Microsoft Upgrading Windows Users To Latest Version of MSIE

helix2301 writes "Microsoft will be upgrading all Windows XP, Vista and 7 users to the latest IE silently. They are doing this because they have found a large number of non-patched systems. Microsoft pointed out that Chrome and Firefox do this regularly. They will start with Australia and Brazil in January, then go world-wide after they have assured there are no issues."

Comments

For your own good

[Toe, The]

Don't knock 'em. Microsoft has a Big Brother reputation to uphold.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

And what browser do you use? Firefox? Chrome? both of those already do this. This is actually a good idea. I know that at both my office and my parents house that if a screen comes up asking them to update, it's *close* "I'll update later"... this will go on until I manually run the updates because they don't want updates taking time away from facebook or shopping online. Automatically updating like this will silently fix issues, which is a good thing for the bulk of the population that still uses IE.

Re:For your own good

[Toonol]

Do we want to call MS Big Brother over this, when they're following the example of Firefox?

IE has been getting a lot better, and the more sane release schedule was becoming more and more of a selling point over Firefox. Funny how the browser field has shifted. It used to be Firefox for the smart people, Opera for the independent smart people, and IE/Safari for the people that didn't really know how computers operated.

Now, IE and Safari have improved, Firefox is squandering it's lead, and Chrome is on par with Firefox, and Opera is still the Ron Paul of browsers. There's no obviously bad browser anymore, but we also don't have an obviously superior browser.

Re:For your own good

[EvanED]

There's no obviously bad browser anymore, but we also don't have an obviously superior browser.

Alternatively, if you're me you think that all browsers are bad, but approximately equally. ;-)

Re:For your own good

[Yakasha]

There's no obviously bad browser anymore, but we also don't have an obviously superior browser.

As a developer, I strongly disagree there. IE has the same problems it has always had: everything works in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, & Safari but oh, surprise surprise, it doesn't work in IE. Always have to code something special, even with widely supported Javascript frameworks, there are needed tweaks nearly every time, just for IE.

Re:For your own good

[MozeeToby]

One thing that makes a difference between FF and IE pushing upgrades, if I have IE6 installed on my machine, it's because there's some horribly written intranet site that will only work in IE6. I'm not saying that every IE6 user can use that excuse, but there exist some number of us for whom it is true. Do they have a way to force a downgrade or install versions side by side?

Re:For your own good

[elfprince13]

I lol'd because I became a Ron Paul supporter about the same time as I became an Opera user. Of course now I just use Firefox tricked out to look like Opera because I'm hooked on ABP, so maybe I've lost a little bit of that independent streak. Then again...I'm still a Ron Paul supporter.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

My obviously superior browser is Lynx. No ads, no flash, no pictures and integrates with my screen reader nicely.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we want to call MS Big Brother over this, when they're following the example of Firefox?

Simple way to answer this. Ask yourself three simple questions:

Are they a corporation?

Are they collectively larger than you are, large enough to trigger primitive prey instincts you're still holding over from grade school when bullies kept beating you up?

Are they doing something?

If the answer to all three are "yes", the answer is that they are, indeed, doing something on which we can slap a cheap scare tactic label as a sort of crude bludgeon to convince really really weak-willed impressionable people of our cause*. Sure, the label has already lost almost all of its impact due to overuse and misuse in this manner, but so long as we can find one malleable dope we can scare into following us, it'll all be worth it.

After all, in the time it took me to type out this much (which is definitely nowhere near the length of even a halfway-decent analysis on the topic), a hundred other people could've posted their own comments, and that would mean they Won(tm)! Therefore, we don't have time for rational discussion, it's all just a land grab for the few remaining idiots who'll fall for labels like "Big Brother".

*: Alternatively, we could just be trying to convince the echo chamber that we still agree with the currently trendy dogma. Still ultimately the same degree of usefulness.

Re:For your own good

[Merk42]

There is a way to opt-out of the upgrade and also to downgrade if you happen to get it.

Re:For your own good

[Blue Stone]

>Do we want to call MS Big Brother over this, when they're following the example of Firefox?

Sure. Firefox isn't integrated into the OS in the way IE is, for starters. And what this means is that I haven't upgraded IE for some time now because it broke one of the widgets I use on my Win7 desktop. Firefox doesn't do that sort of thing, because it can't, so there's not an issue with beaking stuff outside of itself.

I guess I might as well mention while I'm here that I haven't upgraded to the latest Firefox either: it breaks one of the addons that I use all the time.

Re:For your own good

[marcosdumay]

Hum, last I saw, Firefox only auto-updates if you authorizes it. (What, by the way, I don't do, on any of my computers, for reasons that are completely different from not trusting the updates.)

I welcome the news of no more IE6, IE7 and IE8. But the means aren't good (well, I don't depend on Windows personaly, so I don't relly care - the IT of my workplace may think differently).

Re:For your own good

[Charliemopps]

yes, but I trust Mozilla, they have not screwed me in the past.

Re:For your own good

[GameboyRMH]

In my experience it hasn't been so bad in IE8/9. There are still a few quirks but it's a huge improvement over 7 or fucking 6.

Re:For your own good

[RMingin]

For me, my relatives, and other private users, this is undoubtedly a Good Thing. There better be an opt-out clearly defined and honored, though, because there are many big companies out there denying the passage of time.

An unnamed multinational Big Pharma up the road from me still uses a major in-house app which is coded specifically to IE6's foibles. They've actually coded up some horrible hackjob that runs IE6 on Windows 7, rather than fix the horrible in-house app.

Re:For your own good

[InsightIn140Bytes]

On top of that it will also bring HTML5 features closer. While many sites will still probably use Flash and Silverlight, at least people will have a browser that is capable of showing HTML5 video and supports HTML5 tags. Sites won't start using it before IE9 is more widely used. And then we can finally stop the H264 vs WebM battle, because IE9 will only support H264.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all the applications that still don't work with the newest version of IE? We have one vendor who only supports IE and then they're only up to supporting 7 I think in the next release this will change, but if we don't upgrade soon we'll have to wait until October due to business contraints.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm Chrome has a lot of broken stuff where IE/Firefox work just fine.

Re:For your own good

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Link for the opt-out tool: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=179

Re:For your own good

[Darinbob]

Firefox does not upgrade me automatically. Though every single day it annoys me with a popup asking me to upgrade.

Re:For your own good

[Beardo the Bearded]

I just got moved up to IE8 at work. It was IE6 for years, moved to 7 in September. That choice is made by the IT department, and they have to confirm that there aren't issues with the various bits of software being run on the Intranet.

Not everyone uses their computers exclusively at home / at a coffee shop.

And no, we can't just use portable Foo on a USB drive.

Re:For your own good

[s1d3track3D]

Yes, this is great in general (assuming they keep aiming for standards compliance) Personal users benefit, developers benefit, browser competition benefits, etc.

However, I know many Corporations that have in-house applications that can ONLY run on IE6. Often these legacy apps are extremely important for the company and are non-trivial to update to more recent browser versions. (or, the company does not have the resources to work on this)

For many corp's this will be an IT nightmare.

(however, I mean really, these Co's have had 20 years to upgrade these app and they have chosen not to, so at some point maybe a 'stick' is needed)

Re:For your own good

[anonymov]

IE8 is here to stay, as Windows XP will probably be upgraded to IE8 - unless they've decided to backport IE9. Well, at least IE8 is a lot less painful to support than 6-7.

Also, IE6 and 7 users still can opt out of the upgrade. It will lower the numbers and will allow to phase out IE8 support for some sites, but some webdevs will still have to deal with glorious mess of IE6.

Re:For your own good

[datavirtue]

Yeah, it is great when you have applications that break in IE 9! Namely, Blackboard. Not everyone who uses Blackboard is patched to support IE 9 so any students who end up with IE 9 have to download different browsers to fix their system. Hold on a minute, this is a good thing. Nevermind.

Re:For your own good

[Yakasha]

Umm Chrome has a lot of broken stuff where IE/Firefox work just fine.

emphasis mine to point out exactly where I disagree. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, & Opera have some slight differences and yes, I do find sometimes minor bugs (like Firefox still calculating CSS margins incorrectly for form fields), but by and large they all at least make a show of abiding by published standards. I.E. only complies with standards seemingly by random chance.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're in the situation where your company's web programmers are retards and you are forced to use that company's machines (which is the situation you appear to be in), then you're probably running a corporate network where updates will be managed by WSUS and won't be pushed to your computer automatically.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Please feel free to point out what "widely supported Javascript library" doesn't just work on IE9. Because in my experience those don't exist anymore.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your widget and add on choices might need to be reviewed. A poorly designed widget or add on is not necessarily a browser problem. Just like browser performance metrics tend to be irrelevant in the real world. You can have the fastest browser on the market but a poorly constructed web application or web site can drastically reduce performance.

Re:For your own good

[datavirtue]

IE9 is configurable to a compatibility mode so it will operate like IE6 for all or specified websites. Most people do not have the time or the knowledge to get it configured properly though. Microsoft went through a lot of trouble to build this compatibility mode though.

Re:For your own good

[hawkinspeter]

Maybe companies that make stupid "lock-in" decisions should reap the rewards of their own stupidity and short-sightedness.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about you, but I (and I'm probably not the only one) felt pretty much screwed over since some time after FF3.5-3.6

After that it felt like "If they're trying to badly emulate Chrome and Opera, why not just go with one of them instead?" I chose Opera.

FF started to worry about looks, while internals are still... meh.

Just a tiny example, try running this simple javascript forkbomb in any modern browser. If it hangs and crashes the whole browser instead of slightly slowing it down by eating a CPU core, you're running Firefox. For fuck's sake, even universally hated IE6 can handle it, but not FF.

void function forkbomb() { setTimeout(forkbomb, 0); setTimeout(forkbomb, 0); }()

Re:For your own good

[Lucky75]

I'm so incredibly in favour of this. Stupid people using IE6 still :@:@:@

Re:For your own good

[Lucky75]

Pretty sure there's a way to prevent this.

Re:For your own good

[rabtech]

When will the IE6-only sites get updated to fix their broken implementations?

If Microsoft doesn't force people to update then the answer is never because there is no reason to update it. These are the same type of excuses people made for not getting rid of ISA, the floppy disk, and Flash.

If someone doesn't take the lead and force people to move forward then inertia will guarantee you are stuck with old crappy technology forever.

Saying the original company or design is lost/gone is a horrible answer... what happens when the office holding that old PC w/an ISA control board gets robbed/catches fire/gets struck by lightning?

Please drag the world into the HTML-5 future (kicking and screaming if you must). Don't let the web turn into dead legacy technology that can't be updated.

Re:For your own good

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Not yet, but it's coming in version 12. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mozilla-firefox-silent-update-browser,14217.html

Re:For your own good

[Lokitoth]

Actually, Google provides a WebM fiter (tech preview) that IE can use to display WebM video. The Theora folks could do Theora as well that way.

Re:For your own good

[Draconmythica]

I'm not sure which school you're at but at my local university we've been using Blackboard on IE9 just fine since IE9 was in beta. Seems like if you have a version of Blackboard so old it can't handle that you probably need the kick in the pants anyway.

Re:For your own good

[devent]

How is this "following the example of Firefox"? I never heard that FF will just update itself to the newest version. It will ask if you want to update. But it will not just update.

It's one thing to ask the user if you want to update, but something totally different if you just do it silently. Sure, you can opt-out and de-install, but it's still horrible. Something like this should always be opt-in.

How would you like if you hate the new ribbon interface in MSOffice, but MS just updates your office to the new one, without asking you?

That update shows that MS can do anything it likes with your computer, and will do it if they think it's a good idea.

Re:For your own good

[viperidaenz]

It took the company I'm working for a kick from microsoft to upgrade from IE6 to IE8. Someone convinced them sharepoint was the product they needed for their intranet, which nolonger supports IE6. 5000 desktops upgraded and internal apps fixed over a period of a year or so

Re:For your own good

[tantaliz3]

Also, you can just disable auto-updates and go manual if you're technically inclined.

Re:For your own good

[viperidaenz]

Hopefully by 2014 most/all corporates will have upgrade from XP since extended support runs out then. That should bring the implicit upgrade to IE9 that comes with Windows 7
I can live in hope...

Re:For your own good

[devent]

Don't blame the software, blame the user. How dare you to have such a bad choice to use a widget that breaks in our latest and greatest software version. Clearly, you should review your choice.

Re:For your own good

[TheRealGrogan]

Umm, Firefox and Chrome don't break the system when they update and if they do, it only takes a minute to uninstall and reinstall the desired version. It is also very easy to opt out.

Internet Explorer upgrades are not something to be taken lightly, because:

a) They can affect the Windows shell
b) Programmers may be (correctly or incorrectly) relying on behaviour of its APIs

Internet Explorer upgrades can break shit.

Another example, I have noticed that adding IE8 to an older Windows XP computer slows the whole system down. (That sucks when you don't even use the browser)

Re:For your own good

[anonymov]

Oops, a typo. Meant to say

will allow to phase out pre-IE8 support for some sites

Re:For your own good

[Lokitoth]

If you can stick a meta-tag into the HTML generated by the application there is a one-line fix that will trigger IE7 rendering/DOM mode in later versions of IE for backwards compatibility. Here is a good overview of how it works, and how to manually trigger it, overriding doctype sniffing.

Re:For your own good

[Billly Gates]

Do you use an appropriate doc type? If not your site will render in IE 7 mode. Do you use xhtml? IE 8s only major flaw is xhtml can go into quirks mode if not done right if you include ms xml which is not w3c supported anyway.

IE 9 renders perfectly just like chrome and firefox. Only thing missing is text shadow in css 3 and some html 5 which Ie 10 will include soon

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe companies that make stupid "lock-in" decisions should reap the rewards of their own stupidity and short-sightedness.

You mean the decisions based on Microsoft's claims about how great IE6 was when it came out, so they locked critical business apps to it?

Re:For your own good

[RandomFactor]

Companies can avoid the stick - there is inevitably an opt out provision companies can implement within their environment for updates like this.

Enterprise maintained machines generally aren't accessing Windows Update automatically anyway and use dedicated patch management tools (McAfee, Symantec, Bigfix, et. al) or implement W(S)US internally.

Not that IE6 it matters too much - The majority of windows shops should be past IE6 dependency these days one way or the other with Windows 7 (IE8) rollouts. Maybe MS is just trying to avoid having IE8 stick around for a decade :-)

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously haven't tried IE8 or 9. Funny seeing as they still command the most market share. Ibet your websites make LOTS of money!

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

The software on your intranet must be a load of crap when it required them until last september to get compatability with IE > 6!

Re:For your own good

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Really, everything works fine in Safari?

That ends your credibility as a developer.

Re:For your own good

[D'Sphitz]

I agree that IE8 is a huge improvement over 6 & 7, but it still sucks. IE9 is like heaven, still very far from perfect, but after a decade of dealing with IE it feels damn near perfect. There are still gotchas but for the most part I can safely expect everything to work in IE9 with some minor tweaks, whereas previously I had to expect that most thing wouldn't work in IE without multiple hacks or in some cases code overhaul. It's certainly a welcome change of perspective, the problem is that we can't code for IE9 yet because IE8 is still so prevalent, which is why TFA is music to my ears.

Re:For your own good

[gstoddart]

They've actually coded up some horrible hackjob that runs IE6 on Windows 7, rather than fix the horrible in-house app.

Clearly you've never been involved in trying to get rid of an app like that.

It's mission critical, covers a bunch of use-cases that nobody can remember but that are absolutely vital to like two people (but affect millions of dollars of business), and almost nobody who fully understands it is still around. It's impossible to gather requirements because the application has so many exceptions and one-off fixes and tweaks as to make it impossible to know what all it's supposed to do.

I've been on a couple of projects which tried to replace legacy, in-house apps ... it's often a very expensive, time-consuming process that leaves you with a solution which does a fraction of what the original did and leaves the users miserable that they've been "upgraded" to a tool which doesn't do the job.

Sadly, once you have that kind of software, the process of getting rid of it is often damned near impossible. At the very least, it can be prohibitively expensive ... who wants to spend $40 million to end up with software that does less than what you have now?

Nobody sees it as investing in moving away from old creaky technology, they see it as spending money on something they already have. Hell, I've seen someone go through a multi-year process, tens of millions of dollars, huge amounts of man-power ... only to decide that the twenty-year old app that runs on the mainframe is still a better solution because it covers all of their use cases and the users are comfortable with it.

It gets even worse if you try to replace purpose-built with something that does 'most' of what you need. The users won't touch it because they think it's cumbersome, and missing features they can't live without.

Yes, it is short-sighted to not get rid of it, but the sheer cost and amount of pain in ripping it out can make the alternative seem more attractive.

Re:For your own good

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Actually, its about time that companies invest a little money updating their intranets. Chances are that an intranet that was written for IE6 is an unused intranet.

Re:For your own good

[jimicus]

If they've got any sense at all they'll be using WSUS - can Microsoft override this? I wouldn't think so.

Re:For your own good

[jimicus]

You'd be surprised. I know of at least one industry (which I won't name here) where franchisees have to connect to a website that's private and exclusive to them.

Guess what? IE only. Even today.

Re:For your own good

[Rockstar Rich G]

I work on B2B websites and as unfortunate as it is, we have to make sure every nook and cranny of our sites are backwards compatible with ie6. Our customers are in similar situations where their IT departments decide which browser will be used so they can limit the variance of support issues. veeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrry interested to see how this plays out because if I didn't have to support ie6 and 7, I could easily shave 25-30% off of my coding time. IE8 isn't perfect but it's got so many fewer quirks than 6 and 7.

Re:For your own good

[MojoRilla]

Try making a cross domain javascript request with IE9 with JQuery.

Re:For your own good

[sortius_nod]

WSUS requires human intervention prior to deployment. So, no, MS can't override this.

Re:For your own good

[SpryGuy]

I.E. only complies with standards seemingly by random chance.

This would seem to be untrue of IE9. It has gaps, but not random ones, and what is there complies with standards pretty well.

