's a difference, and not knowing that difference is why we're in the "Can't move away from IE6" problem. Learn the lesson, please.

Something was missing....

[voodoo cheesecake]

They should have send a blue screen of death dressed up as the grim reaper!

Nobody is completely evil

[Locke2005]

The Internet Explorer team has got to be the coolest group in Redmond... unless, of course, you believe the cake is a lie!

Re:Nobody is completely evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't our fault. We ordered over the phone, and that's what the bakery did.

For Firefox 3, we had an IE alum living in the area who could go talk to the bakery, so you got a better cake.

Such a pity

[ilikebees]

It's so sad when a parent outlives a child.

Re:Such a pity

[BearRanger]

Better than the child outliving the parent. That's how zombies are made...

The flowers I'd send

[greenguy]

And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flower by the snail mail
Say it with dead flowers at my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave
No I won't forget to put roses on your grave

IE 9 perhaps?

[dmgxmichael]

Hmm.. So they might show up with a build of IE 9? Would be appropriate (turn a 6 upside down).

I feel sorry for the IE team at Microsoft - they get a lot of flak for a situation they didn't cause. They didn't choose to discontinue browser development in 2003. Where it up to them IE 6 would have been superceded in 03, 04 at the latest, instead of 07. And if IE 7 had come sooner IE 6 wouldn't have become as entrenched as it is now.

Re:IE 9 perhaps?

[ircmaxell]

I feel sorry for the IE team at Microsoft

I don't. They openly ignore standards, because they don't see it as necessary. I was at an event where the IE team lead (this was a month or two before IE8's release) gave a talk and was answering questions. He said that IE8 will support "most" of CSS 3. Someone asked why not all of it, he replied to the effect that they don't think the parts they left out "mattered". When asked how it did on the ACID test, they said that it didn't matter, because that test doesn't test anything that's necessary (and it requires things that they didn't see a reason for)... Keep in mind, this was a developer, not a manager. So unless management has it so ingrained in their heads that "This IS the only way", these decisions are being made at the development team level... And you wonder why IE sucks so hard in comparison (and is a thorn in the side of every web developer). It's not that they don't follow standards. It's that they purposely don't follow them... They know better, but make the rational choice to be different. I have no pity for someone who thinks like that...

Re:IE 9 perhaps?

[Thaelon]

They didn't choose to discontinue browser development in 2003.

No, they did it in 1998, yet shat out IE 6 after.

It's not like IE 6 was some first, beta version that they sent out that got adopted before it was ready. It was the sixth major release! They stopped caring because they had market share based on monopoly, not a superior browser. It wasn't until Firefox gave them serious competition that they started trying to fix it.

Re:IE 9 perhaps?

[jpmorgan]

But perhaps he's right? Everybody likes to jump on ACID as some ultimate measure of a webbrowser's worth. Neither ACID2 nor ACID3 were based on the most important or commonly used features of HTML, JavaScript and CSS, but a sampling of obscure little bits that most webbrowsers were doing wrong at the time.

As useful as ACID are, it's important to realize that they are NOT proper compliance tests. It could be argued that one of the real failings of the W3C standardization process is that they never produce a compliance test suite. So you can't accurately state that a browser (like IE) poorly supports relevant standards, without relying heavily on anecdote.

Re:IE 9 perhaps?

[Blakey Rat]

You missed the parent's point completely. If the test is useless, or mostly-useless (which I personally believe ACID is), then who gives a shit what score IE gets? And, more importantly, why should the IE team waste their precious time caring about it?

Since there's no good reference implementation, and since the W3C is fucking awful at writing standards, frankly I don't blame the IE team for anything that's happened. My only gripe is that they stopped development for so long, but then again-- why would they have bothered to developer it since their major competitor, Netscape, gave up? So even that I have trouble criticizing them for.

Microsoft are masters of pragmatic code. The W3C is nothing but pie-in-the-sky good intentions that don't actually get day-to-day business done. (Proof: pick a successful website, any random website, check to see if it validates. It doesn't.) While the W3C was dinking around with some moronic plan to make HTML XML compatible, for several years and for God-knows what reason, Microsoft was creating real useful code.

Look, I have no problem with people writing perfectly compliant websites, or perfectly compliant browsers, but peopel on Slashdot act as if your perfect renderer is Jesus. It's not even a tenth as important as this forum thinks it is.

Were the flowers sterilized?

[stefanlasiewski]

And shortly afterward, plants surrounding the funeral began to wither and die from a exotic new fungus.

Re:Were the flowers sterilized?

[DCstewieG]

Sadly, Microsoft has a working fungicide but they refuse to ship it until next Tuesday.

Re:Were the flowers sterilized?

[TheSpoom]

The fungus immediately bloomed into advertisements, and funeral organizers had difficulty pruning quickly enough to keep up with what they are now calling "deadware".

