Microsoft to Force IE7 Update on February 12th

Z80xxc! writes "InfoWorld is reporting that on February 12th, Microsoft will roll out Internet Explorer 7 through Windows Server Update Services to all systems - regardless of whether or not the update had been requested previously. The piece also mentions ways to prevent the update from occurring, for sysadmins who do not want to use IE7 on their systems. Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."

Good in some ways...

At least now there is only IE7 to support - IE6 should quickly fall from use.

Re:Good in some ways...

Except I can guarantee that at least one of my clients will cling doggedly to IE6, just to piss me off...

Re:Good in some ways...

Probably because they are in the same boat we are, we implemented a large financial system last year and went to the newest available version and yet it still isn't certified with IE7, between that system and our document management system it will probably be years before we can run IE7. The financial system is going through its first year end right now so we are still tweaking and optimizing it, I can't imagine doing an upgrade just so we can support IE7!

Re:Good in some ways...

That's why you don't implement for IE at all. You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards, and then make little tweaks to fix IE displays. Doing anything else puts you in a world of hurt.

Re:Good in some ways...

I believe he was pointing out the shortsightedness of the company that designed said system. I don't know about anyone else's site, but between Firefox 2 and IE7, that's just under half my site's visitors right there (49.48% for the month of January as of 6am this morning).

Re:Good in some ways...

In software development Implementation is the phase where a system is being deployed, it is not a phase where you develop the system.

That really depends on where your culture got its vernacular.

In research and academia, you implement a design or algorithm by writing code. You then deploy your implementation when you install it for your users.

In marketing and some production groups, "implement" is a synonym for "roll-out" or "deploy". Near as I can tell, they don't have a word that makes a distinction between designing software and actually coding it up. This causes no end of confusion in meetings between marketing groups and research groups.

Re:Good in some ways...

It's a difference in how they fail to support standards. While there are bugs in WebKit, Gecko and Opera, most of the time they don't support a particular feature of CSS they simply ignore it. IE, in contrast, often does completely the wrong thing. It's easy to design web sites for browsers that partially support the spec since HTML and CSS were both designed with graceful failure in mind. It's much harder to support a browser that implements the spec wrongly unless you do it at the expense of browsers that implement it correctly.

Re:Good in some ways...

The grandparent isn't talking about HTML/CSS concerns. That would be silly. I'm assuming that his document management system uses ActiveX controls or some Microsoft proprietary features to improve the interface. They could also be doing SSO to IIS which can be difficult with a non-MS browser.

Yeah it's short sighted to rely on a browser that you can't install and uninstall like a regular application. But it's understandable that people will be upset that IE7 is being forced.

Re:Good in some ways...

You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards

Last time I checked, none of these browsers are 100% compliant on most W3C standards.

Yeah, and nobody's perfect, so we should all be killed. Kidding aside, standards support is not a binary property, and I shouldn't have to point out that there's a world of difference between something that's 95% correct and something that's 5% correct.

IE7 is far more standards compliant than IE6, so I would think if you're truly worried about standards compliance in Internet Explorer, you'd welcome the upgrade.

...and 35% is a much greater percentage than 10%! IE7 is still much worse on standards than pretty much any other browser worth mentioning. The fact that IE7 still manages to be that much better than IE6 should simply give you an indication of how bad IE6 is (it's very very bad). So, while it would be nice if IE6 never existed and they skipped straight to IE7 in 2000 or so, that's not what happened, and now we're stuck with adding in a whole new host of workarounds for IE7, because it still doesn't render pages correctly a non-trivial amount of the time, provided that you want to support IE at all.

On the opposite end of the scale, I can develop a page in Konqueror (which is very standards compliant), and then check it in Firefox and Opera, and not end up needing to make any changes, because everything works the same. Checking in IE will almost certainly result in IE producing something largely wrong, but at least IE6 is a relatively known commodity [positioniseverything.net], with a well known set of workarounds. IE7 on the other hand is still largely undiscovered. Given Microsoft's past and the fact that they have no reason to produce a browser that doesn't suck, don't be surprised when people treat a new release of IE with scorn.

Not supporting IE at all is, without a doubt, the easiest approach. Supporting IE6 but not IE7 is still easier than supporting both IE6 and IE7. Supporting IE7 but not IE6 probably won't be feasible for most people for several years yet.