Re:For your own good

[silanea]

IE 6 is a decade old. Three major releases have come out since then. Using "But...but...but they said it would be so awesome!" as an excuse does not quite cut it anymore. IE 7 came out in 2006, and since then at the very latest the writing has been on the wall. And companies are complaining now, another five years later, about how evil Microsoft is? Making a stupid investment once can be excused, we all make mistakes. But they have had more than enough time to move off the Titanic.

Re:For your own good

[DeathFromSomewhere]

I did a quick bit of googling and it seems IE9 handles it as defined by the W3C standard, it's the other browsers that are broken. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd573303(v=vs.85).aspx

Granted I'm not a web dev so I could be way off on this.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

I've actually done that before, transitioning engineering software from HP Basic to pascal to delphi to visual basic to c# with out the loss of a single option along the way

If you can't replicate each one of the features, you just basically suck as a developer. There really are no excuses if you have all of the code.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

How was safari ever for the people that didn't know how computers operated? Because it came with the os? Please. It was the first browser that used webkit and the absolute fastest browser on osx. Firefox was always a buggy mess on osx.

Re:For your own good

[theweatherelectric]

And then we can finally stop the H264 vs WebM battle, because IE9 will only support H264.

Internet Explorer 9 supports both H.264 and WebM. No other video codecs are supported by IE9. WebM support is added by installing the media foundation components:

http://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf/

You can test WebM support in IE9 with Microsoft's IE9 test drive video support demo:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/videoformatsupport/default.html

Re:For your own good

[theweatherelectric]

The Theora folks could do Theora as well that way.

No, the only codecs supported by IE9 are WebM and H.264. You can, however, shoehorn Theora support into IE with an Active X control:

http://cristianadam.blogspot.com/2011/01/activex-controls.html

Re:For your own good

[Blue Stone]

The widget came with Windows itself.

It's the mini-desktop calendar.

Installing the IE update (whatever one of the last ones was) glitched it's ability to display properly. Uninstalling that update to IE fixed the problem.

Re:For your own good

[mwvdlee]

Dumping the worst browser in the world for the second worst browser in order to use the worst intranet platform in the world... When will they be upgrading from ME to Vista?

Re:For your own good

[Spy Handler]

what version of IE are you talking about? IE 9 is quite good. I can make most pages work fine without resorting to

Re:For your own good

[NoahsMyBro]

I think SharePoint is pretty good; why do you call it "the worst intranet platform in the world"?

AND, I can't help but point out you make the bold, blanket statements that IE8 is 'the second worst browser', and SharePoint is 'the worst intranet platform in the world', and then display a signature that states your world has 'too many shades of gray'.

Seems to me you aren't seeing shades of gray at all. Depending on the environment, SharePoint may be perfectly fine. You might want to re-evaluate your chosen sig before proclaiming rash and baseless judgements.

Re:For your own good

[Applekid]

The software on your intranet must be a load of crap when it required them until last september to get compatability with IE > 6!

You'd be surprised at the quantity and degree of crappiness internal business-specific applications can get when no one wants to spend the money to develop properly.

Re:For your own good

[Dr_Barnowl]

Conversely, if you can actually do a good job and replace their old software with new software that does the job better, you're sorted.

I replaced a monstrous thing that was a custom facade on a UML modeller with integrated CVS handling with a couple of Eclipse plugins, a small Java program and a few shell scripts. Their startup time went from 15 minutes to 60 seconds, all their basic operations are at least an order of magnitude faster, the editor is WYSIWYG instead of having to paste HTML in from Dreamweaver, and it uses autocomplete to place links instead of some horrendous wizard where you have to find the thing you want to link to in a tree view.

They don't even mind that I left a whole bunch of features out, because they were there to compensate for the incredible suckitude of the original solution. The only thing they'd really like is a few more GUI widgets, but they have a good (self-maintained wiki) manual and nice friendly shell scripts and really, the tasks the GUI would be for are a minor part of their work - the bits that consume the time are already wrapped in GUIs. I just view it as a minor anxiety with command lines - a GUI wouldn't make anything more robust, or even easier to use (really - just LOOK easier to use), and it would make things harder to debug when they do go wrong.

Just the savings on not having to pay the support licenses for the horrible proprietary Java CVS server they were using has paid for the time I spent on it, and then some. The increased productivity is just gravy. I get about 1 support call a month for it, usually asking for a change to one of the XSLT sheets because they need their templates updating.

The key is not to look at what the old app does and try to replicate it exactly. If you take a step back and work out what the actual requirements are, you'll end up with a better product that the users actually want. The old application can help considerably with that - usually the thing that frustrates them the most is the thing that wastes most of their time and needs to be made the most streamlined or even automated away. For this app, that was the linking - instead firing up a wizard and making of a whole bunch of clicks in a tree view, you now just type the first few letters, hit ctrl-space, and find the item you wanted to link in a menu with the mouse or keyboard. And you can actually copy and paste the links now, which you couldn't do in the old version.

So there are definitely benefits. Fortunately, the manager of this team could see that. Even better for me, he's now become greatly elevated in the hierarchy, carrying my reputation as a miracle worker with him...

Not the same scale though.. we're talking in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of millions.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Your understanding of how things work at corporations in the real world must be a load of crap. Now go upstairs - your mom is yelling that your Hot Pocket is ready!

Re:For your own good

[hherb]

The big difference would be that the makers of Chrome and Firefox appear at least halfway competent in matters security and standards compliance, and few would distrust them implicitly in that regard

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom still corners the market at 7th and Main, I bet she makes a lot of money.

Obviously I've tried her.

Re:For your own good

[dugn]

Corps won't be upgraded automatically. Corporate admins will always have the option to accept or decline a new version of IE just as they always have. Loosely managed PCs (those who aren't managed by a Microsoft solution like SMS, SCCM, WSUS Server, Intune, SBS or SCE) can use the blocker toolkit that they likely already have in place to block the original IE9 update.

Re:For your own good

[ozmanjusri]

I think SharePoint is pretty good; why do you call it "the worst intranet platform in the world"?

Wait 'till you get more than 2000 records in a list, or you're on a slow link...

Re:For your own good

[cyber-vandal]

But you can't tell that to some people around here who will just call you a liar because their blog doesn't need to support IE6 any more.

Re:For your own good

[cyber-vandal]

People who don't want to pay millions of dollars to upgrade a system that works fine are not stupid.

Re:For your own good

[Penguinisto]

I think SharePoint is pretty good; why do you call it "the worst intranet platform in the world"?

...because it requires four servers to do, what one box running Apache and a competent open-source CMS with a few free modules can still do - that's why.

Yes I know there's a single-box SharePoint solution, but once you start scaling up the SP solution, things start getting ugly.

Re:For your own good

[Canazza]

There's still the issue of the differences between IE 8 and 9. There's a few issues with some of our toolkit that just can't be fixed without forcing IE 9 into IE 8 standards mode. Granted, it's just a matter of sticking a meta tag in the header, but, funilly enough, if you don't make that meta tag the FIRST meta tag, IE 9 throws a MAJOR wobbly and won't execute it, or any of the other command meta tags. And will still run the controls wrongly.

Just for reference, if anyone else has wondered why their code won't work in IE 9 but does in 8, the meta tag is <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8" />

it's amazing how many extra tags, conditional comments and js hacks have to be implemented just to accommodate Internet Explorer. And yes, many corporate networks still have 10 year old code that only runs in IE 6, that is the crux of their productivity suite. It's an utter shambles honestly. And MS is entirely to blame.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Link for the opt-out tool: http://linuxmint.com

FTFY

Re:For your own good

[viperidaenz]

Until there are smooth talking sales people selling other solutions, it will continue to be widely used.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Link for the opt-out tool: http://laughingsquid.com/r2-d2-garbage-can/

FTFY

Re:For your own good

[Spy Handler]

... [if IE] statements...

Re:For your own good

[cupantae]

Of course, by 2014 we'll all be using Linux.

But it'll only last for a year, by which time we will have adapted to naturally process pure, immaterial data, freed from the unavoidable constraints of software.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also very easy to opt out.

If it were easy to opt out, every update notification window would have a button marked "Never bother me about this again.".

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

Cry me a river. None of us can truthfully comprehend how much web development effort has been wasted keeping websites working for the diminishing number of users stuck with IE6! Fuck you and your "our valve software at 'the Plant' will break if we make any changes" horse shit. Fuck it good and hard.

Re:For your own good

[Kalriath]

2000 records in a list is fine... just don't connect that list to an Outlook calendar. (Shudder).

Re:For your own good

[Kalriath]

This sort of shit is why noone likes Linux zealots.

Re:For your own good

[bmuon]

For that reason it is much better to use a server sent header than the meta tag.

Re:For your own good

[Kalriath]

IE isn't integrated into the OS. Trident is, in the same way WebKit is embedded into Mac OS X, and KHTML is embedded into KDE. It really irks me when people talk about IE being embedded into the OS when IE is merely the chrome around Trident.

Re:For your own good

[shockbeton]

Cry me a river. Can any of us really imagine the wasted effort over the years of supporting the diminishing few still using IE6? To be kind, it adds 10% to the cost of developing a standards compliant website. Multiplied by the millions of websites... it boggles what's left of my mind to think of what good could have been accomplished with those man hours. So fuck you and your legacy intranet shit that controls the pressure valves in "The Plant". Fuck all of your kind, and, please, die in a pressure-related explosion and watch me as I weep... but not for you. I weep for those of us who've slaved away our youth to fix the bug that is IE6!

Re:For your own good

[makomk]

As far as I know, compatibility mode didn't used to support anything older than IE7. (Yes, there was enough stuff broken between IE7 and IE8 that they needed this feature.) Did they change that at some point?

Re:For your own good

[cshark]

I've been through it too. The truth of the matter is that it can be done, and it's not usually as difficult as the people involved want you to think it is. Truth of the matter is that people hate parting with software they're comfortable with, no matter how much better the newer software is. The trick to it, as with most things is building them a new piece of software that's pretty much exactly like the old one. Build it properly, but don't change the look of the ui, or the workflow, no matter how absolutely idiotic or inefficient the workflow is. As programmers, we have it in our nature to want to improve things. We do, we can't help it. It's hard wired into our DNA. But in a project where you're replacing an old system that everyone uses, that initial acceptance phase is critical. So at least for that first step, you're task is to recreate it. You can improve it gradually later, in small steps, over time. Honestly, it's not that difficult if all you're doing is getting rid of xml islands and assorted com objects. But it's like any software project. The success of it is determined at the planning stage. If there's no planning stage, all you're doing is throwing money out the window.

Re:For your own good

[atlasdropperofworlds]

>IE 9 throws a MAJOR wobbly and won't execute it, or any of the other command meta tags. And will still run the controls wrongly.

Shouldn't that be expected if the page is to be compatible with some other version of IE? I mean, if you specified some arbitrary number of meta tags, and THEN said, "Oh, by the way, use the compatibility view for IE7", wouldn't that just throw a wrench into things? It suggests that IE is actively parsing the page as it arrives well, probably for the sake of performance.

Re:For your own good

[fafaforza]

Firefox and Thunderbird both autoupdate default, unless you configure them not to ahead of time. You don't get asked. The next time you start either up, you get a nice "please wait" screen and you're upgraded.

Re:For your own good

[gstoddart]

Fuck all of your kind, and, please, die in a pressure-related explosion and watch me as I weep... but not for you. I weep for those of us who've slaved away our youth to fix the bug that is IE6!

Wow, and a go fuck yourself to you as well sir.

I hope some day you're forced to maintain the most miserable, old piece of software ever written and discover what it really means to be stuck with something like that.

Maybe you'll realize that it isn't always as simple you think. In the mean time, stop acting like such a punk.

Re:For your own good

[Billly Gates]

Why should Chinese pirates and corporate IT departments being overun by accountants looking only to boost the company's share price cause the rest of us to suffer and experience the real web only with our Iphones and Andriods? 10% of the lower denominator dictates the rest of the 90%, which in turn empowers the bean counters as they know they can demand IE 7 compatibility.

Look. It is not like IE 6 came out just last year or anything. Hell IE 8 is 2009. Infact it is early 2009 and was developed in 2008. It is 2011 so I think that is a great compromise.

IE 6 EOL was in 2008 and I believe the EOL for IE 7 was a year or too ago as well. CEOs and workers want and need IPAD access to their intranet apps and metro apps for Windows 8 and Windows 7 mobile. IE 6 is a thorn and wont ever go away unless something is done.

They had years and years and years. It is EOL and the rest of the world will be better off not just for HTML 5, but rather OEM computer makes can stop shipping drivers for XP. Windows 7 can not be adopted if these silly old requirements wont ever go away. This will mean cheaper computers for the rest of us.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

The IE8 blocker tool is here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=14149
There is also this important bit of TFA to consider:

Similarly, customers who have declined previous installations of IE8 or IE9 through Windows Update will not be automatically updated. Customers have the ability to uninstall updates and continue to receive support for the version of IE that came with their copy of Windows.

So if your XP is still running IE6 because of IE7's performance issues on old hardware, and you use some other browser anyway, you will be unaffected.

Re:For your own good

[thegarbz]

I think you fail to realise just how much money has been sunk into these decade old systems.

It's hard to justify spending potentially millions of dollars on an upgrade when:
1) The system works now just fine.
2) The upgrade does not necessarily add features or make it work any better.
3) The entire saga is classed as a discretionary spend.

As for the rest of your post:
- Designing a system based around a product of the biggest software company in the world who are leading the internet browsing industry in every factor is in no way a "stupid investment". Heck the fact these systems work now 10 years later is a testament to the good investment it is. Designing a system now with IE6 support would be a stupid investment.
- How is IE6 representative of the titanic? The systems work. They continue to work. IE6 continues to run. For the most part subsequent versions of IE even provide dedicated compatibility modes to help keep them running which works well in many cases.

I hate using IE6 at work as much as the next guy but don't come in all high and mighty and pretend you wouldn't have made the same decisions at the time given the information you had at hand. If you did, likely you wouldn't be working at the company anymore.

Re:For your own good

[Tubal-Cain]

You mean the decisions based on Microsoft's claims about how great IE6 was when it came out, so they locked critical business apps to it?

IE 7 was released 5 years ago. By that point, it should have been abundantly clear that the app's days were numbered. If nothing else, they should have at least started brainstorming the migration at that point.

Re:For your own good

[Billly Gates]

It is certainly most not fine or just works in 2011.

The first and foremost problem is that XP support is going to end. What are you going to do when the next Daqua worm shuts down your lan for a day? How much will that cost? $1,000,000 easily if you have more than 200 employers. Now compare it to the cost to upgrade that intranet app? Get the idea?

IE is the only corporate browser that is not on a 6 week upgrade cycle and it is problematic as suppliers and other companies the employer depends on no longer support IE 6. If you demand them to use IE 6 like Volkswagen does, they make likely not be able to as they will be rushing to Windows 7 before August 2013 when EOL for XP happens.

Infact, IE 6 & 7 already have EOL and are NOT PATCHED.

IT needs to grow a pair and better sell themselves to management. IE 6/XP is a liablity waiting to happen and it is therefor an investment to edge agaisnt rather than a usless expensive for the geeks in the basement.

Even those in the I.T. field do not know Chrome, Firefox, and IE do not run fully sandboxed under XP because the ancient kernel lacks DEP (not just for some services), ASLR, and exception handling api in VS 2010 that are all availabe with Windows Vista and up. Ask any large company that migrated to Windows 7 what the immediate benefits were. The first thing they will say is reduced TCO and downtime from viruses.

And if your company makes its new intranet IE 9 compatible it means it uses open standards. No matter have to use each version and rewrite etc. The app will work in IE 10, IE 11, and so on. Sell that too management as they do not want to go through this again nor stick with more outdated browsers. IE 9 is a great browser today but I sure as would not want to be using it in 2021 10 years from now. That would be crazy!

Re:For your own good

[TheRealGrogan]

Well, there are all kinds of things that I can do, but that wasn't really my intended point. Personally I don't even browse the web much in Windows... I use a 64 bit Nightly just for checking my forums etc. in between gaming. (and I use Windows 7... my XP example is because I am an on site computer service and I observe a lot of systems) Personally I also do not automatically update anything.

For the masses, this amounts to an Internet Explorer enema.

Re:For your own good

[ozmanjusri]

2000 records in a list is fine.

You'd think it'd be fine, but if you run a filter over slow link, it'll silently time out and only show you the results from the first 2000 records.

The day I discovered this "feature" was not a pleasant day...

Re:For your own good

[MojoRilla]

No.

XMLHttpRequest Level 2, which supports CORS is the proposed W3C standard. See this. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari implement this spec.

Microsoft's XDomainRequest is Microsoft's non-standard proprietary implementation, though they have attempted to get it ALSO added to the W3C. See this for a response to Microsoft, and why XDomainRequest is a bad idea.

Also see the XMLHttpRequest Wikipedia page as well as the cross origin resource sharing page. Microsoft's proprietary XDomainRequest partially implements the CORS spec, but they don't implement the XMLHttpRequest Level 2 spec at all.

Quoting a Microsoft documentation page isn't any way to prove a point. Nothing in the referenced page says other browsers are non-standard. I can't decide if you are Astroturfing, ignorant, or just can't Google.

Re:For your own good

[Yakasha]

IE 9 is better than previous IE versions, but not "quite good", and it is still at the bottom of the pile and requires numerous customizations away from standards. Just a couple items (though I don't recall which are for IE 9 specifically):

Adding indexOf() to Array

different call for creating an Event object

different call for adding an option to a <SELECT>

different calls for Events

different call for hiding / showing some elements

css display still, STILL, can't do positioning correctly

1 thing that i know still affects IE 9: CSS margins / borders. CSS 2 was published in 1998. That is now 13 years of fail.

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to call it "incompatibility mode"

Re:For your own good

[Ja'Achan]

This sort of shit is why noone likes zealots.

