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'."

Re:Tsk Tsk

[strtok_r]

They were coded to comply with IE6's rendering model, which isn't standards-compliant. There are many, many in-house applications like these, since developers only have to test for the browser version mandated by IT.

Good for them

[nekokoneko]

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.

Re:Good in some ways...

[afidel]

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:Web developers

[cdrudge]

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.

Re:IE7 is better?

[jrumney]

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.

Re:Silverlight

[jacksonj04]

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.

Re:Good in some ways...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you don't understand what your parent post is about. In software development Implementation is the phase where a system is being deployed, it is not a phase where you develop the system.

Re:Firefox!

[Gr8Apes]

FF 2.x is worse than the other iterations. You can turn off spell check, that helps some. There's some tuning parameters you can set to release memory/pages in cache and limit it to those in the browser currently. Other than that, the core problem with all browsers is that the JS engine in them sucks rocks, and the single threaded nature of that beast is what kills performance when you have lots of plugins or heavy JS pages.

FF 3.0 reportedly is much lighter in memory and faster in performance, but I've not tried it yet. I downloaded it this weekend, and will try to find some time to install it shortly.

Re:Good in some ways...

[VGPowerlord]

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:IE7 breaks corporate intranet apps and Moodle

[nmg196]

> 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.

IE7 sucks just as much as IE6

[acoustix]

My company can't switch to IE7 yet because of web applications from 3rd party providers that don't work with IE7. Thanks again to Microsoft for totally fucking up the web.

Nick

Re:Good in some ways...

[TheRaven64]

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...

[TheRaven64]

ActiveX allows you to access the win32 API. That means that it is effectively a simple way of turning your existing view objects into things you can embed on a web page. You can take an existing Win32 app, add some abstraction in at the controller layer and have a web-enabled app using ActiveX very easily. Of course, it's as secure on the client as running an arbitrary Win32 app, but this isn't really an issue for corporate intranets. If you're starting from scratch, you can write the whole thing on Java and then have the client and server on any platform, but if you have a load of legacy Win32 code then ActiveX was a very cheap way of moving it to the web.

Just so everyone knows

[bogie]

WSUS or Windows Server Update Systems is an addon for Microsoft Windows networks. It allows you to control which updates clients get and instead of every client going to MS's servers, clients go to the WSUS server which can save a crapload of bandwidth. Regular home users are not affected.

Re:Good in some ways...

[Mad Merlin]

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...

[Gr8Apes]

You apparently don't work in the real world where your paychecks are determined by having your website viewable by the largest possible audience.

You have no idea what you're talking about. I do work in the real world, and I explicitly developed websites for the largest possible audience: that includes IE, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. (Why not Konquerer et al too? Because we developed with Firefox, and tweaked for IE, everything else was shown to largely work because we didn't employ lots of "neat" tricks. Hence a working website that supported browsers all the way back to Netscape 4.7x and IE 4.)

So, you can continue to develop for your less than the largest possible audience. I'll take those extra percentage points and add them to the bottom line.

Re:Good in some ways...

[slackmaster2000]

Not supporting IE6 is understandable. Pushing the update to the unaware is not cool IMO.

HP Printers!!!

[Ender77]

Prepare for HUGE problems with some older HP printers. When I updated to IE7, my HP software (HP director) for my all-in-one 1350 HP printer stopped working, it is a known issue with IE7 that HP has known about but has refused to release a real fix(updated installer). As long as you do not uninstall the software you can find fixes online, but if you uninstall it (like I did), you are screwed unless you do a rollback before IE7.