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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."
Do they start with Australia and Brazil because they do not care about the users there?
I can't believe it's taken this long.
Haha, I guess a big thanks goes out to Australia and Brazil for being the beta testers. Thanks!
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
I think Microsoft is going to find plenty of issues trying to roll this out in the US.
I know there might be negative ramifications, but I'm glad to see this day arrive. The sooner old IEs die, the better.
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.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Because they are not running Windows updates. at all. And therefore this is not going to have an effect.
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."
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
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.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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.
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.
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Do they have IE9 for XP? Not last I checked...
"...after they have assured there are no issues..." Besides the faulty English, this little line sends shivers all over my spine.
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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.
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.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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. "
Really? When did this happen?
Slagborr
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.
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?
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.
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.
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There is a way to opt-out of the upgrade and also to downgrade if you happen to get it.
>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.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
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).
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Link for the opt-out tool: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=179
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
if it's web base and only works with IE8 i wouldn't call it "software" but rather a bandaid
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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.
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.
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.
---
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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)
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".
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.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
Maybe companies that make stupid "lock-in" decisions should reap the rewards of their own stupidity and short-sightedness.
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Maybe they'll roll out an auto-update of XP to Win7? I wonder how they'll handle the auto-debiting of bank accounts.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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
http://saveie6.com/
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
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.
Also, you can just disable auto-updates and go manual if you're technically inclined.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If they've got any sense at all they'll be using WSUS - can Microsoft override this? I wouldn't think so.
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.
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.
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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.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
My friends, it's time for a conga line!
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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
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?
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what version of IE are you talking about? IE 9 is quite good. I can make most pages work fine without resorting to
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.
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.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
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.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
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.
--
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.
The easiest way to get a troll comment rated informative around here is just to mindlessly bash MS.
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.
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You can remove Safari on OS X, or IE on Windows. But you can't remove WebKit on OS X, or Trident on Windows.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
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.
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!
http://saveie6.com/