FTFY

Re:For your own good

[Anonymous Coward]

this seems like a good place to remind people that one day back in 2001 Microsoft decided to quietly break the internet with an IE update. http://web.archive.org/web/20071016233843/http://www.meer.net/jg/broken-plugins.html

Re:For your own good

[neokushan]

One word: Security.

Yes, while no browser is perfect and some IE alternatives are certainly not "hack proof", the number of issues IE6 has is staggaring. All of the above points are completely moot, it just takes one piece of malware and you could potentially be looking at hundreds of compromised machines, having to rebuild every single one of them, having sensitive data stolen, deleted or both. How much will that cost, compared to upgrading the software?

This year has proven that Security is clearly an afterthought for most companies and there's been enough high-profile attacks that nobody has any excuse for not taking security seriously. Just because it costs money and doesn't get any obvious, visible benefit (In that you could have spent $0 on security last year and had no issues, then $1,000,000 this year and had no issues) doesn't mean it should be cast aside for more important things, like executive bonuses.

Re:For your own good

[Lonewolf666]

You mean the decisions based on Microsoft's claims about how great IE6 was when it came out, so they locked critical business apps to it?

Exactly. Don't trust the salesman, his job is done once you buy.

A recommendation from an IT guy who has to support the thing once it is rolled out might be a bit more reliable ;-)

Re:For your own good

[Lonewolf666]

Just out of curiosity - what made "Delphi to Visual Basic" attractive (I think I can guess the motivation for the other three steps) ?

Re:For your own good

[thegarbz]

Many of the security issues that plague IE6 can actually be disabled through group policy. Most of the attack vectors were through execution of temporary files, Active X and security elevation.

The fact is there are a SHITLOAD of IE6 machines in corporate America. Or in corporate multinationals for that matter. Yet I can count on 1 hand the number of times we had malware compromise multiple of our corporate machines (20000 seats globally) in the last 3 years. One. It was stuxnet, and it hit a few sites in America, two sites in Australia and one in NZ. And it didn't come in via IE6.

Just because a piece of software is unpatched doesn't mean you can't protect yourself against malware. A lot of malware uses exploits like this to get on your machine rather than to deliver a damaging payload. At which point it can usually be detected with an antivirus package.

Re:For your own good

[mgblst]

Yes, but it will have to be done sometime, you guys are just putting it off and making it harder. As less and less people who know what the hell is going on leave the company, you are going to be more screwed.

This stuff should have been documented, of course, but putting it off is just plain stupid.

Re:For your own good

[silanea]

[...] Most of the attack vectors were through execution of temporary files, Active X and security elevation. [....]

Which, in my experience, is exactly what ties those applications to IE 6 in the first place, so locking it down can only go so far and help so much.

[...] Just because a piece of software is unpatched doesn't mean you can't protect yourself against malware. [...]

Sure. But every layer of protection you build around such vulnerable software breaks something else. One of my previous employers decided to "mitigate" risks by disabling any kind of plugin and disabling any active content, including JS, in IE 6. Which rendered the websites of most of our business partners, suppliers and utilities all the way down to Google Maps unusable and prevented people from getting work done. The result? Everyone and their dog put Portable Firefox on their workstation, completely unsupervised, often unpatched and in insecure configurations.

Of course, you can get it right, given enough budget, time and the right people. But often it will not come all that much cheaper than getting rid of the problematic applications.

Re:For your own good

[mgblst]

Which will introduce its own new bugs. Still not to be trusted.

Re:For your own good

[marcosdumay]

You don't have to maintain it, does you? When the instalation of Sharepoint you use loses a disk, you'll see one of the problems with it.

It is nearly impossible to take data out of Sharepoint. That is great for Microsoft, because it ensures lock-in, but is not that good for making backups... (Oh yeah, there is a procedure for backup, supported by Microsoft. Seems to work as well as Exchange backups, that is, almost always fails. Also, it is incredibly complex, so hire an expert.)

Re:For your own good

[V for Vendetta]

The problem isn't IE6. The problem is that MS in all its wisdom decided that IE7 is for XP and better only. If you are/were still using W2K at the time, no matter how much you would have liked to get rid off IE6, you were forced to use it until you upgrade your OS. Stupid decision by MS.

Re:For your own good

[Lokitoth]

As far as I can tell, all that needs to be done is to implement a system-wide Windows Media Foundation component to render Theora, and IE will pick it up if it sees a Theora video.The MSDN docs there are really bad, though; they will tell you how to build out the component itself, but nothing about how to get the system to pick it up. However, what I guess you can do is run regmon while installing the WebM MF components (which is all the installer does) and see how it publishes its MediaSource implementation out. Given that there are macros to create media type guids for arbitrary FOURCCs, it should not be impossible to register arbitrary filters to be used by this.

Re:For your own good

[theweatherelectric]

As far as I can tell, all that needs to be done is to implement a system-wide Windows Media Foundation component to render Theora, and IE will pick it up if it sees a Theora video.

For HTML5 video IE9 only allows H.264 and WebM regardless of whatever other codecs are installed. Originally it was H.264 only. Then, after Google's announcement and release of WebM, it became H.264 and WebM. Microsoft cites security, consistency and legal concerns as their primary reasons for restricting the number of codecs available for HTML5 video. Here are some posts from the IE blog which chart the changes:

H.264 announced as the only supported HTML5 video codec: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx
Explanation of exclusion of other codecs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx
WebM support announced: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx
Video format support demo published, only interesting as a convenient test page for WebM in IE: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/16/html5-video-update-webm-for-ie9.aspx

It's a shame that Microsoft hasn't joined the WebM CCL yet. Dean Hachamovitch (corporate vice president for IE) called for the creation of such a body, it was created, and Microsoft still haven't joined for some reason. As far as I know they haven't yet said why they won't join.

Re:For your own good

[toddestan]

The problem is that you often don't have specifications or documentations on what the old application is supposed to do exactly and why. Or perhaps you have the original documents from 10 years ago but clearly the application doesn't follow those anymore and the changes have not been documented well. Sure, you can just go through it line-by-line and duplicate it, but then you're just duplicating the old problems in the new application which kind of defeats the purpose of the rewrite in the first place.

Re:For your own good

[Kalriath]

Touché.

Re:For your own good

[Coren22]

Since when? It most assuredly does not REQUIRE human intervention unless there is an update that requires you to agree to terms. Since MS is quietly forcing this update, I doubt it requires any user intervention, therefore could go through depending on the auto approval settings in WSUS.

start with Australia and Brazil

[epedersen]

Do they start with Australia and Brazil because they do not care about the users there?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia.... starts with an A
Brazil... starts with a B

probably just going down an alphabetical list of major countries.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Toe, The]

No, they decided to do it alphabetically. So they spent $13 million conducting market research in which they asked focus groups to name a country that starts with A and another that starts with B. After spending another $4 million running statistical analysis on the results (plus an additional $87 million trying to keep the analysis computers running, since after all they were Windows machines), they came to the conclusion that the ideal A country is Australia and the ideal B country is Brazil. Shortly they will be running a $150 million ad campaign depicting Kermit the Frog and Al Gore traveling from Australia to Brazil.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit! We're next!

-Canadian AC

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[gman003]

Brazil I imagine has rather high infection rates, due to the high piracy rates (I'm pretty sure Windows_XP_NoWGA_+_Keygen.torrent doesn't have all the patches slipstreamed in).

Australia is probably just because if the inhabitants can handle thousands of incredibly toxic spiders, scorpions, snakes, fish, and even exploding trees, they can probably handle a browser that's slightly more broken than normal.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[ColdWetDog]

Not to mention driving on the wrong side of the road.

And Vegemite.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[ackthpt]

Shit! We're next!

-Canadian AC

Ha! USA! USA! USA!

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, Not so Anonymous now are you?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Sun]

So why is a raven like a writing desk?

Shachar
Who waits to see if the moderators get the joke....

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Little known fact: Originally they were going to use Austria as the "A" country, but they were afraid Arnold Schwarzenegger might get pissed, and come beat them up.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[GameboyRMH]

What happened to Bahrain, Barbados, Belarus...?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[amicusNYCL]

Australia and Brazil both have IE6 usage rates below 2%, and they probably both have a relatively small percentage of global internet users. In other words, it's a small but diverse test case. The US has an IE6 usage rate of only 1%, but we have a larger share of global internet users.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[ackthpt]

Brazil I imagine has rather high infection rates, due to the high piracy rates (I'm pretty sure Windows_XP_NoWGA_+_Keygen.torrent doesn't have all the patches slipstreamed in).

Australia is probably just because if the inhabitants can handle thousands of incredibly toxic spiders, scorpions, snakes, fish, and even exploding trees, they can probably handle a browser that's slightly more broken than normal.

"Crikey! This is a really dangerous virus on our computer! I'm going to try to take it by the tail and drag it out of the drive so you can see it. That's quite a magnificient beast, isn't it? Look how it hooks in between layers and takes advantage of vulnerabilities. OK, letting it go again. Watch yer selves!"

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, fuck you buddy! I take PRIDE in my pirated OS torrents...

- totallynotskeevydude@microsoft.ru

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[AliasMarlowe]

Shit! We're next!

-Canadian AC

Ha! USA! USA! USA!

Time for Luddites to move to Zimbabwe?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[jd]

Those users matter less/more (delete according to who has the money)?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[jellomizer]

If that was the Case what about...
Afghanistan,
Albania,
Algeria,
Andorra,
Angola,
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina and
Armenia
Then after Australia we have...
Austria,
Azerbaijan,
Bahamas,
Bahrain,
Bangladesh,
Barbados,
Belarus,
Belgium,
Belize,
Benin,
Bhutan,
Bolivia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Botswana.

I think it is about greatest area with lower population.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[jd]

In Russia, they put worms in vodka to see if it's toxic. In Australia, if you're still breathing you already know what's toxic so why bother testing?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[rossdee]

Argentina comes before Australia alphabetically. Its got more population too.

Anyway, what if you don't have Windows Update set to automatic mode?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[unixisc]

Shit! We're next! -Canadian AC

You can claim China is major, Canada is minor and let them represent 'C'

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[MonsterTrimble]

All they had to do was hire Chuck Norris. Problem Solved.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[viperidaenz]

Probably. I think thats why Facebook decided to use New Zealand as its beta test for time line

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[thetoadwarrior]

What about Austria and Belgium?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[ifiwereasculptor]

Also, in Brazil, IE's market share is now about 30% from 50% in September. XP is still huge here, IE8 is still crap and Google is running TV ads for Chrome, so it went from 29% to 44%. Might this have something to do with it?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, there's more Microsoft customers in Canada than in China.
Sure, there is more Windows users in China. But how many of them paid for their copy?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[EnsilZah]

I suppose you'd be surprised to learn then that there are regular releases with all patches slipstreamed in.
For example:
http://www.rlslog.net/microsoft-windows-7-enterprise-x86-sp1-integrated-december-2011-bie/

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Kaenneth]

I'm wondering if there was a specific agreement with the national governments to preempt lawsuits, or at just a careful study of those countries laws to ensure it's (legally) safe.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Culture20]

In Russia, they put worms in vodka to see if it's toxic

... enough to drink yet.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[cyberfunkr]

Time for some schooling from the Animaniacs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1qkLn6IRI

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[cvtan]

Not USA. America! Crap!

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[westlake]

Do they start with Australia and Brazil because they do not care about the users there?

Looking at Statcounter, I noticed two things about Australia and Brazil:

IE 8 is the dominant browser in both countries (30% each) and IE 6 doesn't even make the top 12 in either country. The last of the hold-outs running IE 6 should not be a problem.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Zebai]

Maybe, but you can be certain autoupdate is not turned on by default either. Which case this update will not hit any of those.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Whiteox]

Yeah but it's not alphabetical.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Whiteox]

No. Australia was chosen as its use of IE6 is 1.8%, which is pretty high.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[unixisc]

Doesn't work if you've pirated it

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[jrumney]

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Argentina, ... Austria, Azerbaijan, ...

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Kjella]

Sure, the moment you install it from the disc. Doesn't mean Windows Update will work and there's no easy way to insert a more recent slipstream image and say "upgrade my current installation to this version" that I know of, or maybe I just didn't look hard enough. I assume Microsoft has some way to update machines on networks too secure to connect to the Internet. [Insert obvious pun that then they shouldn't be using Windows anyway]. My current install is legit anyway, but when testing things in VMs the activation and keys thing is a hassle.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Phoghat]

Time for Luddites to move to Zimbabwe?

If you don't like IE, you're a "Luddite"? How very droll.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[tehcyder]

Time for Luddites to move to Zimbabwe?

If you don't like IE, you're a "Luddite"? How very droll.

No, if you insist on using an unpatched, deprecated piece of software you're a luddite.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[tehcyder]

Australians drive on the side of the road tha jousting knights used (hedge to your left, weapon arm free to spear your opponent) and vegemite is both the nectar and ambrosia of the gods combined.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[mgblst]

The most dangerous thing in Australia is the jellyfish. Cute, cuddly jelly fish.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[bigrockpeltr]

they are making sure it works before they trouble the Bajans :P PS. same gameboy from Zhaust?

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[GameboyRMH]

Yep that's me. I can tell you're a Bajan from the username, haha.

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia and Brazil both have IE6 usage rates below 2%, and they probably both have a relatively small percentage of global internet users. In other words, it's a small but diverse test case. The US has an IE6 usage rate of only 1%, but we have a larger share of global internet users.

That is a ridiculous statement. Like you I have no data to back me up, but base my opinion on my experiences on the web.

Go outside the native American-English language part of the web and you will find almost nil US-Americans. Even native Spanish speakers in USA do not leave the security of made-for-US websites.

Australians you find everywhere on the web. There are a lot of native speakers of other languages (lots and lots of people with recent Asian, Scandinavian, Eastern European et c. origin) then English in Australia; they, unlike US citizens that speak other languages then English, often visit foreign web sites that use their native language. Unlike English speakers in USA, Australians visits web pages in Britain or from other English speaking countries. I doubt most US-Americans even visit (1)BBC News or (2)The Globe and Mail, despite their cultural(1) and geographical(2) closeness.

Brazilian people visit all of the Portuguese language web, without care for country of origin. There are also a lot of native German, Chinese, Vietnamese and Scandinavian speakers in Brazil. They visit the parts of the web that use their native language(s). They are often very interested in what is happening in the countries from which their forefathers immigrated. I.e. if you get some comments written in early 20th century Swedish on a Swedish web site, you can be 50% sure the commenter is from Brazil (and there are no more fierce defenders of the Swedish Royal family then Brazilians, because the Swedish Queen is German-Brazilian (almost half the Swedish population (and it is the official policy of all the political parties represented in the parliament, except for the neo-nazi party) want Sweden to become a republic; the debate have been going on for a century).

Re:start with Australia and Brazil

[darkgrayknight]

Somethings shouldn't be combined, like nectar and ambrosia.

finally!

[sneakyimp]

I can't believe it's taken this long.

Re:finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really expect it to change anything?

We will start in January for customers ... who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update.

Customers who have declined previous installations of IE8 or IE9 through Windows Update will not be automatically updated.

People on Automatic Updates who aren't already running IE9 have previously declined it, so they're not getting the IE9 update now either.

IE6 is Finally Gonna Die!

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody tell netcraft!

Re:IE6 is Finally Gonna Die!

[A12m0v]

You don't tell netcraft, netcraft tells you.

I like there strategy, I like it a lot...

[thestudio_bob]

They will start with Australia and Brazil in January, then go world-wide after they have assured there are no issues.

Haha, I guess a big thanks goes out to Australia and Brazil for being the beta testers. Thanks!

Re:I like there strategy, I like it a lot...

[xs650]

They will start with Australia and Brazil in January, then go world-wide after they have assured there are no issues.

Haha, I guess a big thanks goes out to Australia and Brazil for being the beta testers. Thanks!

Australia is the alpha tester, Brazil the beta tester.

Re:I like there strategy, I like it a lot...

[jd]

I think Microsoft might want to reconsider the order. Having a country filled with the deadliest snakes and spiders in the world be the alpha testers is NOT a smart move. Worse, Paul Hogan and Rolf Harris might release a celebrity protest song.

Re:I like there strategy, I like it a lot...

[Em Adespoton]

That's a relief... they'll be wanting a gamma tester next, not a kappa tester.

Re:I like there strategy, I like it a lot...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously Australian users will be alpha testers.

Re:I like there strategy, I like it a lot...

[antdude]

I like your typo (there). :P

Re:I like there strategy, I like it a lot...

[hedwards]

So in Fx parlance, that's what like version 11 and 12 respectively?

Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[JazzyJ]

I think Microsoft is going to find plenty of issues trying to roll this out in the US.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly?

Fuck 'em. They deserve the headache.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

It's coming in through Windows Update. If you have intranet apps with specific requirements and don't carefully manage Windows Update, you'd have gotten fucked long ago.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[halivar]

Microsoft won't be the ones getting the angry customer phone calls. The devs of broken, backwards web apps will.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[FoolishOwl]

I think that a lot of organizations are going to have to eventually upgrade their obsolete software.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS! Its either they have a mild headache and upgrade their apps now, or they can get hacked (or have been getting hacked). And besides, web developers like me have been dealing with their bullshit for so long. Its time for 6 to go, no questions asked.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the people using IE6 are going to have the issues. Microsoft mostly has control of the PC market, at this point they can essentially do whatever they want (i.e. making Windows 8 "label" devices incapable of booting any other operating system).

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understand, some SAP products are locked into IE6 (so I have read.) It's ridiculuous that that's the case, but it is what it is.

Although I wish the world would automatically update, I also believe that consumers should have the write to maintain which ever version of software. At a minimum, they should be able to keep what they originally purchased because, after all, that is what they originally purchased.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[ColdWetDog]

Microsoft won't be the ones getting the angry customer phone calls. The devs of broken, backwards web apps will.

Now, is that a feature, or a bug?

