Good riddance, Internet Explorer!
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As Internet Explorer enters end-of-life, Vivaldi co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner goes into its history and why its loss is not really a loss.
Click here to see the full blog post
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@varsha Fantastically interesting historical reading -- really enjoyed it, & learned from it.
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With WiFi, the web is almost free to use this days, so it's very important to have a good browser.
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@varsha I have very fond memories of Opera 7 (Bork!)
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I remember those times. I had a user-agent switcher button on the toolbar, so whenever some site didn't rendered correctly, immediately switch to IE and reload. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
People kept blaming Opera for not rendering sites correctly, it was difficult for them to understand that it is not Opera's fault, but sites being optimized for non-standard web of IE.
I'll never miss IE.
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Reading about the misbehaviour is infuriating. Good riddance indeed, but more important is to prevent this in the future.
How to achieve that, I don't know.
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@Steffie Indeed it is. Jon's experience and understanding of how these companies have worked is phenomenal.
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@TbGbe I am sure like you many others will have a thing or two to remember of Opera 7. It sure made an impression.
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Embrace, extend, extinguish - this is exactly how Google operates today, taking over standards bodies on account of their heaps of money and domination of the browser market, then changing the specs to fit their long-term plan of turning the web into an "app" they have complete control over.
Microsoft may have failed to take over the web, but Google is nearly there.
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@Pathduck said:
nearly
And is getting nearer with every second… It’s gonna be hard to stop them (& even harder to stop the next almost-winner).
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I learned some things, great article
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I got some bad news for you... they aren't ending IE 11 yet. It is explained here... https://youtu.be/dn6kPaDs9Ek?list=TLPQMTkwODIwMjAQrA0pmz1ivw
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People should say "Good riddance" to Microsoft in general due to their filthy past alone. Trying to list all their filthy tactics and their multiple convictions with fines of millions over the last 40 years would require a bible, CP/M theft and Kildall's tragic end, OS/2 fiasco & Windows 95 , Wordperfect, IE case & death threats to Netscape officials, OEM threats, to name the basics.
The denial of the company's split according to the imposed sentence for breaching antitrust laws, monopoly and killing other companies instead of competing with them which powerful lobbyists achieved in the antitrust law case United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp made them come out of it with just minor indifferent scratches, unpunished and in a more dominant and arrogant position than ever which lead them to what they are now, continuing their "Embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics even stronger (sudden love for open-source & Linux, -previously they were "cancer" in the words of Balmer- Windows Subsystem for Linux, github buyout, attempts to close the ecosystem with App Store and the PC platform with UEFI, enforced 24/7 telemetry silently backported to their previous OS's etc).
But as @Pathduck aptly said, Google is a threat of even bigger magnitude, it became what it was fighting with pride and overcame Microsoft:
Web by Google (TM)"Looking at Mozilla’s finances, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google is keeping them on life support to keep the anti-trust hounds at bay."
"Chrome’s ability to dictate web standards will only get stronger over time. Safari and Firefox have been able to apply some shame to Chrome on things like disabling third-party cookies, but soon it’ll just be Apple left with a voice."
"But Google doesn’t even need Chrome to dictate standards since it controls the Web’s front door. AMP, a technology no one asked for, is now on over 70% of all marketing websites for no other reason than Google said so."
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Why do news sites report IE as dead when all Microsoft did is to stop support on some of their specific sites - MS Teams and Office 365 in this case.
What about the real support - the bundling on Windows 8.1 and 10? According to their own site,Internet Explorer is a component of the Windows operating system and follows the Lifecycle Policy for the product on which it is installed.
so for 8.1 it is January 10 of 2023 and for 10, I don't know, indefinitely? Until further announcement, that is.
So until Edgium is the only built-in browser (or at least, a visible one, excluding Webviews for internal components) on a supported Windows system, it is too early to report death.
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@madiso It's true, IE is far from gone, but it's circling the drain
In Windows 10, even with IE "uninstalled" it still exists as various DLLs like
ieframe.dll
. There's just too many legacy applications still dependent on IE out there to completely remove all components, and it will likely hang around for a very long time in this form. And continuing to be a potential vector for various malware...Here's a "fun" experiment:
- Create a new dial on the start page of Vivaldi.
