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IE Standardization Fading Fast
alphadogg writes "Just as Internet users in general have defected in huge numbers from Microsoft Internet Explorer over the past several years, the business world, as well, is becoming less dependent on the venerable browser. Companies that used to mandate the use of IE for access to web resources are beginning to embrace a far more heterodox attitude toward web browsers. While it hasn't gone away, the experience of having to use IE 6 to access some legacy in-house web app is becoming less common. 'A lot of it has to do with the emergence of the modern web and the popularity of mobile. They have made it very different for companies to truly standardize on a browser,' says Gartner Research analyst David Mitchell Smith."
Without Microsoft nobody will be left to defend us from the Ubuntu £inux monopoly.
I've seen a lot of people start making this mistake again, but now it's the KHTML/Safari/Chrome/Opera engine, especially on mobile.
Let's hope companies also stop mandating the use of Shockwave and JavaScript, or at least let me use the web site without having to completely disable NoScript.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I don't believe IE ever deserved to be called venerable.
All of them specifically to convert IE only sites to support at least Firefox, Chrome, & IE. A few of them even specifically listed Safari. We may not have seen the cusp of the wave, but companies have definitely heard the message loud and clear, and are responding appropriately.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
I can't say when there was a time when "venerable" would describe Internet Explorer. It's pretty much been despised its whole existence.
No, and I'm not sure where he's from - I live in the US and none of the banks I've used in the last maybe 5 years have mandated IE 6 - at least not to the public. I worked for Big Ol' Bank for a spat and, up until recently, IE6 was the "must be compatible with" browser of choice, although not the only that we could use. So, our internal sites worked great on modern browsers, and maintained functionality in IE6 thanks to some good JS libraries and sacrificing some data-intensive tasks for people who couldn't get clearance to download a new browser. They've since done a push to install Windows 7 across the enterprise, but who knows when that will be done.
For every business that Gartner "knows" is dropping IE standardization, there are 100 it doesn't know about who are continuing to mandate IE use because they bought some legacy Web-based app that is only used internally, and the people who wrote that app were too lazy or incompetent to write it in actual HTML (as opposed to "we played with it until it worked in this browser, so this is what your users must use").
My favorite example of a web-app developer who knew virtually nothing about HTML but shipped what "worked" had every single element on the page absolute-positioned with CSS. What looked like a simple table of 30 rows of data on the screen was actually hundreds of DIVs that had been rendered on the fly by the server with absolute position coordinates for each one. Even INPUT elements that were invisible had absolute positions calculated for them. Every time someone loaded a page, the server would calculate the offset for each "cell" in the table so it would look like a table, and for dozens of invisible form elements so they wouldn't collide with the table. The billion-dollar non-tech company that bought this couldn't figure out why the server frequently became unresponsive... They actually bought a second server from the developer and a load balancer to get around the fact that the developer didn't understand basic HTML, and have been using the app for 7 years. When I explained the problem to them, they reasoned that it would cost them more to ask the developer to do it properly that to just add additional servers as needed. They will probably be using it for the next 20 years. And the login page states that it requires IE.
Often this type of app lives on an internal server that will never be updated because the company doesn't want to pay for something that works well enough, but serves some essential purpose that hundreds or thousands of employees are required to use daily. IE standardization will die out in consumer applications long before it goes away in businesses. Microsoft knew this is how most businesses approach computers, and it's the reason the Windows/Office/IE monopoly was so successful. It's the reason Microsoft is still successful despite the Ballmer decade.
Query post works in IE, it's just that IE was written by retards and will actually do something no browser written by intelligent humans would ever do: cache Ajax POST calls. Yes, they actually treat POSTs like they are fucking idempotent calls. I shit you not. I assume this was in some misguided attempt to make up for the shitty performance of their browser. This caused a problem in a web app we wrote and it took a while to figure out because it never occurred to us that any browser could be this fucking stupid, but IE managed to exceed our expectations. jQuery has built in cache busting for ajax calls but it only works for GET calls, so we had to add in our own to resolve it.
I have not checked to see if this is something that has been resolved in recent iterations of IE (9 or 10).
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
So instead: this is hopefully a sign that, in the world of computing, monopolistic practices will give way to healthy competition.
There we are, tentative but hopeful!
Nice to see that typical snide attitude of "but our site is certified for IE 6, so use it" that was so common among web developers getting its comeuppance by the CEO's latest smartphone. I would have given a dollar to be there every time one of them was told to his face that his site needed to become cross-platform, and pronto. I can only imagine the weeping and gnashing of teeth as the web developer fearfully installed Firefox and Opera and began to learn that awful vocabulary "cross-platform".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sad, isn't it? People are *still* talking about standardizing on browsers instead of enforcing adherence to standardized markup languages.
C|N>K
There is in fact legislation in Korea requiring the use of an ActiveX control as an anti-Phishing measure, and there has been since the 1990's, in order to implement the SEED encryption algorithm in a captive frame; here is a report on it: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/12295718818/south-korea-still-paying-price-embracing-internet-explorer-decade-ago.shtml
Similarly, Chinese banks implement an alternate ("software clipper chip") asymmetric key encryption, also in a captive browser frame.
The software that initially implemented this was developed in Germany, and there are a number of major banks all over the world which require ActiveX controls to implement secure banking. This is why if you search for "banking activex firefox" or "banking activex safari" or "banking activex opera", you will see lively discussioms with people bitching about not being able to do banking.
Now, there have been several researchers who have published exploits, which indicate, that it's possible to attck through the ActiveX control, and therefore this type of thing in reality provides no security any longer. But moving a bank or a government is like trying to move a mountain.
Before you fault them, realize that when you are logging into your Google account, you are also doing so in a captive browser frame -- which is why there aren't programmatic ways to log into Google accounts.
I seriously doubt it. WinRT is a horrible mobile OS, maybe with WinRT +1, but it's current incarnation has enough loose ends to make Gnome 3 look polished.
"We need to spend money to get rid of IE" doesn't fly with management.
"You can't run that on your iPad because it needs IE" however, does.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.