Firefox is the closest, but Opera and Safari are in no way better than IE when it comes to implementing standards.

I don't really test in Opera, but limited experience shows that to compare it to IE is no less insulting than comparing Firefox to IE. Konqueror (and presumably Safari, given that it was forked from Konqueror (or rather, KHTML)) is generally better about standards than Firefox, and unquestionably better than IE. Firefox is compatible with more pages on the general Internet than Konqueror, because it tries to emulate a lot of IE quirkiness, but that doesn't push it any closer to following standards.

Re:Good in some ways...

I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's a good idea to use IE as an application platform. Sure standard HTML forms with CSS are fine, but why would you rely on IE specific features? You know that in a few years when MS reworks IE that you are going to have to rework your application to work on it. Also, there's a lot of other issues like limiting your user base.

Re:Good in some ways...

Also, there's a lot of other issues like limiting your user base.

This has always frustrated me. A well-implemented web-based solution will run on literally anything. It doesn't matter if you've got Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BSD, or what. You just need a (mostly) standards-compliant browser. You'd think companies would love that.

Instead, you've got all these web-based applications that only work on IE and then break when a new version comes out.

Re:Good in some ways...

If your corporate IT department didn't know about IE7 they should be sacked. Hell if your bigger than about a hundred users and you have auto-authorize turned on in WSUS they should probably be sacked. I knew about the IE7 GPO setting back when IE7 went into public beta and put the block in place back then, so even if a user happens to have local admin (not many do here) they can't install the update.

Re:Good in some ways...

Damn straight Active X is solely responsible for what percentage of viruses in the past 9 years since it's introduction? 50-60% more?

Coding for Active X is stupid because it is a virus magent. poorly designed, lots of buffer overflows, etc, etc.

design to standards and you will won't have nearly as many problems.

Re:Good in some ways...

It's not so good -- Win2k and 98 will still be affected. And they're quite widespread -- Win2k in bigger corporations, Win98 in smaller businesses. Private computers tend to use XP, mostly of questionable legality. And of those who run XP, a vast majority seems to have updates disabled.

And even if everyone switched from IE6 to IE7 overnight, it's still a steaming pile of crap. Sure, it may be mere bullshit instead of military-grade toxic sludge, but either version makes me glad I don't have to do webmonkeying for a living.

Re:

The quicker Microsoft gets rid of non-standard software, the better the alternatives work. I know there's quite a bit of sites that don't work under firefox, but the user doesn't have a choice (like my parent's payroll site at the gov't). While IE7 is st

Re:Good in some ways...

If you are so head-in-the-sand where Windows security is concerned, perhaps a switch to Linux makes more sense for you and everyone (customers, clients, etc) in your immediate corporate environment.

I hope you don't have a similar attitude where Linux updates are concerned.

Re:Good in some ways...

If you are so head-in-the-sand where Windows security is concerned...

Anyone truly worried about Windows' security would not be running Windows.

Re:Good in some ways...

Seriously, that's fine. You keep using IE 6 all you like. Just bear in mind that once your preferred broken browser is in the minority, us web developers will stop spending hours or days at a time going out of way to make our sites not look and work like complete and total ass in it.

The standards were created so that we didn't have to do that for every site that gets built, and by and large they apply--except for IE 6 and IE 7 (IE 7's so much better than IE 6, though; it's a breeze in comparison).

So yeah... you use IE 6. Then you'll discover how its rendering engine really copes with standards-compliant mark-up (hint: it's not pretty).

Re:

Er, what he said was "IE7 WILL NOT be going on any of my machines", not that he will use IE6. Updating MSIE replaces a bunch of system files as well, even though you don't use the sorry-excuse-for-a-browser at all. I have yet to see a case when version X

Re:Good in some ways...

For a while that's pretty much been the case: browsers that render standards-compliant mark-up and CSS without a good deal of tweaking are in the majority. IE 6 sits somewhere between 30% and 40% of the visitor share for e-commerce sites in the UK (our target market), so it's been the case for some time that standards-compliant mark-up hits the majority. The problem is, of course, that 30-40% is a hell of a lot of people, and so the hassle of the IE 6-specific workarounds still has to be endured until it drops to the sort of percentages we see for earlier versions.