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[bobcat7677]

Yes, but really it's time this happened. Microsoft finally has a half way decent browser, it's been 18 months since IE6 and 7 were end of life'd, there is no reason for people to still be running on IE6/7 other then organizations being too stubborn or bureaucratic to make their stuff work on the new. The last project I was on we as a team of 8 devs + project manager and two testers spent weeks making the app backward compatible with IE6 just because there was other stuff that they refused to fix that only worked on IE6 so parts of the company was stuck on IE6. Obviously updates can be controlled, but hopefully this will start breaking up the log jam of dependencies on broken old version of IE...

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Dwedit]

Then install MultipleIEs, and you can have your IE6 still exist somewhere, while the main IE on the machine is 8 or 9.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[amicusNYCL]

I don't think Microsoft is going to find any issues rolling this out in the US. Dinosaur IT departments, on the other hand, may see an issue or two.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[GameboyRMH]

From what I understand, some SAP products are locked into IE6 (so I have read.) It's ridiculuous that that's the case, but it is what it is.

Yep we have to keep IE6 on accountants' computers just for ACCPAC. That said we install Firefox on those and set it as the default browser.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[operagost]

Competent orgs are using WSUS to manage updates, anyway. They can still decline it.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Billly Gates]

Then you say sure I will fix. ... For $100,000 :-)

See everyone wins but the beancounters.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Billly Gates]

Windows 7 can boot fine from uefi. The first Uefi boards are out and boot windows in half tje time. You can also turn efi off and use bios for linux too. No biggie. Efi does not have 30 years of bugs for ancient windows worjarounds either.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS, a 1000 times THIS.

The same goes for all the webmasters that have some OCD to "support every deprecated browser in existance".

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[cyber-vandal]

You're right! What we need in the middle of a huge financial crisis is to spend lots of time and money on rewriting software which will work in pretty much the same way and for an added benefit introducing plenty of brand new bugs. There's a reason why there are still 40 year old mainframe systems running - because they work.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure if dependency on IE 6.0 is the fault of the IT department.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on.

I used to work for a company (not in the IT department) that turned cartwheels and wasted god-knows-how-many hours trying to get things to work with IE6, but whenever the subject of using a more modern browser came up, would cry like babies about how difficult it would be to essentially tweak a few lines of HTML to get it to work in any up to date version from any vendor. I even opened up a few pages in notepad myself and modified the code to show them how simple it would be. And they still said it was "too big a job" and they "didn't have the resources".

As far as I know they're still using it.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

No, its a jobs stimulus program.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[EdIII]

We don't even bother supporting IE6 for developed web sites.

However, I also have to support IE6 on some servers *only* because some vendors (lock-in) have web portals that only run on it.

Totally ridiculous, but going away far too slowly. If MS makes the whole world go "cold turkey" on this, without consent, without knowledge, all that will happen is that a bunch of IT departments will get cracked pirated versions of the OS instantly to get IE6 back and working again.

Even worse, it will result in many systems not getting updates since they are now pirated.

MS started this whole situation with a horrible, abhorrent, and inexcusable piece of shit, that is IE6. Most of the companies that are still forced to use it do so out of budget constraints.

There is going to be a number of businesses, a lot of them small businesses, that will be unable to adapt. That is hardly fair in these economic times.

I want IE6 to die just as much as anybody. Just not at the expense of businesses that will sincerely struggle to adapt, if they can adapt at all.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Alarash]

IE6 is no longer supported (for several months now), it's not like Microsoft is pushing this without forewarning. Also the cost of potential data leaks due to unpatched/unsupported/unsafe browsers totally shadows the cost of upgrading a shitty intranet website. So if people have "budget constraints" about this, they don't understand the concept of security and how it can hurt their business.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally agree. If they want to keep driving Model T's they have to understand that most things in the modern world won't work for them.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[EdIII]

Also the cost of potential data leaks due to unpatched/unsupported/unsafe browsers totally shadows the cost of upgrading a shitty intranet website.

That's completely irrelevant if the company is floundering and the costs are so high, that they might as well be infinite.

So if people have "budget constraints" about this, they don't understand the concept of security and how it can hurt their business.

No.. It's worse than that. Most of them do, they just keep deciding to *not* fire Bob so that his salary can pay for the team of developers to spend weeks upgrading them to the latest and greatest MS technologies.

So far you have spoken about internal websites. What about external websites?

Vendor-lock-in is not pretty. When you have one or more 3rd party companies providing a service that you cannot operate without, you have no choice but to use IE6. It is simplistic to take a hard line approach and just get rid of them, if that is even possible.

Which is why, there are some Windows Server 2003 installations that actually have IE6 running on them specifically so remote desktop sessions can access these 3rd party vendors.

When there is no money for additional development, and the money to retrain staff and purchase different platforms do not exist, and 3rd party vendors to replace those still stuck on IE6, you have real problems.

As far as forewarning, the writing has been on the wall for YEARS. Like I said, no money is the bigger issue. Considering how hard the economies of the world right now are being hit, performing actions that can push small businesses under will only add to our problems.

If MS really wanted to solve the problem they could identify those businesses in trouble, and offer help in transitioning the platforms. In truth, switching all those older platforms out with professional help from MS might cost them 20-30 million dollars, or more. The PR would be invaluable, and quite frankly, MS should try giving something back when they have already taken so much. You might be thinking why should MS shoulder any responsibility? They wrote they farking thing in the first place, and unlike struggling small business, MS has the money and ability to do it.

But your right. Let's just switch it off and those who can survive, will survive. If Bob loses his job because the company cannot adapt, that's life and Bob should have had a plan. Meanwhile, his wife Lucine, with breast cancer, can just figure out how to pay for their medications and treatment without medical benefits paid for by the company.

Fuck em.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

they should be able to keep what they originally purchased

Didn't they purchase automatic updates as well?

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[sdnoob]

I think Microsoft is going to find plenty of issues trying to roll this out in the US.

those companies that absolutely must remain on ie6 have likely already taken steps to keep ie7 and ie8 off their workstations. instructions and tools have been out for years to do just that.

but just as there are some companies that may not like this move by microsoft.. web developers the world over (except on the pirate ship 'china') will rejoice as they can now, once and for all, tell ie6 users to sod off. and as a special bonus, they don't have to screw around with ie7 either.

Re:Lots of intranet apps still stuck on IE6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not UEFI that is the problem. Both Windows 7 and Linux can boot just fine from UEFI. The problem is the new "secure boot" crap they are pushing.

A web developer says thank you!

[mrtwice99]

I know there might be negative ramifications, but I'm glad to see this day arrive. The sooner old IEs die, the better.

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree more.

Though since it's going out through Windows Update, those individual users with updates turned off won't get it and I won't be surprised if all the businesses still keeping machines on IE6 for shitty old reasons will just leave it unapproved in WSUS. :(

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there might be negative ramifications, but I'm glad to see this day arrive. The sooner all IEs die, the better.

FTFY.

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[rannmann]

I thought that at first too, but then I remembered this article: http://paulirish.com/2011/browser-market-pollution-iex-is-the-new-ie6/

Even with forced updates, the way IE is designed will not make things easier.

Products like Windows and Office have a lifecycle policy that typically runs 10+ years because that’s what these organizations need. As part of Windows, IE honors that 10+ year commitment.
~Dean Hachamovitch, IE Corporate VP

Basically, this means not only will you be supporting not only Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE, but the previous 9 versions of IE as well, all of which attempt backwards-compatibility and fail. Quoting the article I posted above:

The problem percolates when you come to terms with the fact that many of these modes are not the same as the original browser. For example:
IE8's IE7 mode: adds sessionStorage & localStorage, false positives on a feature test for the hashchange event, mishandles rowspan, and some other event and attribute differences.
IE9's IE8 mode: intermittently false positives on a feature test for inline SVG. Renders CSS differently than true IE8, and is crashier than the real one.

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[davesque]

Absolutely! I practically high-fived the random strangers sitting next to me here in my university center. This is good news, no matter how you cut it. Perhaps some lazy corporations will whine as they actually have to invest money to update their infrastructure. But, overall, this will save billions of dollars in lost productivity for developers who have to agonize over backwards compatibility with archaic browsers. Microsoft, THANK YOU!!!

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[cyber-vandal]

If lazy geeks could be bothered to write the cost benefit analysis required to get rid of IE6/7 it would have been long gone. However shrieking about it on a web forum and ignoring the perfectly valid business case of 'it does what we want it to' accomplishes precisely zero.

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[KiltedKnight]

I know there might be negative ramifications, but I'm glad to see this day arrive. The sooner IE dies, the better.

There. Fixed it for you. :)

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are you kidding? IE is still the biggest hassle of any developer, you have to make custom hacks constantly to specifically cater to IE because they don't support standards. We're better off without IE completely.

Re:A web developer says thank you!

[Hyperhaplo]

The sooner IE dies, the better.

FTFY

I agree entirely.

Good.

[wolrahnaes]

Fuck IE6. Fuck it hard. Companies that have been dragging their feet on this for years need a hard kick in the ass, and this is how to do it.

If something breaks because of this, you only have yourself to blame. Anyone still running this shit intentionally knew they were on a path to pain.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree more. I'm just confused as to why this ended up as "+5 Funny". Unless it refers to the fact that everyone is laughing their arses off at the plight of the web devs whose "solution" to "this doesn't work in anything later than IE6" was "well, just stick with IE6, then".

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck IE6. Fuck it hard.

For its security problems, and poor standards compliance, certainly. But I wonder whether its lack of implementation of some of the uglier misfeatures of more recent versions of HTML may have been the only thing stopping websites from implementing them.

Re:Good.

[dillee1]

It not just crappy intranet application that are stuck with IE6 which can be easily replaced. Lots of hardware infrastructure are relying on IE6, e.g. lift, surveillance camera, building management systems are all stuck with IE6 for remote management.
Do you expect a large commercial building to replace 1000s perfectly good surveillance camera simply because MS thinks IE6 sucks? Not to mention having to replace all dozens of servers for controlling the cameras? And now we start talking about replacing the lifts....

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck IE6. Fuck it hard. Companies that have been dragging their feet on this for years need a hard kick in the ass, and this is how to do it.

If something breaks because of this, you only have yourself to blame. Anyone still running this shit intentionally knew they were on a path to pain.

Our main customer still uses a web page for its EDI that does not work with IE7+ or Firefox... so guess this forces us to maintain a completely unpatched VM just for the sole purpose of communicating with this customer. Thanks MS, great thinking.

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies?

How is this going to affect companies? They probably have a group policy that disables automatic updates from Microsoft servers...

Re:Good.

[Methuseus]

Yes, I do. My organization spent hundreds of thousands doing just this to get standardized cameras that worked with known APIs so they would work with multiple software vendors. Unless the corp literally can't afford around $500 or so for each camera, they really should anyway.

Re:Good.

[wolrahnaes]

It's not just MS that thinks IE6 sucks, by any objective measure IE6 sucks. Unless your only criteria is "do my shitty old apps written by absolute fucking idiots run on it", IE6 sucks.

If someone had critical infrastructure that depended on GOPHER or WAIS would you be complaining about support for those being dropped? Technology is a moving target, things become obsolete, and when you do it wrong (as anyone who wrote an IE6-only app unarguably did) that happens sooner rather than later.

Too bad, learn a lesson for next time that depending on broken implementations of things is a bad idea no matter what, because it will be fixed and you will be fucked.

And why are those systems unpatched ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they are not running Windows updates. at all. And therefore this is not going to have an effect.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[MightyYar]

Or it's my wife's computer and she just keeps dismissing ANY message that comes up without reading it.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we keep telling people never to click YES, so now they click NO/CANCEL/BUGGEROFF

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[ewhac]

...Or it's me, who long ago told WinUpdate to never attempt to "upgrade" IE, for the simple fact that I was never ever going to use IE (except to download FIrefox).

Every time Micros~1 updates IE, they fsck around with the defaults -- incorrectly, of course -- and I have to dive through half a dozen panes of preferences settings to bludgeon the thing back into submission. So, no, Micros~1, leave the damned thing alone.

(I also long ago uninstalled MSIE which, for some inane reason, is distinct from IE.)

Schwab

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[X0563511]

Oh god that was so hard. Upgrade already. XP is old-n-busted. Windows isn't my favorite, but 7 gets a lot of things right.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[marcosdumay]

It's an improvement.

When the software grows up and stops crying for attention all the time, we can start asking users to pay attention.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[X0563511]

Oh damn, that even works on XP. Guess you have no reason to bitch then!

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I will admit that calling them "Micros~1" is slightly less lame than calling them "Micro$soft", it's still childish and really sticks out in your post, causing most of us to dismiss you as a brash buffoon who is just too stubborn and stupid (not "and/or stupid") to perform basic computer maintenance from time to time, yet feels the need to complain about it loudly on the internet.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[Anonymous Coward]

most of us

Speak for yourself.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[MightyYar]

In general I agree with your post, but I do think they deserve all the ribbing they get over their 8-letter-filename patent.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[ttong]

It's what micros~1 has repeatedly called themselves. In fact, one day after another crash and subsequent disk trashing by "scandisk" they called themselves micros~1, micros~2, micros~3, micros~4, micros~5 and micros~6! They all sat in a folder called progra~1.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[rssrss]

You gonna pay for new hardware for us?

Figured.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[X0563511]

Finish reading my post please. You didn't even look at the link did you? Note what operating system it applies to.

Unless you're telling me you're stuck on IE5 of all things, back on the win9x series...

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, wife dismisses YOU!

(well, actually around here in Sweden as well)

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, I don't patch IE because I never use it, and I can't uninstall it. That doesn't mean I want to be forced to auto-patch IE.

I don't think that IE can be compared to Firefox of Chrome in this case, since it comes preinstalled on all windows machines.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[cyber-vandal]

If you give me the money I will. Otherwise fuck off telling me what to spend my money on. Perhaps if it didn't cost a ridiculous 100 pounds for just the upgrade then perhaps more people would be upgrading.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[MightyYar]

In America, Swedish women dismiss men with golf clubs.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't change the fact that on windows, the "internet options" directly affect settings for explorer.

I'll even provide a nice example i just had to deal with myself.

Go to
Control Panel > Internet Options > Security (tab)

Highlight the INTERNET zone, and click the "Custom Level" button.

Scroll down to the MISCELLANEOUS section

Find the option labeled "Launching applications and unsafe files"
Change this option to "Disable"

Now, open up firefox,chrome,opera,other and go download an EXE of your choice (something you already trust to be safe and work)

Open your downloads folder, and attempt to run said exe.

Result: You are blocked from running the program.

Conclusion: IE may be able to be hidden, but it's still going to get in the way.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[X0563511]

That's not a function of IE. It just happens to have a very stupid place to hold the setting.

Re:And why are those systems unpatched ?

[AmiMoJo]

So you didn't read TFA? The updates will be in the browser, not windows update. That is the whole point.

Red Headed Step Child...

[TommyGunnRX]

Well, I guess we know what Microsoft thinks of Australia and Brazil...

I don't use windows in my personal life anymore, but I really wish they'd release patches on a nightly basis like Ubuntu or Red Hat instead of waiting to make sure systems are compromised.

Re:Red Headed Step Child...

[Merk42]

They do release patches, the problem is people keep telling Windows not to update it!

Re:Red Headed Step Child...

[AdrianKemp]

No actually nightly patch cycles is the worst possible way to go for actual end user security.

My windows machine is completely up to date, because the one time every week or two it asks me I let it install and reboot.

Same story for my OS X boxes, all up to date.

My several different ubuntu boxes aren't up to date, not a damn one of them because five minutes after I update it wants to do it again. Fuck that.

Re:Red Headed Step Child...

[captaindynamo]

Windows and OS X are only updating the OS. Ubuntu, like any Debian based install, is upgrading everything you downloaded through the repository. You don't have to update every five minutes. The vast majority of the updates aren't major security concerns. What you see as "constantly needing fixed", is actually instant availability of improvements. Why be forced to wait a week for something thats been fixed minutes after the last update cycle?

Re:Red Headed Step Child...

[Anonymous Coward]

Might I suggest changing the update period in your settings, then?

Re:Red Headed Step Child...

[AdrianKemp]

You say this as though I don't know that.

Of course that's what's happening in Ubuntu, it doesn't change the fact that it want's to update all. the. fucking. time. and doesn't make and serious effort (at least by default) to let the user know that.

If Microsoft started pulling that shit you'd end up with even more horribly out of date windows boxes, not less.

Re:Red Headed Step Child...

[TommyGunnRX]

Do you really have an Ubuntu install? Because I know the two I have don't update automatically by default. The update manager pops up once a day with a list of packages I can choose to install but I've never seen them update automatically... unlike a few windows servers I've had under my control that (BY DEFAULT) have updated and rebooted.

Now I'm pretty new to OSX... been using it at work for about 4 months and in that time I've had 4 or 5 updates. Only one was a security update (the bogus certifcate blunder) and the rest have been iTunes or other app updates. So is Mac OSx updating under the covers?

Re:Red Headed Step Child...

[TommyGunnRX]

Re-read this - and it makes no sense! Just because you don't want to apply the latest patches to your system doesn't make the OS the problem. If you choose to ignore a security patch then you've compromised the system.

You're saying you'd rather ubuntu aggregate the security patches and release them at a later date than make the available as soon as possible?

We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[sandytaru]

We tried. We really did. Then our users started to complain that their browsing history was gone. Apparently, some of them had never heard of this strange thing called "bookmarks."

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Laxori666]

I'm on Chrome. I don't use bookmarks anymore. Just: "r", "g", "d", "s", "st", "sl".

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[gman003]

Neither has IE - they call them "Favorites" over there.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox user here. I do the same, locally rather than through Google instant, so my browsing habits are less exposed to the data miners at our favorite advertising agency.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[GameboyRMH]

I do the same thing in Firefox. Bookmarks are for sites you rarely use.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Anonymous Coward]

When I tried "g" all I saw was a fleshy tunnel. Dude, why are you going there?

