IE 11 Breaks Rendering For Google Products, and Outlook Too 231
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Register: "The Windows 8.1 rollout has hit more hurdles: the new version 11 of Internet Explorer that ships with the operating system does not render Google products well and is also making life difficult for users of Microsoft's own Outlook Web Access webmail product. The latter issue is well known: Microsoft popped out some advice about the fact that only the most basic interface to the webmail tool will work back in July. It seems not every sysadmin got the memo and implemented Redmond's preferred workarounds, but there are only scattered complaints out there, likely because few organisations have bothered implementing Windows 8.1 yet."
Also from the article: "Numerous reports suggest that IE 11 users can once again enjoy access to all things Google if they un-tick the IE 11 option to 'Use Microsoft Compatibility lists.'" And here's Microsoft KB work around.
Known workaround (Score:5, Insightful)
Use IE to download your browser of choice.
Come on Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on Microsoft, it is year 2013, 2014 almost. We are not in 2000 anymore, you can't just tell everybody to go screw themselves anymore and act like you are some kind of god. I don't think it is going to work as well as it used to...
http://slashdot.org/story/07/02/03/1524250/confidential-microsoft-emails-posted-online [slashdot.org]
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t90205.html [javalobby.org]
Can you do better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Severity (Score:4, Insightful)
The Windows 8.1 rollout has hit more hurdles...
... Which affect the 5 people who are actually using Windows 8. The entire interface is an unmitigated disaster. DOSSHELL looked prettier and was more functional than Windows 8. The OS has multiple personality disorder and the interface looks like it was gang-banged by Crayola. Nobody wants to touch it even with a 10 foot pole. :/
Did you notice how this wasn't on the front page of any tech section of any major news site on the internet (Slashdot doesn't count -- it doesn't have a tech section, it is a tech section)? It's because nobody uses it. I mean, look at the market share numbers [statcounter.com] for Windows 8 currently. Windows XP is stomping it. It only just this month beat out MacOS by a tiny margin. Its month over month growth is stagnant.
This is just another story to add to the growing funeral pyre we're building to honor monkey boy's first major OS released without any input or direction from former CEO Bill Gates. In a few years, I'll be opening specially marked boxes of cereal and finding copies of Windows 8 in it... just like they used to distribute AOL disks in the days of old. Actually... now that I think about it... that may have been where the Metro interface's inspiration came from. Sweet mother of god....
Re:Come on Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:uninstalled (Score:0, Insightful)
No, fuck you.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever since I started doing web design for a living in 1998, I hated this crazy situation where one has to take into account all quibbles and arguments the software industry has internally and make up for it in your code. Now we are 15 years down the road, I've moved on to greener pastures, but I see the poor sods in web development are still stuck with the tantrums of yesteryear.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding custom extensions, like using -webkit-, -moz- or -ms- (note the last one) for CSS and similar for JS APIs, is not how you break compatibility.
Making your implementation behave wildly unlike any other - what IE did - is how you break compatibility.
Re:IE ? don't bother (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
Was recently the subject of a blame-placing at work and was asked why we can't just use Internet Explorer (because of a single site-specific Firefox-only bug) and why we don't update INSTANTLY a major patch comes out without testing (because "Microsoft test these things", you know). It's ironic that, within a week of that, a patch is out, from Microsoft, that breaks IE's rendering of websites (including Google Apps, which we used heavily) and which should be one of the most heavily tested patches to come out of Microsoft.
There's still such a thing as choice and control. If you don't want choice and control, don't bother hiring an IT guy - just let Apple/Microsoft do what they want on your systems. If you do, hire IT people and let them worry about this and then LISTEN to their reasoning. We have testing/production, dev/stable, beta/release, etc. versioning for a reason.
And just because MS say it'll be fine and "there's workarounds" (well, a workaround is NOT a solution, as far as I'm concerned, only a way to turn stuff off that you might be using so you're not affected by the problem itself) does not mean it's not their fault. In fact, it makes it worse. "We know it's broke, but fuck you - do this to your systems or we don't give a shit" - for a web browser, which should be a separated process and application in ANY decent OS? No. Sorry.
IE was removed from my network desktops (sadly can't properly get rid it of for several reasons) many, many years ago and replaced with a standalone browser that can be updated independent of the version of the OS that's in use (or even the TYPE of OS that's in use, e.g. Linux, Mac, etc.).
As far as I'm concerned, still running IE on your desktop means you don't know any better. Notice the wording: It's not rude to home users who literally don't know any better and you don't expect them to, but it's quite damning to professionals who SHOULD know better - you can whine about ActiveX, .NET, Silverlight etc. being in your business all you want - the fact is that you should know better than to tie your company into a single third-party supplier. Even one as large as Microsoft or Apple.
Re:How is this surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
The architecture of web applications on the client side is screwed up.
It was originally designed so non technical people could create content and now it's been pressed into service doing extremely complex things.
The web fucking sucks.
Re:Great article explaining what has changed (Score:4, Insightful)
And according to the knowledge base, since the problem is the user agent string, it seems to me the REAL fix is on the server side. As the web has gone back to standards compliance, servers which attempt to discriminate against browsers need to discriminate less. Once they stop that, a lot of problems disappear.
Re: No. (Score:4, Insightful)