Microsoft to Kill Internet Explorer 11 Once and for All in 2022

[TheUn4seen]

The company I'm doing a thing for right now, which is one of the largest Japanese corporations, has a vast Intranet where their employees have to do basically everything, from checking cafeteria menus to requesting reimbursement for delegations or sick leaves, not to mention most of the company-wide accounting which is freakishly complex and convoluted is done through it. The whole Intranet only works in IE. Not even in Edge with compatibility. There are layers upon layers of legacy stuff which was probably horrible when it was new and now it's just pure undocumented garbage.
I might be cynical, but I can't shake the feeling Microsoft is doing the "pay us A LOT of money for extended support or your stuff will stop working" again. For consumers it's "meh", but I'm sure there are corporate admins who swear a lot more than usual right now.

 

[Camm]

You have to understand that things move much slower in the enterprise sector than in the home user/small business market, hence why many if not most enterprises are still transitioning from W7 to W10 (and why Microsoft still offer paid support for W7 enterprise). And in the Enterprise sector Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, it's the one browser based applications are designed to work with first and foremost with thousands of browser based applications not running properly (or in many cases at all) in Edge/Chrome/Firefox.

To put this in perspective, the main reason W8 Enterprise failed wasn't anything to do with ugly GUIs/etc like with the Home/Pro editions, it was because you couldn't install Internet Explorer 9.0 on it, you were limited to IE10 or above and at that point in time Internet Explorer 9.0 was still the defacto standard browser for enterprises. The biggest driving force behind W10's success in enterprise has been browser based apps releasing IE11 compatible versions allowing organisations to move to W10.

I'm a Systems Architect by trade, the trope of 'things move slower in the enterprise sector' simply boils down to a refusal to acknowledge that IT is a Opex intensive cost requiring continual investment.

 

[Vayra86]

I'm a Systems Architect by trade, the trope of 'things move slower in the enterprise sector' simply boils down to a refusal to acknowledge that IT is a Opex intensive cost requiring continual investment.

This, but its a perspective that does need to grow even in companies. Wasn't always the case. You'd manage your own mainframe and that'd be that, you have your inside knowledge and the supplier was somewhere way in the background. Today, the supplier of an application or service is a key component of your IT environment, and its a per-item choice of what you keep on-premise and what you move elsewhere.

But even today... we're knee deep in continuous improvement cycles but still business management is keen to think in old timelines, thinking they can happily break and make things muddier over time with change upon change and then still have something that is cost effective and possible to maintain. Its really not, and with that approach, even agile teams and flexible applications eventually get filled with bullshit they can never fix themselves out of. End result: new migration, new application, another grand reset, and more IT work for me. Another cool one they keep trying to 'fix things' or 'be more agile' is to put more abstraction layers over a core application for different business lines or target markets. Single point of entry has now become single point + manage the change through a dozen other systems and suppliers, and every time somebody gets the grand idea to insert a tiny little thing that's just different enough to not make it single point Its like we're still not quite up to speed on the fact that whatever wheels we invent, they'll always be circles.

 

[insane 360]

agree with the others in comments, lots of things in the industry are never easy to upgrade or get approval for upgrade, doesn't mean its right or wrong, just the way it is...

i've gotten most of my functionality for these legacy devices through palemoon and (either the last real release of Flash or amazon's spin of java...etc even silverlight)

maybe one day everyone will have buckets of money or these company's will give free upgrades to us

 

[Wirko]

The company I'm doing a thing for right now, which is one of the largest Japanese corporations, has a vast Intranet where their employees have to do basically everything, from checking cafeteria menus to requesting reimbursement for delegations or sick leaves, not to mention most of the company-wide accounting which is freakishly complex and convoluted is done through it. The whole Intranet only works in IE. Not even in Edge with compatibility. There are layers upon layers of legacy stuff which was probably horrible when it was new and now it's just pure undocumented garbage.

I feel almost too scared to even ask ... is the main culprit called "ActiveX"?

I might be cynical, but I can't shake the feeling Microsoft is doing the "pay us A LOT of money for extended support or your stuff will stop working" again. For consumers it's "meh", but I'm sure there are corporate admins who swear a lot more than usual right now.

MS may be evil but they aren't evil because of that. If they decide to demand a lot of money for IE support, like they are doing for Windows 7, I say they are doing the right thing.

This, but its a perspective that does need to grow even in companies. Wasn't always the case. You'd manage your own mainframe and that'd be that, you have your inside knowledge and the supplier was somewhere way in the background. Today, the supplier of an application or service is a key component of your IT environment, and its a per-item choice of what you keep on-premise and what you move elsewhere.

But even today... we're knee deep in continuous improvement cycles but still business management is keen to think in old timelines, thinking they can happily break and make things muddier over time with change upon change and then still have something that is cost effective and possible to maintain. Its really not, and with that approach, even agile teams and flexible applications eventually get filled with bullshit they can never fix themselves out of. End result: new migration, new application, another grand reset, and more IT work for me. Another cool one they keep trying to 'fix things' or 'be more agile' is to put more abstraction layers over a core application for different business lines or target markets. Single point of entry has now become single point + manage the change through a dozen other systems and suppliers, and every time somebody gets the grand idea to insert a tiny little thing that's just different enough to not make it single point

I subscribe to all of that. Integration of applications and services and things is an ever-increasing part of IT work, and it requires some long-term thinking and planning. So anti-agile, isn't it?