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[miffo.swe]

I do the same, and thanks to the actually working synking feature between all my computers its the same everywhere i sit. If i cant install Chrome on a computer its useless to me for browsing nowadays.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[cyborg_monkey]

You cannot do that with Firefox. You can press "r ". Google and Opera are great in this regard, Firefox not so much.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Derek Pomery]

Well. Let's see:
If I type:
r
it opens http://www.raspberrypi.org/

(or r^C to copy it to paste into a /. post)

If I type:
g foo

It googles for foo because I added g as my shortcut for google under Manage Search Engines.
If I type:
w foo

It opens foo in wikipedia for the same reason.

And the only time anything I typed was sent to google was when I explicitly requested it w/ "g foo"

Yay!

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Derek Pomery]

Ugh. I always forget /. does not escape tags by default.

Well. Let's see:
If I type:
r<tab><enter>
it opens http://www.raspberrypi.org/

(or r<tab>^C to copy it to paste into a /. post)

If I type:
g foo

It googles for foo because I added g as my shortcut for google under Manage Search Engines.
If I type:
w foo

It opens foo in wikipedia for the same reason.

And the only time anything I typed was sent to google was when I explicitly requested it w/ "g foo"

Yay!

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Insightfill]

If i cant install Chrome on a computer its useless to me for browsing nowadays.

Might I introduce you to "Portable Apps"? They even have Portable Chrome, so you just put in the jump drive and start running your own standalone session of Chrome.

The only challenge I've found with it is that if you don't have a snappy thumb drive, the write-back to the history can be pretty sluggish. I've taken to a plain old batch file which copies everything to %temp%, runs it from there, then copies it back when the app is done. I've also added some 7zip action since it's faster to write back one big 7z than a bunch of little files.

The other thing I've seen is that it seems to manage the sync via Windows certificates or something. Whenever I run sync on a computer, it doesn't know my sync account and settings. When I bring the flash drive to a new computer, it's lost the account info again.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Kalriath]

Probably saved in something called Protected Storage. It's an area where Windows encrypts everything in the storage with the user's password so that it can't be accessed by other users.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Whiteox]

Exactly - Some users think that the MRU list are bookmarks. I had to use some sort of FBI software to recover MRU IEx list from a registry backup and install it into the IE upgrade.
Then I did a 5 min workshop with them to show them how to use Favorites.

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[Anonymous Coward]

given the upgrade preserves the history by default, congrats on messing up a simple task. Please leave IT now

Re:We tried a big IE8 rollout last summer

[mgblst]

r = reallybayporn.com
g= goodporn.com
d= disgustingporn.com
s=slashdot.org
st=sexytrannyporn.com
sl=sextlesbopron.com

Awesome for web developers and designers.

[Fallingcow]

Goodbye IE7/8 support!

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[sylvandb]

Do they have IE9 for XP? Not last I checked...

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[xlsior]

Not really: since IE 9 is not available for XP, there will still be millions of IE 8 installs around evem after a forced update to the latest version.

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[Fallingcow]

Well....

Shit.

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[amicusNYCL]

Not really: since IE 9 is not available for XP, there will still be millions of IE 8 installs around evem after a forced update to the latest version.

This is a major improvement over millions of IE6 and IE7 installs.

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[Gilmoure]

Maybe they'll roll out an auto-update of XP to Win7? I wonder how they'll handle the auto-debiting of bank accounts.

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[Billly Gates]

Hey. iE 8 is a BIG improvement over 6 or 7. Xp will end early 2013 and I see it ending already. In the US at least it is falling very fast to just 27% of users from 50% last March. Ie 8 will die off with it.

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[catbutt]

Are you sure about this? I understand that IE9 is not available for XP NOW, but certainly they could make it work on XP if they wanted to. Maybe certain things would be turned off, or maybe their would be code added to the OS to support those features, or something. But I can't see it being impossible to support the most important things in IE9 on XP. The important thing is to support the features that cause web sites to break, anyway.

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[ZzzzSleep]

You still need this t-shirt....

Re:Awesome for web developers and designers.

[Anonymous Coward]

And those of us developing the sites those IE8 users will be viewing, will be force upgraded to IE9, so we can't debug in IE8 anymore.

(We're all on Win7 here, with about half running IE8, the other half running IE9, so that we can debug in both browsers).

Web Applications

[David89]

What about all the companies that use older versions of IE because of compatibility with their own proprietary web applications?

Re:Web Applications

[AdmiralXyz]

What about all the companies that use older versions of IE because of compatibility with their own proprietary web applications?

Simple: they'll disable the automatic update, by force if necessary.

Realistically, though, these users tend to be behind corporate firewalls with lots of antivirus protection and a forced patch schedule, so I doubt Microsoft is too worried about them contributing significantly to continued security holes thanks to IE6. This is an update to save the clueless from themselves.

Re:Web Applications

[Anonymous Coward]

How about reading the article before commenting on it?

"While the benefits of upgrading are numerous, we recognize that some organizations and individuals may want to opt-out and set their own upgrade pace. One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule. The Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker toolkits prevent automatic upgrades of IE for Windows customers who do not want them. Of course, we firmly believe that IE9 is the most compelling browser for business customers, and we want them to make the decision to upgrade at their convenience.

Similarly, customers who have declined previous installations of IE8 or IE9 through Windows Update will not be automatically updated. Customers have the ability to uninstall updates and continue to receive support for the version of IE that came with their copy of Windows. And similar to organizations, consumers can block the update all together and upgrade on their own. Finally, future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading. "

Re:Web Applications

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all the companies that use older versions of IE because of compatibility with their own proprietary web applications?

Fuck 'em.

Re:Web Applications

[implowry]

Hmmm, perhaps they weren't web applications at all but IE $version applications. If they would've built real web applications this wouldn't be a problem.

Re:Web Applications

[painandgreed]

What about all the companies that use older versions of IE because of compatibility with their own proprietary web applications?

They'll probably do the same thing they did in the brief time that IE8 was an automatic update, release an app that we can run that will prevent the automatic update from happening.

Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[DigiShaman]

So far, I'm found a few XP and Windows7 PC that automatically install and schedule a reboot regardless of your Automatic Update settings. For some reason, MS decided to override this policy with some super-secret update policy I've never seen before. This would be the first time I've noticed it. These machines are always update to date each month and some are on a domain while others in workgroup mode. Anyways, the updates that got push out this week will prompt a user every 15 minutes to reboot. It's like a dead man's switch. If you ignore the option to postpone the reboot, it does it on it's own.

I smell a lawsuit coming for loss of user data that hand't had a chance to be saved while open on the desktop.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[Spad]

If you've got machines on a domain that aren't properly configured to a) Update automatically from an internally managed WSUS server on a regular basis and b) Set to suppress and/or reschedule automatic restarts out of working hours then frankly you deserve any data loss you get.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[DigiShaman]

I have many clients that have SBS 2008 servers that manage WSUS policies by default along with many GPOs associated with computer OUs. You can still define WSUS updates manually, but you risk breaking the link back to the main SBS console. There's an entire KB article on this. Anyways, I haven't check if those workstations are experiencing the same behavior. I'm also managing a domain with standard 2003 DCs and GPOs to modify the update behavior and custom WSUS settings.

Basically it comes down to this. like I've stated in my previous post, I've never seen this behavior before in which Microsoft forces a dead man's switch upon the user every 15 minutes to reboot. The default update behavior happens at 3AM, but at least the user gets prompted to reboot on their own time for changes to take effect. That's ok in fact. But to force a reboot *without* user interaction isn't defensible as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[Anonymous Coward]

This. However one client decided to drop us. Nobody left that knows how to approve updates for install. They're all lost in the dead of space

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatic reboot has been around for a while, if someone in power wanted it on. I've used a few XP machines where it doesn't even give you the option to postpone- it just starts counting down, and you'd damn well better have everything saved and shut down gracefully before the clock hits zero. Thankfully, the vast majority of admins know better than to set it up this way.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[harryjohnston]

The "dead-man's switch" is the default setting for AU, the one Microsoft recommend. Personally, I disagree with this, but it's been that way for years. If there hasn't been a lawsuit yet, I can't imagine one happening now. :-)

I've seen a number of complaints over the years that people's AU settings have mysteriously changed. I think in most cases this was due to products like MS Office that reconfigure AU during setup - they ask for user consent, but people often don't realize they're changing AU settings for the entire computer rather than just Office. However, I've never seen AU automatically reboot when it was not configured to do so - are you sure that this is what happened, did you double-check the settings on those machines? Have you looked at WindowsUpdate.log to see what it thought it was doing at the time? (One person I remember helping had AU settings coming from two different places, so AU was switching backwards and forwards between the different settings at different times of day, making it look as if it was ignoring the settings; the log file helped clarify the situation.)

Updates to AU itself are treated differently to other updates, but they shouldn't ever cause a reboot.

(Pop over to superuser.com if you would like troubleshooting assistance with this problem, by the way.)

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[DigiShaman]

I'm still scratching me head over this behavior though. Normally AU will install a 3AM in the morning and reboot if required. But my Windows 7 machine automatically started installing updates in the background around 10pm last night while I was watching Netflix. I only noticed because of all the excessive HDD activity from the LED on my case. I minimized Netflix and *bam*, a pop-up window started counting down 15 seconds with an option to ignore which I choose. Eventually, it popped back up again and I wasn't there to cancel it. So my machine got rebooted. It's as though Microsoft knew this was some uber security issue that they just had to update on my machine at all costs. I just want to know what the KB number of that update that was deemed so important to them. This was truly one of those "for your own good" moves that quite frankly got me torqued.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[harryjohnston]

My first guess would be that the 3am-10pm discrepancy comes from your time zone: AU uses GMT internally, so if you're in the Eastern Time Zone, a "3am" installation would actually take place at 10pm local time. But I'd need to see the relevant part of the logs to be sure. And perhaps you'd never noticed the "dead man's switch" behaviour before simply because this was the first time you happened to be using the machine while AU was doing it's thing?

It is very unlikely that this month's updates were intentionally configured to behave differently than normal. We'd be seeing news reports by now if this were widespread. :-)

Seriously, pop over to superuser.com if you want to troubleshoot this - no registration required - or just email me.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[DigiShaman]

Central Time Zone here. A co-worker stated it also happened to his home machine and a with regular client of his. We're not hearing anything from anyone about this, but I'll start asking around. It happened to me after a few minutes of booting up a VM of XP running on my MacBook. Go figure.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[harryjohnston]

Hmmm. When using a WSUS server, the behaviour you describe is typical of an update with a deadline. I suppose it is possible that someone at MS inadvertently configured a deadline on one of the WU updates.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[perryizgr8]

yeah, it sometimes even wakes from sleep, reboots, force closing all your apps and waits at the login screen. next time you open your laptop, it takes ages to start because its actually doing a fresh boot, and all your work is gone.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me right up until the ridiculous comment regarding a potential lawsuit.

Re:Automatic reboot this month for XP and Win7

[L4t3r4lu5]

I've had this happen to me, so I know the pain. Saying that, though, if your users are leaving their workstations for 15 minutes without saving their work, they're asking for trouble.

Ctrl + S, WinKey + L, get up from desk. It should be in muscle memory.

Enterprise?

[Xacid]

While I'm ok with this as an end user and I actively use chrome at home so I'm used to this, I can't help but wonder if this is going to either be a godsend or nightmare for the enterprise IT crowd. However, the shop I work in is fairly good about letting go of things such as the infamous IE6 and we've had very little issues with the latest.

Re:Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine most enterprise environments would have WSUS managing updates. It would be trivial to simply not authorize it if they absolutely have to keep IE in the dark ages.

Re:Enterprise?

[Spad]

Any enterprise IT department worthy of continued employment will be running all Windows updates through their own WSUS server anyway and so will be free to leave their XP clients running IE6 if they so desire.

Re:Enterprise?

[Billly Gates]

Godsend longterm, but nightmate short term. XP really is an inappropriate os to use in 2011. No aslr, dep for all services, trim command, html 5, uac, default admin write, usb 3, the list goes on.

Even firefox and chrome run without dep, aslr, and other security features in XP. Management does not know this.

Upgrading an intranet to IE 8 will make it work in any future version of IE. All these things will make it a dream at work, but a nightmare for the bean counters and CFOs who are ignorant and demand their bonuses. Corporations have been too cheap for too long. You cant not invest and expect more cash to keep coming in

Companies can avoid this like before

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

Respecting Customer Choice and Control

While the benefits of upgrading are numerous, we recognize that some organizations and individuals may want to opt-out and set their own upgrade pace. One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule. The Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker toolkits prevent automatic upgrades of IE for Windows customers who do not want them. Of course, we firmly believe that IE9 is the most compelling browser for business customers, and we want them to make the decision to upgrade at their convenience.

Similarly, customers who have declined previous installations of IE8 or IE9 through Windows Update will not be automatically updated. Customers have the ability to uninstall updates and continue to receive support for the version of IE that came with their copy of Windows. And similar to organizations, consumers can block the update all together and upgrade on their own. Finally, future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading.

OMG

[vikingpower]

"...after they have assured there are no issues..." Besides the faulty English, this little line sends shivers all over my spine.

Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[JMZero]

after they have assured there are no issues

IE 6 is a very, very different browser from IE 9. We've had plenty of clients who can't move off IE 6 (or are in the middle of a large project to do so) because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly. I've seen MS make this type of mistake before - they don't see many public-facing sites using a technology, so they feel safe getting rid of it. Well, yes, very few public-facing sites are going to use crazy IE specific stuff, and most are (by now) going to be making reasonable efforts to work between browsers.

Intranet sites are a whole other kettle of fish; corporate programmers often target a single browser - and for many of them, that was IE for a long time. They got away with that from IE 4 to IE 6 because MS just added stuff. With IE 7 and, particularly, Vista, they started fixing insecure and non-standard behaviors - and that's part of why so many companies are still on XP and IE 6.

If MS does this, there will be a lot of pissed off people and gnashing of teeth. I'm not saying it's the wrong choice but "once they've assured there's no issues" sounds pretty silly.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is -precisely- what they get for targeting something /other/ than an openly documented standard. Maybe corporate memory will actually learn this lesson this time. I highly doubt they'll learn about vendor lockin, but this is a major step towards being insulated from that in the first place.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Update your aging infrastructure, or go out of business. I am sure MS have determined that backward support for that crap is costing them more than to just lose the customer.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this 2007 or 2008? If you are still depending on IE6 for anything, you should have either found a way to sandbox some locked-down, not-updating, single-use XP in a virtual machine people can use for that one broken intranet web-app (transparently if possible), or fixed their software. I have a hard time feeling sorry for those still stuck on IE6.

This is good news for the web. Most of us devs have been ignoring IE6 for a while now, and the sooner IE7 goes, the better. For our web-app (not a global customer base, intranet only) IE8 is condoned, but not 100% supported (things work, look good enough, but lack polish in places), and IE9 is what we fully support. Oh, and all the other modern browsers of course, who are rarely an issue. Even iOS (touch-)devices are manageable compared to IE6 and IE7.

CSS and HTML are actually quite nice when you can actually use all the good stuff.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Billly Gates]

Its one thing to keep costs down but another to never ever upgrade to boost its share price.

Companies realize company cars wear down, equipment fails, things wear out amd have limited life spans. Oh but not computers thats different. Look it turns on therefore its fine.

Viruses get in through obsolete products, replacement pcs dont have drivers, that uber cool ssd ultrabook the ceo wants cant use it because XP doesnt support the trim command, etc. These things add up.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Em Adespoton]

This won't be an issue with Intranet clients... only public facing browsers will be affected by this, as internal browsers will all go through a local WSUS server.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious - IE9 has a "incompatibility" button (looks like a torn sheet of small paper) that is supposed to make it IE6 compatible; I had to use it this week for my bank's new web site. IE even remembers that you've turned this on for this site for the next visit. Have you tried that on your Intranet sites?

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[pmontra]

I agree that MS is going to piss off a lot of people but they should have seen this coming a long time ago: bad investments pay bad dividends. In this case the original mistake was made by those developers (and/or managers) that coded a web application for a specific browser instead of for all browsers. The occasional need of using ActiveX is not an excuse. If they really needed to run native code they should have written a desktop application and distributed it with the usual Windows management tools.

The same happens with parts exchanged sometimes. I recently started to take care of a project in which the original developers coded an intranet application for Firefox on a Mac but the customer runs only mixed versions of IE on mixed versions of Windows. Guess what happened when they installed the application on the production server. That's an extreme case of lack of care and of control but again: if it's web technology, develop as if you were developing for the web.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[pmontra]

That's not always possible. The big international company I was working for at the end of 2006 had Windows 2000 laptops running a version of IE6 customized by MS for them. Those laptops didn't have the processor or the RAM to run a VM. Furthermore the intranet developers made a lot of those strategic mistakes I described in my reply to GP, the first one being asking MS for those customizations. I know that they switched to Vista the month before the launch of Windows 7.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks - Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since it works GREAT so far, AND? Especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[JMZero]

Many companies have lax or no update control, and many allow logins from home computers and what not. People will end up in a version they didn't mean to get and that will create work for other people.

Not end of the world, and again I'm not saying the decision's wrong - I just think they're crazy if they don't expect some significant problems and complaints.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly

Never mind the browser then. Fixing that intranet site is way overdue. It's causing extra costs in network security, anti-virus, and so forth- I'm pretty sure that taking those in consideration, one can make a business case for dropping the current intranet site for something less archaic and obsolete.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[JMZero]

To be fair, the situation looked a lot different in 1998. I mean, look at what web standards defined in 1998 (almost nothing) vs. what managers demanded from these web applications (pretty much everything we have now, plus some other stuff).

So say you want a page that can update dynamically? What are you going to tell your manager: wait for some more tech to be invented and put into a standard? OK, fine - we'll just sit out for 5 years while we get trampled.

Oh, or we'll go "cross browser" and limit ourselves to stuff you could get to work in Netscape 3 (hint: the answer is nothing, and you had to pay out the nose in layers and BS and image pre-load scripts to get that nothing).

No - you did what you could: and sometimes that meant using IE specific DOM and events, ActiveX BS, iFrames, showModalDialog, the wacky DHTML Edit control, and maybe you try to find some CSS that works in the browsers you try to support.