Firefox, Opera, Safari, and the various other Gecko/KHTML/WebKit derivatives aren't on their own significant enough to warrant special treatment, but taken together (which makes sense, as they generally adhere to the same standards) they're a pretty persuasive argument for standards-compliant mark-up: especially when you take into account the fact that IE 7 isn't remotely as bad at dealing with it as IE 6 is.

Re:

> IE7 WILL NOT be going on any of my machines

Why on earth not? IE 7 is *SO MUCH* better than IE 6 it's ridiculous.

IE 6 is so bad that I can't understand why anybody would NOT want to upgrade as soon as IE 7 came out.

IE 6 is an seven year old web browse

Re:Good in some ways...

IE 6 is so bad that I can't understand why anybody would NOT want to upgrade as soon as IE 7 came out.

Because most vertical web apps are so poorly written that they rely on the bugs and problems in IE6 to function. Almost every single app I had to manage at my last job was IE6 specific and written by a bunch of blathering idiots, I regularly went into the asp code to fix something they said cant be fixed.

Most companies buy the low grade dog food webapp suites as they have no other choice and then they are stuck having to support it's quirks until that company actually hires competent programmers or someone else comes along and makes something different.

Take that Firefox!

Now we'll see which browser has the greatest growth rate in January!

Re:Take that Firefox!

Tumours can have high growth rates too, doesn't make them a good thing :p

translation

Microsoft claims that the decision was made due to 'security concerns'."

So this means they're feeing insecure about their market share?

Go firefox!

Yes, finally! Get rid of IE6

IE6 is a huge pile of ******. These days, whenever I write a website, the procedure is always like this:
1. Test website in Firefox initially.
2. Verify that it works in Opera.
3. Verify that it works in Konqueror.
4. Verify that it works in Safari.
5. See it totally break down in IE6.

IE6 has too many rendering bugs. It's the sole cause of hours and hours of lost productivity. It's about time that it dies. IE7, although not as standards compliant as... uhm... pretty much every other browser on earth, is orders of magnitude better than IE6. People should be forced to use IE7 (or Firefox, or Opera, or whatever; just not IE6).

Re:Yes, finally! Get rid of IE6

> Unfortunately, we still have clients who insist on using Windows 2000 (which can't run IE 7). Thankfully, they don't stick to IE 5.5 and complain that the sites "don't look right"

Ok, I'm not at work today but let's just pretend like I am...

1. Fires up IE

2. These sites just don't look right in this ;-)

3. Things are updated as far as they can be.

4. Oh yeah that's right NT 4.0.

Damn you microsoft.

Re:IE7 is better?

The funny thing is that I've had quite a number of pages that worked fine in IE6, worked fine in firefox (and others), but totally bombed in IE7.

These pages are probably detecting that you are using IE, and enabling ugly IE6 hacks (or more likely the sites are "designed for IE6", and only enable the standards compliance hacks when they detect Mozilla/Firefox and perhaps Safari and Opera. Nothing is perfect, but IE7 is miles better than IE6 when it comes to standards compliance and rendering CSS properly.

Web developers

What's with web developers that have to test html code on IE6? It's really a shame for MS that you can't have IE6 and IE7 installed side by side (I know it IS somehow possible, but that's way too complicated and not the point here). To bad that you always need a second (virtual) machine, just to test html code. And now they are forcing the upgrade...Stupid.

Re:Web developers

We have to test with IE6 as our clients demand it. Of the couple of sites that I've done since starting here, all of the corporate big wigs that sign the payment checks use IE6. So what is pretty simple to do with IE7 or any other browser we have to spend 3x the time checking things out with IE6. Then go back to more modern browsers and make sure none of the hacks we put in affected those browsers.

And it's actually very easy to install multiple versions of IE. See here [tredosoft.com]. It's a nice, tidy installer.

iptables

iptables -A INPUT -s update.microsoft.com -j DROP
at least for a month

Silverlight

Will this upgrade also include a (forced) installation of Silverlight?

Re:Silverlight

Doubtful, Silverlight is already a recommended updated so I doubt they'd bundle it. It's got some nice tricks up its sleeve, especially compared to Flash when it comes to tying in with AJAX.