Its like we're still not quite up to speed on the fact that whatever wheels we invent, they'll always be circles.

Take a look at these impractical wheels. Whatever your experience in IT is, you may see a relation.

I'm a Systems Architect by trade, the trope of 'things move slower in the enterprise sector' simply boils down to a refusal to acknowledge that IT is a Opex intensive cost requiring continual investment.

It's not bad per se if many things move slower in the enterprise sector (and may I add, the public sector). But it sure is bad when things stop moving altogether because IT managers have no plans to get rid of the obsolete parts of the system, even though they know very well what these parts are.

 

[S@LEM!]

oh no, how we can control our Avaya systems and reporting without it.
let's hope there will be a way to manually enable it

 

[R-T-B]

to manually enable it

There is. It's called virtual machines.

 

[newtekie1]

If you are wondering how the company plans to migrate a plethora of apps from needing IE, Microsoft is preparing Internet Explorer compatibility mode on its Edge browser. That way it ensures that all of the existing applications would run under the Edge browser and that old and insecure piece of code is removed from Windows.

So when they say "kill off internet explorer" they really mean keep it alive but use the Edge GUI with it.

 

[lexluthermiester]

So when they say "kill off internet explorer" they really mean keep it alive but but use the Edge GUI with it.

Except that Edge is based on COMPLETELY different code. IE compatibility will come from MS working it into the custom Chromium code they've developed. It is possible, but will take a delivered effort.

 

[newtekie1]

Except that Edge is based on COMPLETELY different code. IE compatibility will come from MS working it into the custom Chromium code they've developed. It is possible, but will take a delivered effort.

If they are keeping the rendering engine, and I can't see how they would do it another way, then it basically is IE in the Edge skin and isn't really getting rid of IE or fixing the problem. There are already extensions that let you run IE in the Chrome GUI, and entire alternative browsers that run IE in a different GUI. But the shit rendering engine and ActiveX are the problem, and they can't feasibly get rid of those and keep the compatibility they are promising.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
I killed ie11 off 4 years ago for firefox.
Edge of a cliff well even chredge isn't going to make any difference on that one still lame and unused.

 

[Wirko]

If they are keeping the rendering engine, and I can't see how they would do it another way, then it basically is IE in the Edge skin and isn't really getting rid of IE or fixing the problem. There are already extensions that let you run IE in the Chrome GUI, and entire alternative browsers that run IE in a different GUI. But the shit rendering engine and ActiveX are the problem, and they can't feasibly get rid of those and keep the compatibility they are promising.

I noticed this in the linked MS blog:

Note: This retirement does not affect in-market Windows 10 LTSC or Server Internet Explorer 11 desktop applications. It also does not affect the MSHTML (Trident) engine.

and in the FAQ:

The MSHTML (Trident) engine is the underlying platform for Internet Explorer 11. This is the same engine used by IE mode and it will continue to be supported (in other words, unaffected by this announcement). WebOC will also continue to be supported. If you have a custom or third-party app that relies on the MSHTML platform, you can expect it to continue to work.

IE mode supports all document and enterprise modes, Active X controls (such as Java or Silverlight), and more.

So basically Microsoft is fixing the mess by deleting iexplore.exe.

 

[newtekie1]

So basically Microsoft is fixing the mess by deleting iexplore.exe.

So they are keeping the actual problem alive and this really doesn't do much.

 

[chrcoluk]

If they do remove it fully from the OS then bye bye to my quick launch (yes this still works on win 10).

For some reason the quick launch feature seems to be part of IE, when adding it to win 7 and newer, the process to enable it requires you to navigate to "%APPDATA%\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch" Which for some reason seems to be part of IE integration.

 

[lexluthermiester]

If they do remove it fully from the OS then bye bye to my quick launch (yes this still works on win 10).

For some reason the quick launch feature seems to be part of IE, when adding it to win 7 and newer, the process to enable it requires you to navigate to "%APPDATA%\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch" Which for some reason seems to be part of IE integration.

Not everyone uses Quick Launch. However, I don't think it will be affected. Windows Explorer(file manager) looks to the folder you mentioned for shortcuts but doesn't actually need Internet Explorer present. I know this because IE is removed from every installation of Windows I do and Quick Launch continues to function as intended.

 

[newtekie1]

Not everyone uses Quick Launch. However, I don't think it will be affected. Windows Explorer(file manager) looks to the folder you mentioned for shortcuts but doesn't actually need Internet Explorer present. I know this because IE is removed from every installation of Windows I do and Quick Launch continues to function as intended.

Yeah, it's just a folder. The program can be gone and the folder still exist.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Quick launch
I always considered pin to taskbar the quickest to open something beside desktop icons if taskbar gets too cluttered.