Some of that stuff worked out fine, by the way (lots of that IE specific DOM code eventually became standard - as did, in a practical sense, the XMLHTTP ActiveX control) - and other stuff didn't.

Sometimes you guessed wrong, sometimes you guessed right; sometimes you knew you were guessing wrong (as with ActiveX) but didn't have another real choice. Say you want your software to be able to save locally in the case of a downed network connection (remember, this is 1998) - what was your good option for the shiny new web app that's going to make your business millions?

Oh and if you, instead, try to write some native app you got destroyed by the market because people didn't want bloody native apps - and you have an even harder transition to come because many as cool as native apps weren't in 1998, they were even less cool in 2003.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

m$ shitting on people that trusted it? As a .net developer who graduated from vb to silverlight I have to disagree with you there Sir!

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[JMZero]

Lol. You haven't spent a long time in corporate development I guess. For many companies, they're just starting to transition off parts of their 1983 mainframe/terminal setup, and they're happy to be getting most of their people on XP because now they can have people all remote into the same crazy old computer that terminals into their older, larger crazy old computer.

The 1998 website that only works in IE 6 is "the new system" for many, many companies.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[tlhIngan]

IE 6 is a very, very different browser from IE 9. We've had plenty of clients who can't move off IE 6 (or are in the middle of a large project to do so) because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly. I've seen MS make this type of mistake before - they don't see many public-facing sites using a technology, so they feel safe getting rid of it. Well, yes, very few public-facing sites are going to use crazy IE specific stuff, and most are (by now) going to be making reasonable efforts to work between browsers.

Intranet sites are a whole other kettle of fish; corporate programmers often target a single browser - and for many of them, that was IE for a long time. They got away with that from IE 4 to IE 6 because MS just added stuff. With IE 7 and, particularly, Vista, they started fixing insecure and non-standard behaviors - and that's part of why so many companies are still on XP and IE 6.

You do realize that the reason why Microsoft has not forced everyone to go to iE7/8 for XP was because of this, right? Microsoft basically told everyone to get ready because eventually, they're going to force an upgrade. In fact, if you don't specifically enable the IE 7/8 block, it'll arrive via WSUS or Windows Update automatically.

The only people on IE6 are those who applied the block (the block exists because of them) as a stopgap measure.

Microsoft is badly wanting ot get rid of a lot of crap out there simply because it's a big pain to support all the hacks and workaround because of lousy coders.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[dugn]

XP will only be upgraded to IE8. IE9 isn't supported on XP.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Our intranet is now a mix of old IE6 only webapps, and newer webapps that work only on Firefox because that was what everyone was using apart from when they need to use the old intranet sites.

IE8 and Chrome don't work with either. I really don't know what it is with Intranet web developers that they manage to make sites that work with only one browser every time. I find it quite difficult now myself with every major browser being pretty close to standards compliant.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[pmontra]

I think you have a point. I wasn't looking back as far as to 1998, my bad. By the way, that was the year of IE5 and Netscape 4.

The dynamic you describe is real and happens all the time. Anyway, we're writing about web applications for an intranet so the case for native applications was not so desperate. Furthermore managers and developers should have started re-writing them in a cross browser way somewhere in the early 2000s, at worst in 2004 when Firefox was launched and gained traction among developers or in 2006 when with IE7 it was clear that the long period of technological stagnation was over. But yes, I know the difference between the right thing to do and what and why management decide to allocate budget for.

Re:Wow, this is going to be interesting...

[JMZero]

Meh, there's still plenty of browser incompatibilities and quirks. You can get around a lot of them with things like jQuery, but you still run into some that are difficult. I was just doing a "code completion" popup thingee a bit ago, and there was quite a few places I had to split code for Firefox vs. IE - and it doesn't work in Chrome (yet) though I have no idea why. I can certainly understand how, if you can target only one browser, it's tempting to do so; even though doing a cross browser solutions are much easier than they used to be they're still not free.

Still the best way to download Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't touched Internet Explorer since the last time I had to install Firefox on a new system. So... how exactly does this affect me? I don't even want to install the piece of crap.

Re:Still the best way to download Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

So... how exactly does this affect me?

Notthing affects you.

...because you're an asshole.

IE9 for XP?

[Svenne]

Really? When did this happen?

Re:IE9 for XP?

[Billly Gates]

XP is dying. G.statcounter.com show only 27% of Americans use it anymore. The rest are in china with IE 6. XPs market share goes down 10-15% every year. That means teen usage as corps migrate to Windows 7 by next summer. IE 8 is semi modern and finally does css 2 and html 4 and a decent upgrade for XP users.

Re:IE9 for XP?

[Control-Z]

That was my thought. They were trying to entice users to upgrade to Vista and 7 by not allowing XP to run the latest IE. That wasn't exactly an enticement to me.

Australia to change name to Zustralia

[Anonymous Coward]

so this won't happen again.

They can do whatever: IE is part of the OS...

[bADlOGIN]

Remember kids, MSIE is _NOT_ a "web browser". It is a part of the Windows operating system. Microsoft has said so in court. Therefore, when you want to go on-line, be sure and use a "web browser" such as Chrome(Win/Mac/Linux/etc), Firefox(Win/Mac/Linux/etc), Safari(Mac/Win/iOS), or even Opera(Win/Mac/Linux/iOS).

When people ask you why you hate IE (and of course Microsoft by extension), be sure to have this fact handy and correct them about referring to IE as being a "web browser". After all, if it really was you could:

keep more than one version installed at a time
install different versions for different user account
and of course... easily uninstall it.

Re:They can do whatever: IE is part of the OS...

[James Carnley]

How did this not get modded Troll?

Good luck uninstalling Safari on OS X or WebView on Android.

The OS has to have an underlying web rendering engine so that apps built to show HTML in an internal window work correctly. It's a core part of the application SDK and nearly all applications would break in some way if you deleted them.

Re:They can do whatever: IE is part of the OS...

[Beelzebud]

The easiest way to get a troll comment rated informative around here is just to mindlessly bash MS.

Re:They can do whatever: IE is part of the OS...

[Kalriath]

You can remove Safari on OS X, or IE on Windows. But you can't remove WebKit on OS X, or Trident on Windows.

Re:They can do whatever: IE is part of the OS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember kids, MSIE is _NOT_ a "web browser". It is a part of the Windows operating system.

Wrong, you can remove IE. However you can't remove trident from Windows, just like you can't remove webkit from OSX. Nice uninformed troll though.

Re:They can do whatever: IE is part of the OS...

[cbhacking]

Oh please, close your BS hole. IE4 through IE6 were pretty well integrated into the OS. There was a lot of code sharing between Explorer (nominally shell and file browser) and IE (nominally web browser). You could browse the filesystem from within IE, browse the web from within Windows Explorer, and the desktop used IE to render its background (assuming you used a JPEG wallpaper) and to display dynamic content (remember "Active Desktop"? I sure wish I didn't).

Now, was any of this a particularly good idea? No, certainly not. Starting with Vista/IE7, the line between IE and [Windows] Explorer started becoming a lot more distinct. With Win7/IE8 (and IE9), the browser has become an optional component of the OS again, just like it was back in the late 16-bit and very early 32-bit days. Mind you, MSHTML.DLL (implements Trident) is still needed in a few places (relatedly, this is why you should upgrade to IE8 or IE9 - whichever you can - even if you don't use IE) but try removing Webkit from OS X or Android and see how much stuff breaks there too.

Was it techncally possible to excise IE from Win98? Yes, it was and it was done. It's also possible to install Vista on a machine with 384MB of RAM (not even very hard, I did it just out of curiosity), block execution of explorer.exe (responsible for an awful lot of what people think of as "Windows") and use another shell/file browser, and run IE6 on Linux. In all cases, though, it's an incredibly bad user experience, at which point you're arguably (and this is what MS argued) not using Microsoft's product anymore - you're using something derived from it. MS has no need nor desire to support that behavior.

Re:They can do whatever: IE is part of the OS...

[Rexdude]

I'd say the 'browser should not be a part of the OS' is an obsolete argument now. IE was made as an HTML rendering engine for the OS, but with a browser interface tacked around it. I remember seeing a friend fool around with Visual Basic and create a new 'browser' by simply adding an IE control to a form and binding the back/forward etc buttons to it.
The same thing is done on iOS now (on the iPhone at least, dunno about OS X) - where if an app wants to display internet content it uses the Safari renderer.

Now here's the distinction. Having a system level browser component that exposes APIs to let other apps use it is one thing, allowing the same thing to also act as a file browser a la Windows Explorer is madness. But then you can use the Nautilus file browser also as a web browser on Linux, so they must be doing something right.

Don't you mean IE6/IE7?

[Millennium]

Unfortunately, Microsoft chose not to support IE9 on Windows XP, so we're going to be stuck with IE8 for quite some time yet.

Mind you, this is still cause for some celebration, as IE8 represents major improvement over its predecessors. But it's not the fundamental fix to the Web that an update to IE9 would be. When Microsoft swallows its pride and ports it (or puts XP support into IE10), that will be cause for dancing in the streets.

Re:Don't you mean IE6/IE7?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I thought. I have IE9 on XP, and so can't upgrade if I wanted to. Besides, my XP is pirated.

Re:Don't you mean IE6/IE7?

[Millennium]

How'd you get IE9 running on XP?

Re:Don't you mean IE6/IE7?

[antdude]

IE8 for XP will probably be forever and the final IE since MS won't do IE9 for it. MS is trying to get rid of old XP.

Re:Don't you mean IE6/IE7?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to roll back to IE8 from IE9 because 9 trashed my printer driver/spooler every time it started. I looked for a fix and MS said "contact your printer manufacturer for an updated driver" while the printer manufacturer said "that's a microsoft problem."

Re:Don't you mean IE6/IE7?

[westlake]

When Microsoft swallows its pride and ports it (or puts XP support into IE10), that will be cause for dancing in the streets.

IE 10 builds on changes in the OS that began with Vista and Win 7. This has been rehashed endlessly on Sladhdot --- and there is no turning back.

Re:Don't you mean IE6/IE7?

[Millennium]

I didn't say it was practical: of course Microsoft won't actually do it. Honestly, though, I don't believe the claims of there being any reason not to other than trying to force the upgrade cycle along. Too many other browsers have managed the same things IE9 does, and IE10 claims it will do, all while running with no problems on XP.

As a web developer

[TheSpoom]

THANK YOU! The number of people using IE 6 and 7 is about to dramatically decline, which is roughly proportional to the number of headaches I will be getting on a daily basis.

Re:As a web developer

[Skapare]

Sounds like someone doesn't know how to do "gracefully degrade". Sure, if some web browser doesn't have a feature you NEED, then the advantage of doing what needs that feature won't happen for them. Their bad. But everything their browser can do, in the standard way, without bugs (oh wait, that doesn't leave much for IE) should still work.

One of the really annoying examples on the web are hyperlinks. HTML has had the capability since the beginning. Yet so many sites insist on doing it with Javascript. In SOME (but not most) cases, the Javascript adds to this by being smart and figuring out what the best URL is. But almost all (some did it right) uses of Javascript break tabbing of hyperlinks (e.g. visit the link in a new tab, either by menu or by middle button click). I hope YOUR pages don't have any misuse of Javascript like that.

If what you want to do can be done on the old browser, and was a standard then, and is a standard now, then make sure THAT works on the old browser.

Of course it's great to have new browser features. But not everyone has new computers that can handle the bloated OSes that can handle the bloated browsers offered today. And not everyone cares to keep updating their browsers every 3 months. The insanity needs to end. Of course IE 6 and IE 7 ... they ARE the insanity.

Re:As a web developer

[HarvardAce]

(e.g. visit the link in a new tab, either by menu or by middle button click).

Middle click automatically opens up in a new tab? All this time I've been right clicking and using the menu to do so...thanks!

Re:As a web developer

[TheSpoom]

Sounds like someone doesn't know how to do "gracefully degrade".

No, I assure you I do. The problem is that we're doing a lot of stuff that requires Javascript from the get-go, and it's there that one finds the most incompatibilities between IE and everything else. (And no, we don't do stupid stuff like make our links require Javascript, except that we hardly have any external links in our flagship applications at all.)

I'm sure you think requiring Javascript makes us Satan incarnate, but that's just the way some apps work. If you can find a way to efficiently show a radio station's currently playing song that keeps itself up to date within seconds at all times without Javascript, be my guest. (If you answer Flash... well, that's just dumb.)

Re:As a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

It closes a tab too.

Re:As a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can find a way to efficiently show a radio station's currently playing song that keeps itself up to date within seconds at all times without Javascript, be my guest. (If you answer Flash... well, that's just dumb.)

Well, using HTTP for something that RTSP can do better is dumb, too. Why use a web browser to stream radio when you could use a media player designed exactly for that purpose?

(it's a rhetorical question: I already know the answer.)

Re:As a web developer

[TheSpoom]

Is the answer that we're not streaming audio? I hope so.

Re:As a web developer

[eddy the lip]

Oh, yeah! Best. Christmas gift. Ever.

Re:As a web developer

[eddy the lip]

Sounds like someone doesn't know how to do "gracefully degrade". Sure, if some web browser doesn't have a feature you NEED, then the advantage of doing what needs that feature won't happen for them. Their bad. But everything their browser can do, in the standard way, without bugs (oh wait, that doesn't leave much for IE) should still work.

Sounds like someone that hasn't had to explain the cost inflation to a client. Graceful degradation is a lovely thing, and in theory doesn't add much overhead. Until you have to write the same feature twice just to make sure that everyone has the same functionality, even if they don't get the same "experience."

Graceful degradation is a lovely idea, and how things should be done, but there is a real cost to it. If you include it in a bid, you come in higher than the useless tools that don't know what it is, if you don't, you deal with the fallout. The unending crap that is IE6 has caused us no end of heartache (and real, hard dollars.)

So, yeah, pretty thrilled about this,

Re:As a web developer

[eddy the lip]

It's nigh impossible to put together anything that does anything and meet client expectations without javascript.

Yeah, I'm old school - I code in vim, I still use lynx on occasion, and I remember when HTML was about markup - but that's not where the web's at, and it's not what client's expect. Anyone can toss words like "graceful degradation" around, but when it's a real cost that shows no real benefit to a client (not in a way they'll easily understand), it's a serious business concern.

I am extremely pleased about this news.

Re:As a web developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there is no hope there. IE 10 on the Windows 8 preview still runs compatibility mode as IE 7. This is why being a web developer sucks. Fuck IE in the ass and don't fuck bill gates, let him be tortured slowly. And thanks to the fucking idiots at Micro$oft you can set all intranet sites to work in compatibility view, so when you write a real web site for modern browsers you have to rewrite the whole god damn thing because even the "latest IE" still runs as IE7.

Also note that I believe this Slashdot post has caused more responses with the word "Fuck" than any other.

Fuck IE, Fuck IE, Fuck IE... ad infinium

How does an upgrade even work?

[Skapare]

I've been wondering how Firefox or Chrome can accomplish such an upgrade. The Firefox binaries are in a /usr directory which ordinary users have no write/change access permission. The browser runs as the user using it, not as root. Even Flash fails to install (I tried it once on a machine I was getting ready to wipe clean and re-install) even though it could have put the shared object module in the user home directory.

Of course, with Windows' holey security model, it might work.

Re:How does an upgrade even work?

[Anonymous Coward]

normally you click "ok" giving it permission, or have you not upgraded your firefox at all?

Re:How does an upgrade even work?

[icebraining]

Firefox on Linux, I have no idea (aptitude takes care of it for me).

On Windows, Firefox still shows the UAC screen to gain permissions, and Chrome just installs and runs from a path inside the user's home.

Re:How does an upgrade even work?

[Bitsy Boffin]

On Gnu/Linux systems (etc), it's generally up to the package manager of course.

Windows systems don't have that luxury so they have to D.I.Y.

Integrated with the OS

[BigDaveyL]

From my basic and possibly incorrect understanding, isn't Internet Explorer an integral part of the OS? This may be why other browsers can get away with it. Also, other browsers aimed to be somewhat standards complaint from the beginning. IE 6 wasn't as standards compliant. So one can get away with upgrading other browsers.

Finally got 'em!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, F you Australia and Brazil!

My IT Staff's job just got harder

[thomasw_lrd]

We use some banking software that only works with IE8. This is gonna be a pain in the ass.

Re:My IT Staff's job just got harder

[Amouth]

if it's web base and only works with IE8 i wouldn't call it "software" but rather a bandaid

Re:My IT Staff's job just got harder

[Anonymous Coward]

Only IE8?? Who's to blame for that?

Re:My IT Staff's job just got harder

[James Carnley]

IE9 can render and act just like IE8. There's no reason why IE9 will not work with your banking software if you set IE9 into IE8 mode for it.

Re:My IT Staff's job just got harder

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll tell them to try it. It appears to be an issue with the usb device used to scan checks

Re:My IT Staff's job just got harder

[shutdown -p now]

Wait, did you really write "IE8" there? Not "IE6", but "IE8"?

If so, what you're saying is that you've got some web developers that wrote an app that only works with a specific version of a specific browser, no earlier than 2009.

Where did you get those folks? I thought it was already a hanging offence by 2006 or so.

No! It is a bad idea!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a web developer who actually LIKES IE 6 & IE 7.

If a client wants IE 6 compatibility, I get to charge them a significant premium. Please MS, don't do this.

Re:No! It is a bad idea!!

[datavirtue]

If you are a web developer then you know Microsoft put out the mandate to "kill IE 6" some time ago.

Re:No! It is a bad idea!!

[D'Sphitz]

I disagree. Spending time on IE compatibility is usually a necessary evil, but I certainly don't enjoy hacking in fixes and workarounds for "bugs" in perfectly valid code, whether I'm paid for it or not. It's unproductive time, and prevents me from using the best tools and techniques available, instead relying on ugly hacks. There's more to developing a website, for me, than plumping up the invoice with extras and upsells and cashing the check at the end. I want to feel productive, create clean and elegant code, and be proud of the result.

Re:No! It is a bad idea!!

