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Please Stop Using Internet Explorer, Microsoft Says (mashable.com)
Microsoft cybersecurity expert Chris Jackson recently published a post on the official Windows IT Pro blog, titled "The perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser." Jackson urges users that it's time to stop using its old web browser, a product Microsoft officially discontinued in 2015. From a report: In his post, Jackson explains how Microsoft customers still ask him Internet Explorer related questions for their business. The fact of the matter is that while most average internet users have moved on to Google Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft's Edge, some businesses are still working with older web apps or sites that were designed for Internet Explorer. Instead of updating its tech, many companies have chosen to just keep using the various enterprise compatibility modes of Microsoft's old web browser. But, Jackson says "enough is enough." It's time to event stop calling Internet Explorer a web browser.
Nothing new. Microsoft also spent a long time getting everyone to use Office Professional, and now it's actively trying to migrate people to Office 365. Microsoft's biggest competitor has since the 90s always been itself.
Now that IE is officially not fit for use on the public web, the question is how do we get people to stop using it?
Attrition. Internet Explorer's market share hasn't gone up once in the past 10 years. Even companies are moving away from that, often forced by their vendors to do so.
We need a really popular website to not support IE to make the phaseout happen.
NO!!! WE ABSOLUTELY DO NOT! Absolutely none of these problems should ever be solved by forcing some selective non-standard behaviour on the internet. We're only just recovering from the last time this shit happened. Absolutely no non-standard action should be taken. IE will die a natural death as it is no longer being developed while standards continue to evolve.
The problem will solve itself, give it time.
I wanted to view the contents of an xml file yesterday so I clicked on it in File Explorer and guess what it opened in: yup, Internet Explorer. It was the first time I'd seen IE since the Vista days. I was connected to the Internet so, needless to say, I closed it down quickly and used Notepad++.
But, really, Microsoft! [i]You[/i] install it, [i]you[/i] make it a default, then you tell us not to use it?! I feel an event stop coming on...
Garry Knight
It isn't an overnight, or even over decade, process to remove all legacy apps from a business, and the bigger the business it's harder to remove "obsolete" software. I guarantee you that there are many big corporations out there still reliant on 16 bit or even DOS software (I don't mean "To control this real time piece of hardware", I mean to run something that was written in 1983 and nobody has been able to set the process in motion of getting it rewritten.)
Now, before you start blaming GM, Sears, Edison, or whatever company you feel is being ignorant by not rewriting all their software using the latest Rust frameworks, and I agree they do share the blame, Microsoft's intention by introducing ActiveX was to get this kind of lock-in. They knew how businesses worked, how big corporations worked in particular, and how smaller businesses needed to be compatible with the big corporations. This is why they actively encouraged people to write "web" software using a technology that gave them full access to the Windows API.
They knew that once a bigger corporation made the decision to build a giant application architecture based on ActiveX, the company would be locked into ActiveX, and Windows, for decades. That IT directors would almost certainly be opposed to rewriting it, but even if they supported the idea, IT directors would have massive difficulty persuading their superiors to support projects to replace a working technology with something functionally identical at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, and even if it passes that hurdle, the average megacorp is so wrapped up with bureaucracy and politics such projects would be unlikely to succeed, being killed by replacement IT managers, or dying with the next company wide reorganization.
Microsoft made this problem and they really have to fix it. Short of creating a cross platform plug-in that implements a 32 bit ix86 VM that includes most of Windows 98 in it, I don't see them doing that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I blame Microsoft for creating ActiveX in the first place.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."