- Select Custom Thumbnail
- Instead of picking a file, paste a URL to an image, example
https://i.imgur.com/s3nIEsw.gif
- Examine
file_mapping.json
in the Vivaldi profile. - Thumbnail will be mapped to
AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows\\INetCache\\IE\\DXWPNZDT\\s3nIEsw[1].gif
Good ol' INetCache is still alive and kicking
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@potmeklecbohdan said in Good riddance, Internet Explorer!:
@Pathduck said:
nearly
And is getting nearer with every second… It’s gonna be hard to stop them (& even harder to stop the next almost-winner).
Yes but using a chromium based browser is not helping either..vivaldi,brave and all other chromium based browsers are just feeding the google monster but merely using a different sauce.
My concern is if firefox goes under and then google will have full control,however google will wish to keep firefox alive as it's lapdog so as to avoid any anti-trust legislation.
rather ironic really as firefox would of been king for a while if not for internet explorer.But then again criticising IE here is rather out of context as at that time there were not really any real contenders and best browser is subjective on personal experience.
Like i have said condemning google here is quite contradictory when using a chromium based browser.Any serious contention to google chrome would have to either create a complete new engine or a larger company than mozilla or a possible merge to vamp up firefox.
If percentages are anything to go by then chrome will not be equalled or topped but merely controlled so that we have an "illusion" of choice which google gives you at the moment..if google really wanted to eat the whole lot it would prevent chromium based browsers from even existing and making their chromium project exclusively theirs..they are just feeding us with the illusion of choice and openness..
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Presto is still way ahead of Chromium on low RAM usage. I remember helping to test browser.js for Opera (including Hotmail & when Google sent Opera broken code on gmail). Even Safari has site specific hacks.
Edge has IE in it for ancient corporate websites. (it is complicated to upgrade the systems & then train users)
There are still sites that are 100% Flash Player based.
"In memory of Geir Ivarsøy." is still on the Opera about page.
In my email signatures I still have:
Why Open the Web?
Despite the connecting purpose of the Web, it is not entirely open to all of its users.
When used correctly, HTML documents can be displayed across platforms and devices.
However, many devices are excluded access to Web content. -
Agree about IE and the past.
Disagree about the present and the nearest (hopefully only nearest!) future.The situation has changed, yes, but not as much as it is presented in the article.
What do we have now? The monopoly of damn Chrome!
Some websites are implemented in an idiotic way that they refuse to work normally on FF and for example Vivaldi (otherwise why has Vivaldi removed it's name from the user agent string for "compatibility" (lol)?) and asking to install the ugly Chrome.
Chromium is now the only standard!
So has the situation really changed that much?
There is no competition in engines, FF is slowly losing the number of users, Vivaldi/Opera/Cent/YouNameIt are all based and dependent on Chromium and Google, the browsers that use their own engines or approach (Otter and a few others) are very poorly supported and are being very slowly developed, or just disappear completely, and even if we imagine that at least one of them becomes stable and full-feature, there will definitely be some website compatibility issues, because Chromium is what we "need" and what is "required"!It's not standards, it's a take-over by Google and their Chromium.
Where is the normal competition between browsers and engines? Where is the choice? Where is Presto?
Presto-based Opera v2020 with a chromium'n'FF-extensions-support-layer - sounds like a science fiction story from the parallel universe.
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@lonm: Sadly, the only two currently-viable browser engines are Gecko (Firefox) and Webkit (pretty much everything else, including Chromium and thus Google Chrome and Vivaldi).
I don't understand why Vivaldi didn't fork off of Firefox instead of Chromium if they're really concerned about preventing a browser monoculture, although maybe Firefox wasn't a viable base back when Vivaldi first launched.
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@JohnConnorBear I think you are being very unfair in regard to mr von tetzcner.He made sound judgement in regard to which engine to use for vivaldi in terms of compatibility now and in the future.
yes indeed he had presto but you seem to incorrectly assume his motives are in parallel with google.
personally i have never used the opera of old and i used firefox or IE.For the record google didn't walk all over us with nailed boots or do people not know how to uninstall chrome.?..Chrome users had a choice and they chose perhaps unwisely to allow this prospective monopoly to occur.
it begs the question..why do chrome users or rather over 70% of web users choose that browser over others.
I just don't buy that a browser is forced upon people and uninstalling takes minutes.