[Twinbee]

Parables, windows and breakage spring to mind...

Re:No! It is a bad idea!!

[cyber-vandal]

Yes Microsoft we'll spend millions of dollars rewriting our apps just because you say so [/sarcasm]

Re:No! It is a bad idea!!

[thegarbz]

whether I'm paid for it or not. It's unproductive time,

Unless you're coding your own website, or not getting paid it's not unproductive time. It meets the requirements of the customer, and it puts food on your table. You're providing a service, and if that service is something someone wants to pay for it can hardly be called unproductive.

Re:No! It is a bad idea!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a web developer who actually LIKES IE 6 & IE 7.

If a client wants IE 6 compatibility, I get to charge them a significant premium. Please MS, don't do this.

Look, as much as people like to bitch about IE6, it's just a web browser. It works quite well.

IE6 doesn't work well with weird web applications that use crazy ajax & css. Frankly, many other web browsers don't either. Firefox often balloons to ridiculous memory usage with that type of web app.

Find the devil

[ojintoad]

Respecting Customer Choice and Control

While the benefits of upgrading are numerous, we recognize that some organizations and individuals may want to opt-out and set their own upgrade pace. One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule. The Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker toolkits prevent automatic upgrades of IE for Windows customers who do not want them. Of course, we firmly believe that IE9 is the most compelling browser for business customers, and we want them to make the decision to upgrade at their convenience.

Similarly, customers who have declined previous installations of IE8 or IE9 through Windows Update will not be automatically updated. Customers have the ability to uninstall updates and continue to receive support for the version of IE that came with their copy of Windows. And similar to organizations, consumers can block the update all together and upgrade on their own. Finally, future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading.

So if you opted out before you're not going to get it. And I imagine you'll be able to back track anyway. Also they have "blocker toolkits" so you can really be sure.

Unsupported apps

[Anonymous Coward]

It happened this week. My non-technical spouse was unable to connect to work with Citrix Xenapps and I found an unrequested upgrade to IE 9. IE 8 is generally pretty well supported, but I would not, personally, choose to go to 9 yet. I use IE only for a few apps that require it, and IE 9 breaks most of those just now.

Rolling back the upgrade is pretty easy, you just uninstall the upgrade and IE goes back to the previous version.

There was some significant loss of productivity before I got involved... Probably a lot of calls to the company help desk (and they did not appear to be able to get IE 9 to work, so a lot of the calls must have lasted a while).

And how much do you want to bet...

[Howard Beale]

that they'll force Live Search, Web Accelerators, and their other BS on those users?

Re:And how much do you want to bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't bet anything on that. I would bet a fairly large amount on that they won't though. That's based on that I have IE9 at home, and they have in no way, shape or form forced any of that stuff on me.

Thank you!

[Billly Gates]

A thousand web developers, security professionals, and html 5 enthusiasts will open champaign bottles and celebration!

Normally slashdotters do not agree with Microsofts practices but this is one which is a smart and well recieved.

With XP dying fast in the US where it will have marketshare in just the teens next summer, it means HTML 5. IE 8 wont go away as half of lusers switch back to it from IE 9 because of the gui.

To corp users whinning I have one word. UPGRADE! Its 2011! If you still use IE 6 or IE 7 with no migration plan you are incompentent. Penny wise but dollar dumb if you think saving $500,000 now but loose $2,000,000 because the lan went down due to daqua infecting every client through IE 7 and flash 8 on 10 year old XP. If you work in such an environment then print this story to your boss? The era of developing for one browser every 8 years is over.

Another reason to upgrade? Your now standards compliant intranet app will run on IE 9 also, and IE 10, and IE 14 and so on. The upgrade train stops when you develop to later open standard browsers.

Being "different" will bite MS in the ass...

[irregular_hero]

Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of this -- I want earlier versions of IE to die a thousand silent deaths, but...

This will hurt some large enterprises who have specifically designed certain website features to work only in IE. Older versions of IE tended to have some quirky rendering behaviors and a lot of sites rely on those quirks. Taking the browser directly to the latest IE will render things in IE "Standards" mode which will break some of these sites.

They better read up on how to explicitly set IE rendering modes:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).aspx

Three ways to do this: 1) do it in the page body with a META tag, 2) do it in the HTTP headers with the X-UA-Compatible header, or 3) push a GPO update to your internal IE clients that forces the browser to render the sites you specify in "IE Compatibility Mode".

Re:Being "different" will bite MS in the ass...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the fourth way:

4) Fix the broken code with which you'd jury-rigged your pages. You never needed it in the first place: had you followed standards and best practices, you could have had browser-agnostic pages ten years ago when IE6 was released. With the advent of modern JS libraries and the compatibility work they do in the background, there was no excuse for having standards-breaking code five years ago. If your corporate intranet becomes inaccessible tomorrow because your employees are no longer running a ten year old web browser, you have no one to blame but your own ignorance and laziness. Successful companies adapt; those that don't go the way of Kodak.

Re:Being "different" will bite MS in the ass...

[Anonymous Coward]

This will hurt some large enterprises who have specifically designed certain website features to work only in IE. Older versions of IE tended to have some quirky rendering behaviors and a lot of sites rely on those quirks. Taking the browser directly to the latest IE will render things in IE "Standards" mode which will break some of these sites.

Don't you think that by now they've had plenty time to prepare for the fact that this moment is coming? Even when those websites were being designed and built there were people all over the web pointing out that following standards is a safer bet for the future than following market share. While at the time the people opting for market share no doubt made what from their point of view was a sound judgement, no-one can claim that this comes as a surprise.

Re:Being "different" will bite MS in the ass...

[olau]

You can also install the IE collection to get back an IE 6.

rolling out IE9

[Muramas95]

I have no problem with this but my main issue is that they bundled C++ 2008 runtimes with IE9... In my office IE9 patched our runtimes and it caused issues with the software we are developing which made it unable to be compiled. I hope for their sakes that they don't do the same thing.

Re:rolling out IE9

[shutdown -p now]

An update to C++ runtime cannot break your software at compile-time - unless you really mean something different.

(CRT does not include headers or static libraries, just the DLLs)

Re:rolling out IE9

[Anonymous Coward]

How is a new binary dll going to make your code unable to compile? Do you even understand the difference between compiling and linking? Perhaps, it's not microsoft's fault this time....

Re:rolling out IE9

[toddestan]

Maybe the updated runtime broke Visual Studio?

good

[infashion2011]

sound like a good news,future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading. http://infashion2011.com/

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason other vendors can distribute the latest upgrades is...

• Only the Microsoft platform is plagued with crappy (but essential) proprietary business software that embeds MSHTML. Never mind a browser update, I've come across heaps of stuff that doesn't function correctly with sane security settings.
• Unlike Microsoft, every other major vendor manages to support their current browsers cross platform and cross MS Windows -- current Firefox and Opera still run on Windows 2000!

Spare me the pretension of nobility; This is Microsoft deliberately breaking stuff in the hopes of selling OS upgrades.

OPERA 64-bit version 4 MacOS X & Windows... ap

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED" - Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port"...

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times, here & here:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED" - Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port"...

(Per your post sneakyimp? Well - About "taking a long time" for things to happen? This took a LONG time to "go down" but it finally has!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times, here & here:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"

(Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port"... it's good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're actually more spammy and more annoying than the average Slashdot Paultard. Never thought I'd see the day.

They don't have to patch.

[pavon]

Microsoft has released blocks for both IE 8 and IE 9 which can be applied by IT if they don't want to upgrade, as they have done for every automatic upgrade. If a company is too incompetent to manage the updates being applied to their computers and still needs IE 6 then they brought this on themselves.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

And no i dont give a shit about your internal business app that was so poorly written that it only works in IE6.

This forced upgrade should have been done several years ago (and i mean completely forced without any option or way around it)

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"

(Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port"... it's good stuff!!!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, it's truly, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Its your own fault.

[Anonymous Coward]

Serves yourself right if you hook a Windows machine up to the internet.

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well - Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!!!

[Millennium]

Honest question: is English your native language?

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is - Others here have had NO PROBLEM with how I write, per upwards moderations I have had for my posts (per these examples as "proofs thereof"):

Roughly 146++ of them & I post as AC (hard to get even +1, as /. hides our posts & we "AC"'s start @ ZERO/0 points, unlike registered "lusers", lol!):

+5 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (5):

HOSTS & BGP:2010 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1901826&cid=34490450
FIREFOX IN DANGER: 2011 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2559120&cid=38268580
TESLA:2010 -> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1872982&cid=34264190
TESLA:2010 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1806946&cid=33777976
NVIDIA 2d:2006 -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175774&cid=14610147

----

+4 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (4):

APK SECURITY GUIDE:2005 -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167071&cid=13931198
INFO. SYSTEMS WORK:2005 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161862&cid=13531817
WINDOWS @ NASDAQ 7++ YRS. NOW:2009 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28571315
CARMACK'S ARMADILLO AEROSPACE:2005 -> http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158310&cid=13263898

----

+3 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (6):

APK MICROSOFT INTERVIEW:2005 -> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155172&cid=13007974
APK MS SYMBOLIC DIRECTORY LINKS:2005 -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166850&cid=13914137
APK FOOLS IE7 INSTALL IN BETA HOW TO:2006 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175857&cid=14615222
PROOFS ON OPERA SPEED & SECURITY:2007 -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=273931&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20291847
HBGary POST in Fake Names On Social Networks, a Fake Problem:2011 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2375110&cid=37056304
APK RC STOP ROOKIT TECHNIQUES:2008 -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021873&cid=25681261

----

+2 'modded up' posts by "yours truly" (11):

HOW DLL API CALL LOADS WORK:2008 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1001489&cid=25441395
APK TRICK TO STOP A MALWARE:2008 -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1010923&cid=25549351
DOING SHAREWARE 1995-2004:2007 -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233779&cid=19020329
MHTML SECURITY BUG FIX IE:2011 ->

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I support you and do the same (always AC).

Besides, your post is ontopic -- the subject here goes beyond IE, it's about getting better quality browsers by updating or, like you suggest, getting a better browser (like Opera, which is great) and thus bypassing the M$ problem in its entirety).

Someone wants you to have -1 -- for what reasons, I ask? This is getting like Wikipedia, trolls as moderators and no controls against vandalization. /. better fix that before it's late. Look at Reddit for hints on how to improve.

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone wants you to have -1 -- for what reasons, I ask?

Simple. He's posted this no less than 20 times to this discussion. Hence it's incredibly redundant.

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

But 64 bit opera's great news.

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows & MacOS X today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, it is, TRULY, good stuff!!!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... THAT seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

IE9 still limited to Vista/7

[JDG1980]

Too bad that they're still not backporting IE9 to XP, which continues to have a massive market share, especially on the corporate desktop. This really annoys me as a web developer, since it means that until after 2014 (when XP support officially ends) we cannot use CSS3 features and SVG images and expect them to work for everyone.

*Yes, I know, graceful degradation. But management wants those nice rounded corners and drop-shadows to appear in IE8, not just Firefox and Chrome. Using css3pie helps a bit, but it's not bug-free, and in many cases special debugging still needs to be done for IE. And I don't know of any effective workaround to display SVGs in IE8 without making everyone download a plugin.

Re:IE9 still limited to Vista/7

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that it matters, XP is falling into the same category IE6 has been in for ages. Most people have moved on, with only a few holding out. In 5 years, XP will be all but a tiny blip on the radar.

Re:IE9 still limited to Vista/7

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, only 5 years more! Are you an elephant or, perhaps, an ent, my good sir?

Re:IE9 still limited to Vista/7

[Anonymous Coward]

XP is as old as IE 6. Let it die.

But but but ... my ass. The only reason it is still used is because IE 6 requires it or the cost accountants figured their was no ROI which creates inertia forcing Dell and everyone else to keep supporting it etc etc.

XP is old, insecure, does not support trim/ssd drives, usb 3, and because it lacks ASLR, DEP, and other security enchancements all browsers are vulnerable and not as fully sandboxed running on that ancient kernel. A modern iCore5 will have a signficant performance decrease on it as Intel had to backport drives and the XP kernel can not scale well. It was designed in the 1990s afterall.

XP is dying fast in the US popular to popular believe it has not held 50% marketshare in this country in a year. It has 27% last time I looked and will have like 15% by next summer.

For MS to port IE 9/10 to XP they would have to implement UAC, ASLR, DEP, and other enchancements to make its safe site filtering work and other libraries. In essence it would cost so much you would in essence turn the kernel into Vista. That is a lot of work for a dying operating system that will fade to irrelevence next year as companies migrate to Windows 7 because of the 2013 EOL deadline. ... I hope you are wrong in that MS did not just extend XP support until 2014! It will never die otherwise as the inertia will keep XP alive longer and people should not run 15 year old software on new hardware. Does it make sense to run Windows 95 today? No. But running XP in 2014 is just that.

I would ignore your boss and tell him look, only 7% of the market uses these old browsers. The rest are in China and we do not run a Mandrin website.

Re:IE9 still limited to Vista/7

[toddestan]

Windows XP has slightly less than 50% of the Windows computers out there. It's replacement came out 5 years ago, and the replacement for its replacement came out 2 years ago. I have a feeling XP is going be around for a while yet.

Billing time!

[Reigo Reinmets]

This is super! This means that a lot of companies will finally bother, or at least consider it, to pay the development companies(and consultants) to replace or patch their old web based intranets and business softwares. This my friends means pretty soon we'll have a lot more work, which means we can bill them adequately(because you can say that this time we built it on the latest and greatest HTML5 standards)! Unless of course some manager decides it's simpler to let their IT department just opt out of the upgrade and pretend they will be OK for the next 10 years using IE6.

Re:Billing time!

[Billly Gates]

XP support will end in 2013 so they can't say 10 more years. Their employees may need web access and I smirked at a few comments here where users had to buy their own machines from home to do their job as Google docs, gmail, and other sites simply wont work with their IE 6. haha

My guess is that or they will use an emulator like some businesses do with rally to run 30 year old COBOL IBM 370 apps on the mainframe. IE 6 can run for many many decades like this. .... shudder ... our poor children will support it.

So these are the 2 paths. Lets hope IT gets it this time and tells app writers to stop writing for a particular version of a browser for $1,000,000 and start to use standards like CSS 3 and HTML 5 so in 2021 we can use IE 17 just fine when HTMl 6 is out, and our old HTML 5 app will still run. :-)

For that kind of money it was a very stupid investment decision to bet $1,000,000 or more for a platform that becomes obsolete on average every 2 - 3 years! Anyone every hear of life cycle management? Hello?!

Idiots

Do they FINALLY have Opera 64-bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks!

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks! Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks - Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since it works GREAT so far, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out!

[Millennium]

That's very nice, but I don't think Microsoft is going to be auto-upgrading its users to Opera 12 from any version of IE, and so it's not really in scope here.

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out!

[silanea]

Well, thank you very much for letting us know in just about every single thread in this discussion. That is so very kind of you.

Microsoft did this before, what is new?

[CaptainPhoton]

When IE8 came out, it was sent by default through the automatic updates on XP. To prevent installation, they offered an IE8 blocker tool.

Reading the article, there is still a blocker tool for people who don't want the latest update.

So, what is so different now and why is it a big deal?

I hope they don't auto-hide the menu bar!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in IT.

We leave "important updates" on auto-pilot.

The auto-update works well for our customers EXCEPT we keep getting calls about toolbars and menu bars disappearing.

I wish I could send Microsoft a bill for the time lost.

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks - Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since it works GREAT so far, AND, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Re:OPERA 64-bit version 4 MacOS X & Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it seems the only logical solution to not having your story accepted is to post the same damn post 6 or 7 times into the same story

It's as if a million web developers cryed from joy

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, if they manage to IE {6,7,8} (and 9?) to below 5%, We're finally saved from being forced to outdated backwards web development styles.

Then the only one still slowing us down, will be FF 3.x (the one before that fully-automated updating started).

Seriously guys, update your Firefox.
I know you love all your old behaviors, like no "awesome bar", the status bar, etc.
I do too!
But they are all available as extensions!
All.
What's not available though, is the new CSS3 features & co.
So please... update.
Thanks. :)

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X out today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks - Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since it works GREAT so far, AND, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk/b

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks - Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

Talk about a "BIG THANK-YOU" I've been waiting to give the folks @ Opera (since I'm a Windows 7 64-bit user here).

Anyhow/anyways:

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since it works GREAT so far, AND, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk/b

Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks - Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since it works GREAT so far, AND, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Opera 64-bit (4 independent smart people)

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been using it for around 3 hrs. now, & it rocks - Just in time for X-Mas 2011... & PER YOUR QUOTE HERE & MY SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE:

"Opera for the independent smart people" - by Toonol (1057698) on Thursday December 15, @01:47PM (#38386206)

You can download & read about 64-bit Opera for Windows & MacOS X, in these 2 links @ Opera:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/64-bit-opera-and-out-of-process-plug-ins/

or

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/12/15/64-bit-and-out-of-process-plugins-builds-now-available-on-labs

* COLOR ME "IMPRESSED"...

(Especially since it works GREAT so far, AND, especially for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I submitted this 2x to the "recent" section today & it disappeared BOTH times:

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881720/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

&

http://slashdot.org/submission/1881604/opera-goes-64-bit-for-windows-finally

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Re:OPERA 64-bit version 4 MacOS X & Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

APK N OPERA kick some ass!

People still use windows XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

so Microsoft is going to install Internet Explorer 8 on computers running Windows XP? Does anyone still use Windows XP? I thought Windows XP is outdated cause it came out like 10 years ago or something. I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just asking. Me, I use Windows 7 64 bit and a quad core Intel computer.

Re:People still use windows XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, I use Windows 7 64 bit and a quad core Intel computer.

Good for you, buddy.

Windows Vista came out in 2007 and it's nearly 2012. So any computer that's older than 5 years running Windows will probably be running XP. It would be kind of pointless upgrading an old computer anyway.

Re:People still use windows XP?

[fsck -fy]

Sure, why should people update a system which runs sufficiently smoothly by an OS infamous for its resource hoggage?

