My first draft of this post focused on all of the good that followed IE6 in the world of web development but I think it’s worth focusing on why we're so happy to be saying goodbye to my nemesis for a lot of the last 20 years. Later this year support for Internet Explorer officially comes to an end and in mid-2022 it will be retired completely.
From 3-pixel bugs, to different implementations and interpretations of the CSS specs, the end of internet explorer couldn’t come soon enough. Never heard of the 3-pixel bug? If you have access to IE 11, then go here and use emulation to pretend you're in IE5 (IE6 is not available for some reason) and you'll see a three pixel indent of the first paragraph in the green box. Maddening.
I had the misfortune to not only have to support IE6 in my development career, but also IE5.5 and even Internet Explorer for Mac too. Internet Explorer for Mac. Truly trying times.
Microsoft eventually moved onto Internet Explorer 7 but the improvements were minimal. IEs 8, 9, and 10 were not much better and even now 11 is painfully slow. Over the past 5 years, I've lost count of how many times I have been asked to look into performance issues and it turns out it's the browser itself struggling. The code itself is good enough for everyone else, the user's hardware rarely an issue and the APIs themselves performant. Every other browser coped without any issues.
Edge is a clear improvement on the browser experience for Windows users and long overdue. Built on top of Chromium, the dev tools are there and so are all of the performance benefits that come with things like the V8 JavaScript engine.
Goodbye, Internet Explorer. You will not be missed.
Top comments (6)
If you're on windows you are still running operations through IE4, at least, IE4 still collects all your data from what I remember. I got hacked in October, and I ended up finding all these crazy issues trying to retake my rig. Like at Install, it literally just a forced screen. You can literally get into your register. I had my ARP poisoned and my endpoint were enumerated in my recovery env.
I literally removed myself from the "Everyone" SID and then got live breached and nuked through an anon SID I've never seen before running tasks I deleted. I also was trying to get them to tell me why the Chinese GSM Root CA's existed for one, but I wanted to know why they had perms for all issuance policies and why I had so many hidden pinyin tables.
In fact, I remember getting to the basebrd file finally and exposing that we all don't really install Windows in english. We all install some version of the Chinese multilingual and the mui files handle a lot of translating. The pinyin tables I found were straight mandarin pinyin to byte. The only version I could see that didn't these issues was the Windows SE version.
Anyways, sorry about the tangent. I just thought I should aware you because I've had MS Employees posing as convercent to me the first time I launch the internal, the second time I got straight shut down and everything just vanished. So theres some cheeky stuff happening over in Redmond via the Webm's and Adobe.
That sucks!
In one of my old jobs, access to the registry actually enabled us to deliver a product but it was really uncomfortable working that way. Basically laptops were locked down to a handful of websites. Our app was used to unlock more for the user. Crazy loophole for a browser to have!
Oh Wow! Its a hell of a OS to sysAdmin for. I switched to a mac because I honestly stopped wanting to know how the operating system worked after learning how to hack it to bits. Never been happier. Cheers!
😁 ciao
👋
Hear, hear! Goodbye and good riddance.