Human moment

[trurl7]

I think that's a fantastic gesture on their part. Yes, it's all in good fun, but look - one of Redmond's lawyer types could've gotten a hold of this, and gotten some judge to issue an injunction based on a combination of ip violation/unfair competition/market image tarnishing/some other frankly-my-dear-I-just-don't-give-a-damn excuse. Yeah, it'd never hold up, but nothing stopping them from just being dicks.

Instead, they took it in good fun, and did the human thing - exhibited humor. Yes, they're still evil, blah blah. But this has that WWI 1914 Christmas Eve soccer-game feel. So let's acknowledge it with good cheer.

Re:Human moment

[lucian1900]

Not suing is not a "fantastic gesture on their part".

Re:Human moment

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple would have gone the "sue them" route for sure.

Actually, I am posting this Anon because Apple might sue me for using the word "Apple"

Re:Human moment

[clone53421]

Perhaps not, but joining in on the festivities was certainly more than anyone expected.

Re:Human moment

[jpmorgan]

You sound surprised... the IE team at Microsoft does stuff like this all the time. I was under the impression that they habitually send the Firefox development team congratulatory cakes upon major releases: http://www.intothefuzz.com/2008/06/17/let-them-eat-cake/

Scapegoating 101

[fserb]

I don't think this is self-jest. Microsoft and IE team love this... the current message is "yes IE6 is broken, you should upgrade to IE8/9 because it's much better". Except that it isn't. So the funeral flowers serve them well, because they can pretend the real problem is with IE6, where in fact the problem is with them.

Microsoft has been using this "network admins don't upgrade from IE6, it's not our fault" type of argument for too long as an excuse for the mess they keep putting web standards into.
If everybody suddenly upgraded to the latest and greatest IE8/9 we would still be in the same place regarding IE not following web standards. We would be free of "IE6 doesn't have a clue about the box model". But we would be at "IE8 doesn't support canvas (or proper event bubble)". Just so 9 years from now they will be sending flowers to the IE8 funeral and saying sorry for not supporting canvas...
A proper solution for Microsoft now would be to completely ditch IE backend, use one of the current available libraries like Webkit, and put in place an IE frontend that can have IE6/7/8 tabs and a proper standard backend (defaulting to the proper backend). Any other move on this area coming from Microsoft seems to be either evilness or PR (which I think it's the case).

Re:Scapegoating 101

[Locke2005]

How much can you bitch about Microsoft forcing you to upgrade, or about the features in the upgrade, when Microsoft is giving it to you for free? If you want a browser with a different feature set, then use IE just long enough to download one of the many alternatives out there! Personally, I use Firefox, but keep IE around to handle the broken webpages that only work in IE. The only reason people are clinging to IE6 is they are still accessing pages written to expect IE6's broken behavior, and they either know or suspect that those pages will not work properly with ANY other browser.

Re:Scapegoating 101

[Locke2005]

Sadly, her work required her to use a website that only works through Internet Explorer 6. Unless she works for Microsoft, that sounds like more her work's fault than Microsoft's fault. Is it Microsoft's fault that businesses a) Were stupid enough several years ago to implement systems that relied on the crufty behavior of a specific browser, rather than open standards, and b) now are too cheap and/or risk averse to redesign their systems, and therefore continue to use tools that by their very design can't possibly work in a secure browser environment? Remember, this crap was built with .ASP code that just naturally assumed it could do whatever the hell it wanted to your computer. Fixing the browser security model means breaking these crufty app's fundamental design.

IE Heaven?

[CopaceticOpus]

I seriously doubt the existence of IE Heaven. But I hope it's there, because that would mean that IE6 is now rotting in IE Hell.

Re:I will never upgrade my IE6.

[martas]

dude, if you're so masochistic as to like using the ie6 POS interface, then the whole "kill ie6" movement is actually good for you. more websites you can't use => more pain => more sick perverted pleasure.

also, try chopping off your balls. i hear it huts real nice.

Re:I will never upgrade my IE6.

[smisle]

I sort of agree, I can't stand the new interfaces for 7 or 8 ... but I also can't use IE6 since it's not secure... enter Firefox and Chrome. You can get a Firefox theme that makes it look like IE6 if that's really what floats your boat.

Re:I will never upgrade my IE6.

[smisle]

yes ... which puts the menus UNDERNEATH the back arrows and the address bar. wow, it looks like crap, and is annoying to use.

Then, they added the shortcut buttons (home, page, tools, RSS, etc) to the right of where the tabs go. What's the use of adding tab support if you're going to cut the tab space in half?

And, one more thing while I'm ranting - what's up with the "call home" connecting that IE 7 and 8 do when they start up? I expect to be able to use my browser as soon as it opens, not be locked out while it looks for updates or loads extensions or whatever else it might be doing.