Re:People still use windows XP?

[Billly Gates]

Keep in mind just last year in 2010 BestBuy still sold netbooks with XP. Almost 2 years ago for a few months after Windows 7 was out. These users think XP is new because their computer is new.

Also corporations use XP because Vista sucked so bad. They upgrade PCs every 4 - 5 years and windows 7 is out less than half of those. That means they used XP and many medium to large corporate buyers who came later, bought the Windows 7 PCS and re-wiped them with XP because their software still requires it or IE 6.

XP is dying and is on its way out. It will be probably 2 more years before all but the largest corporations finally ditch it. For average Joes next year XP will start to trickle as they finally move to Windows 7.

Here's WHY Opera's VERY nice... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

FOR SPEED OPERA ROCKS! (Especially over time):

B.) For SPEED & Opera leads again there, & CONSISTENTLY + for the LONGEST TIME, yes, even in javascript for the LONGEST time, until FF's new engines took its place, albeit, only TEMPORARILY!

(Until Opera 10.50 @ least, because that's gotten a decent "boost" in that area -> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/22/1911216 (not that it matters though, speeding up javascript is like asking to get infected by malscripted sites &/or adbanners faster imo @ least - that of a "POV" of PC security, mostly)):

2.) SunSpider tests done here -> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/356350/on-test-the-hidden-seven-browsers-in-the-windows-ballot/145087 WHERE OPERA REGAINS ITS JAVASCRIPT PROCESSING SPEED LEAD OVER FF YET AGAIN!

OLDER DATA (on performance alone):

3.) And this one too last year also -> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302491,00.htm

4.) AND IT HAS BEEN "BLOWING AWAY" FIREFOX IN HTML PARSING/PROCESSING SPEEDS AS WELL, & FOR YEARS NOW, per this test years ago -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win

5.) Same here -> http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/

6.) Yet again/once more? Same story -> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/08/1750241/Opera-Dominates-CNET-Survey-of-Underdog-Web-Browsers

(Opera "rocked the planet" in those cases... bigtime (& ESPECIALLY ON THE MOST USED PLATFORM THERE IS, BAR-NONE, FOR PC-COMPUTING: Windows!))

====

ALSO, FOR SECURITY? YES - OPERA ROCKS (as far as unpatched security vulnerabilities):

---

Vulnerability Report: Opera 11.x (12/15/2011):

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/33328/

Unpatched 14% (1 of 7 Secunia advisories)

* Mind you, that over time? From all versions UP TO this current one just released today?? THIS IS USUALLY ZERO% & ZERO UNPATCHED!

---

Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.x (12/15/2011):

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/34591/

Unpatched 17% (1 of 6 Secunia advisories)

---

Vulnerability Report: Google Chrome 15.x (12/15/2011):

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/38537/

Unpatched 25% (1 of 4 Secunia advisories)

---

Vulnerability Report: Mozilla Firefox 8.x (12/15/2011):

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/38734/

Unpatched 100% (1 of 1 Secunia advisories)

---

A.) For SECURITY, OPERA ROCKS & HAS OVER TIME BIG TIME, usually @ ZERO unpatched security vulnerabilities AND zero unpatched sec. vulns counts period!

(& Opera leads there for the LONGEST TIME, yes, even in least security vulnerabilities found over time, typically of the "big 3" webbrowsers):

1.) iPhone, IE, Firefox, Safari get stomped at hacker contest -> (No Opera noted as "hosed" though, lol) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/25/pwn2own_2010_day_one/

B.) AND, WHAT DOES A "HACKER/CRACKER"-SECURITY RESEARCHER TYPE CURRENTLY SAY, ABOUT OPERA (per Opera's showing in #1 above)?

OK:

----

Re:Here's WHY Opera's VERY nice... apk

[Millennium]

Yes, and the fact remains that Microsoft is not going to auto-upgrade users of any version of IE to Opera. Since we're dealing with sticks in the mud who don't upgrade of their own volition, this leaves Opera sadly out of scope.

It's not my intent to knock Opera. It's a very nice browser. But it's not in the scope of this discussion.

Just "spreading the 'Good Word'" (Opera 64)

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially the 64-bit release for Windows (+ MacOS X too) today which only released a little while ago!

(Yes, I realize MS isn't going to upgrade users to Opera 64-bit too as you stated, but... had to "yell it from the rooftops" is all - )'ve seen others, like myself, who've waited for a full 64-bit release for Windows state that here on /. before is why I state this!).

* :)

(I'm just doing what I said in my subject-line above's all!)

APK

P.S.=> Glad to see you think this much of Opera in general though:

"It's not my intent to knock Opera. It's a very nice browser." - by Millennium (2451) on Thursday December 15, @03:59PM (#38388494) Homepage

It is, & what I put up in my 1st reply to you only substantiates that from reputable sites &/or tests done on it for SPEED & SECURITY over time... it truly is, "good stuff", & only getting BETTER, now that they've FINALLY released a 64-bit model (especially for Windows - I've been using 64-bit Windows 7 since its release, & waiting for this to happen... I haven't been disappointed so far in a few hours using it (stable, & FAST))...

... apk

Still no HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

MS have been actively slowing spreading of HTML5. Any open standard is poisonous for a monopoly. Even new IE does not understand HTML5, MS's tools dont produce HTML5 etc.

YES!

[cshark]

My friends, it's time for a conga line!

You're most welcome Silanea

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well, thank you very much for letting us know in just about every single thread in this discussion. That is so very kind of you." - by silanea (1241518) on Thursday December 15, @04:22PM (#38388892)

Per my subject-line above? Thanks! However, I rather STRONGLY QUESTION your "motivations" in your posting!

I state that, because this isn't a "1st" from YOU, silanea, in attempting to "troll myself" either, per these evidences of your doing that before to myself here on /. (or trying to, only to end up with "egg on your face" each time, lol):

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1755714&cid=33349528

* That's where others here pointed out that even Microsoft's SENIOR MGT. (one with CSC degree to his name no less) had to agree w/ things I stated... & you "fell silent" right after that. You had to. You were OUTGUNNED & OUTCLASSED (as well as outsmarted, with facts).

APK

P.S.=> So, if you're being sarcastic & trolling as you have TRIED doing to myself here on /. before, per the link above? Well, so much for that...

Heh, because you only ended up with your past haunting you once more here now, per that link above, merely showing you're a troll!

... apk

Great :)

[Anonymous Coward]

This is brilliant it means IE six will finally die and I think every web developer on the planet will sleep better at night know that. Also having only two IE versions IE 8 for xp and IE 9 for the others to test against will make life easier. I don't like IE myself but this is still an awesome move.

Boycott IE6 using companies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. If they will not employ some of the rafts of unemployed programmers out there to upgrade their intranet then they can die in a fire. The same also applies to schools that waste your taxes on forced IE usage.

You don't understand

[cvtan]

It takes months for big companies to verify that major software updates don't screw up their system. Microsoft Office was a biggie. For a while at work we could only legally use Internet Explorer, but we installed Netscape anyway. I never understood why we had to have a proprietary company version of Explorer. Maybe it was so all our security adjustment buttons would be grayed out. Yeah, that's it.

So we're all Microsofts bitches now

[JustNiz]

It may be a stupid decision to keep running an old version of IE (or to use any IE at all in the first place) but nevertheless its the right of the person who own's the PC's to decide and control what software is installed.
It is not Microsoft's decision to make.

Clearly Microsoft now think its OK to mess with your installed software without your permission. Who's to say what they will do next?
Silently uninstall any apps competitive to Microsoft?
Delete any files the RIAA, MPAA or any other large corporate who partners with them doesn't approve of?

An application of... "ReVeRsE-PsYcHoLoGy"

[Anonymous Coward]

".yad eht ees d'I thguoht reveN .dratluaP todhsalS egareva eht naht gniyonna erom dna ymmaps erom yllautca er'uoy ,woW" - by Anonymous Coward ANOTHER "ne'er-do-well" /. OFF-TOPIC TROLL on Thursday December 15, @05:04PM (#38389642)

"???"

Uhm... Could we get a translation of that off-topic "troll-speak/trolllanguage" of yours, please?

---

* And, you're an off-topic troll - no questions asked...SEE MY SUBJECT LINE ABOVE!

APK

P.S.=> Yes, it must have just have been another off-topic done nothing of significance with his life troll spewing his off-topic b.s. again & not contributing to the ongoing conversations. Oh well - No biggie!

("ReVeRsE-PsYcHoLoGy", for trolls - Courtesy of this code by "yours truly" in less than 1 second flat):

---

#TrollTalkComReversePsychologyKiller.py (Ver #2 by APK)

def reverse(s):
    try:
        trollstring = ""
        for apksays in s:
        trollstring = apksays + trollstring
    except:
        print("error/abend in reverse function")
    return trollstring

s = ""
print reverse(s)

try:
  s = "Insert whatever 'trollspeak/trolllanguage' gibberish occurs here..."
  s = reverse(s)
  print(s)
except Exception as e:
  print(e)

---

... apk"???"

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I have a general feeling why this is happening:

There are news today that Chrome 15 surpassed IE 8 in market share.

Long ago I noticed (as others did btw) how progressive are Firefox and Chrome adopters and how conservative are IE users. One just has to add 1+1 to know new IE versions were going to face a fierce fight against the other leading browsers. Having a significative slice of your market share running on an old version only makes the whole product look bad. Since XP folks (a great slice of their OS presence) cannot use IE 9 (apparently they can't make that happen), Chrome becomes the best option for those particular users. One you run Chrome on XP -- and browsers probably make up 80% of computer use, considering videos, webmail, banking, online games and, yes, Google Docs.

At work, I can more or less freely use Firefox. We even get subtle positive references as guides for internal software either clearly show FF screenshots or there is, at least, a FF icon on it. But I cannot keep Chrome update. The proxy/firewall won't allow it.

No upgrades means no Chrome (because an outdated Chrome is a risk... though I have one colleague who simply doesn't care and says the antivirus can catch everything bad... so he uses Chrome without updating... oh, well...).

Recently, whenever someone tries to log into Google Docs, a page comes up saying external "data repositories" are against security policies. So no Google Docs in this M$ shop, nananeena no!

Forced upgrade will keep some users with IE, I guess this is how the thinking goes. It's a great risk they run by incoveniencing the remaining IE6 users. If they make these people move, some might move outside M$ influence.

An Important Difference

[TheNinjaroach]

Firefox and Chrome can get away with pushing updates all day long because those updates aren't anywhere nearly as likely to break any existing website.

But Microsoft poisoned their own well with IE6. A forced upgrade means forced incompatibilities because their older stuff was (intentionally) so far off from the standards to begin with.

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a tool.

...apk

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out.

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't post in that format. Your attempt at imitation fails.

Did they ever stop to think

[Anonymous Coward]

That I don't use IE, and that's why it's never been upgraded?

Re:Opera 64-bit 4 Windows &/or MacOS X is out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on Opera 12 "Wahoo": I've been promoting it for around 3 hrs. now, & it's so obvious i'm trying to get some extra cash by posting this lots of times - Just in time for X-Mas 2011...

You can see this is the sort of thing i do, like how i got paid $100 for my post on a forum about HOST files

* COLOR ME "GREEN"...

(Especially since they are paying me GREAT so far, AND, i should get some good rep when i point out how good it is for a "round #1 64-bit release port" - Man, good stuff!)

APK

P.S.=> What I truly DON'T understand though, is that I troll and shill all the time & my posts get modded TROLL.

(Yet /.'s own SUBMISSION page states "we're powered by YOUR submissions", well... Seems to be untruthful "advertising" then on that account!)...

... apk

Fuck you APK

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to ask if he was 2 years old.

Seriously, how many times do you have to post this fucking bullshit APK? You aren't really going to get any more views at 0 than at -1. I browse at -1, but I can see your trash posts from a mile away and if I've seen one, I've seen them all. Nigger jokes are are more informative than your tripe.

Get a life, dumbfuck.

what are you doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Replying to APK with anything other than awestruck reverence is just setting yourself up for personal attacks and name calling.

You can't have a conversation with a cockroach.

I will sue them.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not supporting my version and I have all updates that I can shut down. They don't have the FUCKING RIGHT to invade my personal computer. Since they have discontinued their support for my version, I have no contract with them and they will be violating my life. I will sue them.

What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

What about those of us who have IE completely disabled? Also, we consciously choose to have chrome/ff auto-update. If this goes through, we have no choice.

Multiple IEs for windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this can help somebody

IE6 Ruined our lives

[xaccrocheur]

Noone seem to really remember those times. Were you even there? I remember vividly 1998/9. You HAD the choice. Everybody had. You COULD see that IE6 was a piece of shit. That it was NOT a web browser, but a really powerful attempt at taking over it (the web). It worked, BTW. It slowed the whole thing during 10 years. Companies now forced to let blood spill on the servers room ARE responsible for this. Microsoft too, but that's not the point. Stop whining and mop.

Re:IE6 Ruined our lives

[xaccrocheur]

Oh, and the way slashdot put "background : #fff" in the CSS rule of this very textarea I'm typing in demonstrates that a lot of "IT Gurus" still don't really fully graps what the heck it is that "teh web" is.

Re:IE6 Ruined our lives

[Billly Gates]

IE 6 was a great browser back in 2001. It just needed to die by 2003 when it was starting to age. IE 7 was more advertised as a Vista browser and was not ported to XP until later but by then it was too late. Cost accountants at work noticed they could save a fortune by being behind in the times and viewed upgrading as cost centers. Prior to 1999 they were viewed as assets as ways to outdo the competition by being up to date. That sealed IE 6s fate.

I hated IE for that very reason as I wanted Netscape to still succeed! I resisted using it for a few years.

Netscape 4.7 was worse than IE 6.I myself started using it in 2003 all the way until Mozilla Firefox was in beta.

It made logical sense for any business to use the cutting edge 2001 IE 6 browser before 2004. The mistake was that MS let is become insecure and left it out in the cold for dead and disbanded its IE team.

Sure Chrome 15 is out now and is a great browser and IE 10 is good too which will be out soon. ... however in 2021 I would be caught dead using these apps at their current version. They would blow goatballs as much as IE 6 does today. Keep in mind the hacked CSS was still brand new and never implemented before in 2001 when IE 6 was out. Netscape never supported CSS and the box model was standardized after IE 6 was in RC stage. This made rendering different requiring hacks but the W3c did not have the proper standard implementation yet. You can't blame MS for that back in 2001?

Re:I will sue them. (haha!)

[xaccrocheur]

This guy is for real, people. They really "think" like that. They *really* say things like "personal computer" whistl using windows in the first place. They do.

Alot of that 1.8% will be XP corporate machines

[Anonymous Coward]

MS backdoor?

20 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how's life in 2021?

geekpolice

[Anonymous Coward]

Please follow the officer to the line to the left where after filling the banishment forms you are required to turn in your geek card. And welcome to the early 2000's

Take your own advice Mr. No Balls, lol... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"Seriously, how many times do you have to post this fucking bullshit APK? You aren't really going to get any more views at 0 than at -1. I browse at -1, but I can see your trash posts from a mile away and if I've seen one, I've seen them all. Nigger jokes are are more informative than your tripe. Get a life, dumbfuck." - by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @05:50AM

Such an intelligent reply (not) from a "courageous unidentified ac", profanity & all: Are you trying to make me laugh?

(Face it: You can't stop me, and that's that, so... take your own advice and go "f" yourself.)

* Plus, face this also: Opera users like myself won't find what I put up here a "trash post"... Especially if they're unaware of a 64-bit build for Windows builds that are 64-bit too (such as I use here in Win7 64-bit)...

APK

P.S.=> In the end? You're truly pitiful, and yes, you DO make me laugh w/ your constant trolling of myself as an unidentified ac here on /.!

Yes - You're doing these ac stalking posts of myself ends up only showing us all that you have NO BALLS in doing it (what's it like living your life KNOWING you're truly a coward? "Inquiring minds want to know")... lol!

...apk

Then go away, cockroach

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can't have a conversation with a cockroach." - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15, @09:36PM (#38393062)

Which is why no one wants to speak to you, oh mindless one ("courageous" (lol, not) unidentified ac poster that you are)...

APK

P.S.=> Your near constant "daily stalking" of myself here on /.'s getting BORING - grow up, get a life, and quit being the cowardly insect you clearly are!

... apk

But, what about Cleartype?

[FlyveHest]

Basically, I don't really care about this upgrade (I don't use IE), and from a security standpoint, its a pretty good idea, but, I had IE9 installed, and removed it as it does not obey the general Windows ClearType setting.

"But, you don't use IE as a browser, so what?"

Problem is, a lot of programs use IE as their content renderer, and all of those will suddenly have ClearType enabled, and theres no way to disable it .. And I absolutely HATE! ClearType, I think it looks terrible.

Only way I found to disable it was to hack DLL files, and while this might work I find it a very un-elegant solution, and I would have to do this again and again after each update. :(

lolwut ?

[Anonymous Coward]

When did XP get a version of IE 9 ?!

Attempting to impersonate me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Per my subject: The "best you've got"'s attempting to impersonate me?

* LMAO - How WEAK!

APK

P.S.=> My original post here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2576256&cid=38387834 (before you copied & altered my original)?

Well... THAT still stands for those that use Opera & have been waiting, like myself, for a FULL 64-bit model to use in Windows 64-bit editions!

(Which so far for a day++ here now, works great! Yes, even with 64-bit Adobe Flash's "latest/greatest" build for it as well, this I am surprised on - it's a damned good "1st round port" from 32-bit to 64-bit!)...

... apk

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change good news (64-bit Opera 4 Windows & Mac is out)...

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News: 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out...

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News: 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out!

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News: 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out!!!

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News: 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out.

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News - 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out!

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News - 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out!!!

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News - 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out....

APK

All the moddowns in the world

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News - 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out.....

APK

All the moddowns in the world

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News - 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out......

APK

All the moddowns in the world

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News - 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out.......

APK

All the moddowns on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't change GOOD News - 64-bit Opera 4 Windows & MacOS X's out........

APK