Good for them

I think this is great news. Quote: (...) and it has posted guidelines on how to ward off the automatic update if admins want to keep the older IE6 browser on their companies' machines. So you can keep IE6 if you want to, but all the non-tech savvy users get a safer, more standards compliant browser.

IE7 tabbed browsing sucks

This is somewhat off topic, but whatever.

Has anyone else noticed how terrible tabbed browsing is in IE7?

Let's just say, hypothetically, I'm at my favorite porn site, looking at thumbnails. The plan is to ctrl-click the thumbnails and open them in tabs.

Once you get enough tabs open, there comes a point where IE7 bogs down tremendously when asked to dispaly jpgs, each in her own tab. Symptoms include clicks on the first tab are no longer acknowledged, and tremendous slowness moving between tabs.

After that, there comes a point where your ctrl-click won't even spawn a new tab.

Tabbed browsing is a great "innovation" in the IE product line, but in terms of performance and not being a resource hog, IE7 is easily outpaced by Mozilla and many others.

While I coud use the money...

...I wish there was another way of making it.

OK, note to self: week of Feb 12, expect many calls from windows-using clients...

Talk about innacurate

IT still needs to approve the update via WSUS for IE 7 to get deployed. If its not an approved update you don't get it.

Of course this is Slashdot, you are allowed to spout all the innacurate crap you want, as long as its crap slung at Microsoft.

If people had bothered to read they would have noticed this in the "warning" from Microsoft: you have configured WSUS to "auto-approve" Update Rollup packages (this is not the default configuration), Windows Internet Explorer 7 will be automatically approved for installation after February 12, 2008 and consequently, you may want to take the actions below to manage how and when this update is installed

Thanks again Slashdot for proving the Linux camp really are full of a bunch of anti-Microsoft loonies who read only what they want to read.

Re:Talk about innacurate

IT still needs to approve the update via WSUS for IE 7 to get deployed. If its not an approved update you don't get it.

...because everyone knows that every house and SOHO computer install has WSUS and an IT department, right?

(you know, those places where the bulk of MSFT's cutomer base can be found?)

/P

Our intranet site uses IE6 activeX...

The place I work uses activeX components to log into the citrix-based intranet client. They have big signs for the last couple years stating that they will not support Firefox. Over the last year they also had to add a sign that they will not cover IE7. Should be interesting to see what they do now. Maybe I'll drop them an email and ask. :-)

Includes "Windows Genuine Advantage validation"?!

So the handy dandy window listing the 100's of updates you are missing to keep your WinXP machine up-to-date just popped up over the weekend. No clue why. After seeing this slashdot story, I scrolled down and saw "Windows Internet Exploer 7.0 for Windows XP". I read the details and the last line says:

"This update includes Windows Genuine Advantage Validation."

I guess so few people are "choosing" to install their spyware that they now they are bundling it with other stuff? This is AFTER Microsloth said they weren't going to do such a thing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/10/04/internet-explorer-7-update.aspx [msdn.com]

      Marc

Developers still use IE6

I work on an AJAX application, and Microsoft Visual Studio's debugger doesn't work with IE7. Most of our dev team still uses IE6 for this reason.

MS coders have it made, no longer update old prod

Microsoft is finally pulling the 'security' card to force users to new versions of their products. It must be nice to be a MSFT programmer when you don't have to work on one rev old products no matter how large the install base.

Seriously, it blew me away in the mid 90s when the press+dog just let Microsoft refuse to provide USB support for the previous OS product and claimed that if you want USB support, you must purchase a new computer or fumble through an upgrade. IIRC, Windows 98 and NT v4 were such products though NT v4 was a larger update since they both moved the graphics subsystem into the kernel and added the win95 shell/desktop along with adding USB support.

I would love to be a fly on the wall for all those meetings they have on how to get customers to upgrade. There's got to be some very funny and some very scary recommendations being thrown around those meetings. It's got to be tough for Microsoft, wanting customers to be lame enough to not look outside of Microsoft for software solutions yet at the same time, be willing to keep upgrading Microsoft products every couple of months and like it.

LoB

Re:Firefox!

Ah, except that in its current incarnation Firefox is a bit sucky too. It's better than IE on many levels, especially security, but it's no longer the snappy and lightweight browser it once was. Memory usage is terrible, I find the UI sluggish, render times are far from ideal and the whole thing just feels... not what it was.

Hopefully 3.0 will fix that, but for the meantime I'll stick with Safari.

Re:

I am not a web browser tester but... lately Firefox seems to be performing much better than it used to. It's still using a bit of memory, but I'm not getting any crashes, or aberrant behaviors. The worst I've noticed in months is Foxmarks sucking the life

Re:Try Opera

Not only are most of Firefox's "unique" features copied from Opera, but Opera is also a remarkably fast and lightweight browser with most stuff built right in. It also happens to work in most variations of Linux including Sugar and it's used on the Nintendo Wii. Not to sound like a fanboy, but it's a far superior browser to anything else I've found. Other than the source, I'm not sure I see the big deal with Firefox.

The reason I use Firefox instead of Opera is the same reason I use Windows instead of Linux: The former supports the plugins/applications that I want to run, while the latter doesn't. Specifically, the plugins I use in Firefox are:

• AdBlock
• BugMeNot
• DownloadHelper
• FireBug
• FireFTP
• FlashBlock
• Forecastfox
• Foxytunes
• IeTab
• NukeAnythingEnhanced
• PDF Download
• RetailMeNot
• SnapLinks
• SplitBrowser
• TamperData
• UserAgentSwitcher
• VideoDownloader
• WebDeveloper

Now before you pick a random plugin, e.g. "DownloadHelper", and make a guess as to what it does based on its name, and then claim "You can download files in Opera too, and you don't even need a plugin to do it!", you really should find out what the plugin actually does.

I'm happy with Firefox, and I don't have any incentive to switch to Opera. I'm open to switching, but I need a reason, as switching takes energy and effort. If you want me to switch, then you need to provide me with an incentive. So not only would Opera need to duplicate all of the functionality I have with my existing plugins, but it would need to offer something additional to make the switch worthwhile.

Re:Firefox!

As I've said before, the problem is that we can never seem to recreate the problems users complain about. When we ask for a detailed set of steps to reproduce the problem, we almost always either get none or we cannot reproduce the problem. You can't fault developers for not fixing problems, when hardly anyone can seem to point out any. You need to report the bugs first, and then the developers will fix them.

I do not seem to experience these problems you refer to. Others I talk to in the MozillaZine forums do not, either. When people come into the forums complaining about problems, we point them to the Knowledge Base, and when they follow the instructions there, they seem to quickly fix their problems.

If you are unwilling or unable to report or fix problems in Firefox, you should probably switch to another browser. There's no sense putting up with problems, as there are many good browsers out there. And it's even more pointless to keep complaining about vague problems such as "shoddy coding and bloat in general" when you cannot point out even one specific problem, no matter how trivial.

Re:Tsk Tsk

Microsoft isn't giving people enough time to catch up with the latest version.

IE7 was released 18th October 2006. RC1 was 24th August, and the first pre-build was January 31st. You've had almost two years to catch up with the latest version, it's not like they've suddenly sprung the changes!

Re:Tsk Tsk

Microsoft isn't giving people enough time to catch up with the latest version.

How long do you need? IE7 was released in August 2005 so Web developers could start testing and fixing their apps well ahead of the October 2006 release.

Re:Tsk Tsk

They must be pretty damn bad applications in the first place if moving from IE6 to IE7 'breaks' them!

1. Get spec: Must work on IE6
2. Design methodology: Hack it around until it looks right
3. Test methodology: Click around in IE6

If you have paid no heed to standards or alternative browsers, it's trivially simple to make a site that breaks on IE7.

Re:IE7 breaks corporate intranet apps and Moodle

> ASP.Net apps work only with IE6 with ActiveX enabled.

Sorry but this is rubbish. ASP.NET is a *server-side* engine. It's rubbish to say that ASP.NET sites only work with IE6.
And ASP.NET does NOT require any ActiveX support in the browser. Properly written ASP.NET sites work properly in ALL browsers - even ones which don't have javascript support.

I think your website is broken for other reasons - not because of ASP.NET or it's supposed incompatibly with IE7.