When I Say “No” – Another in a series of browser related rants

Another in a series of browser related rants

 

One of the most frequent questions I field when talking to clients is whether the amazing new technology platform that we have just spent an hour discussing and which supports a set of business applications that are strategically vital to them, will work OK with Internet Explorer 8 browser (or occasionally 6 or 7).

Fortunately, the answer is really simple.

“NO!”

“What, not at all?”

“Yes, pretty much not at all. When I say no, I mean no!”

“But we have clinical/legacy/dreadful, out-of-date systems that only run on dreadful, out-of-date, insecure, non-standards-compliant unsupportable browsers” (I may be paraphrasing here a bit).

“So what you mean is that your vendors say they won’t support any browser released this decade [IE8 launched March 19, 2009], even though newer browsers have a compatibility mode?”

Yes, that’s correct. They say they won’t support us, so were still using Internet Explorer 8, even on our Windows 7 machines”.

 

This is an unenviable position, and I feel for NHS organisations stuck in this predicament. It’s a classic between a “rock and a hard place” situation.

The conversation usually continues and includes that they maybe can’t use a more modern browser because some of their PCs are still running Windows XP. And the reason they are running XP? Often as not it’s because they need an out of date insecure, non-standards-compliant unsupportable browser to support their legacy systems. Rinse and repeat as the cool folk say.

We also typically learn that many people have a copy of Chrome deployed, which they can use for non-clinical systems. Though sometimes they haven’t even got that because is not part of the standard desktop build.

And all this means that they are stuck with versions of Internet Explorer that are universally reviled, even by pro-Microsoft people like me.

My professional and supportive conclusion to these discussions?

“It sucks to be you.”

 

Why not stick with IE8?

Let’s think about IE8. After all it’s only 6 years old and 4 versions out of date.

On 2nd April 2009, Mark Joseph Edwards stated that the “new edition of Internet Explorer” had greatly improved security, speed and compatibility, though still lagged competitors in all three areas. He noted that, at the time, Internet Explorer 8 was still underperforming relative to other browsers in speed and was not as successful in displaying webpages as they were intended to display. He also wrote that its “continued reliance on ActiveX makes the browser vulnerable in its very foundation.”

So, it was better than IE7, which was much better than IE6. It even tried to embrace the W3C web standards, though with limited success; IE8 did not support some elements of the W3C standards:

  • Internet Explorer 8 badly failed (20/100) of the Acid3 rendering test.

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  • Significant parts of DOM Level 2 and 3, including the standard event model used by other browsers.
  • (The fact that IE8 does not support SVG was criticized by Tim Berners-Lee.)
  • XHTML (except when used as a form of HTML)

There are significant features that IE 8 does not support that are now ubiquitous, including HTML 5, CSS 3 and media queries.

Moving on

Soon after IE8 came IE9 (March 14, 2011), obviously. It was actually much better, pretty fast, with improved standards support.

Computing observed that “the feature set has piled up” since development began, with recent changes including “a completely rejigged JavaScript engine, and far better web standards support.” It reported that Internet Explorer 9 ranked above Firefox, slightly above Safari, and below Chrome and Opera on Futuremark‘s Peacekeeper browser benchmark. Internet Explorer 9 scored 95% on the Acid3 test, so much better than IE8.

IE10 was better still and IE11 surpassed even that, often boasting better performance and stability than Chrome.

The Active hurdle

So what is stopping lenders supporting later versions?

In some cases applications were coded for browser features specific to IE6; however a big part of the answer is ActiveX, which was introduced in 1996 as a means to include rich functionality based on custom code within other applications, including browser pages. In part it was Microsoft’s competitor to Java applets. ActiveX is very powerful due to its ability to run before permissions in the browser, although with this power comes significant security concerns.

Many web-based applications made extensive use of ActiveX to provide the functionality and user experience users were thought to demand.

 

Microsoft

Microsoft are hardly blameless for this state of affairs. Their dubious-at-best business practices under Steve Balmer, with the attempt to use their market dominance to set or destabilise standards to suit Microsoft was strongly instrumental in creating the current market conditions. However, Microsoft has changed and changed mightily; in fact they are pretty much the only platform agnostic major player today, releasing some tools to competing operating systems first

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They have released Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer 11, announced as an update for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, providing better emulation of older versions of Internet Explorer and tools to manage which Web apps use emulation.

Moving forwards, Microsoft has scrapped development on Internet Explorer. Their newest browser, Edge, is so rigorously standards compliant that it won’t run quite a few Microsoft sites (it’s fast though) and improving rapidly. While IE 11 will be around for some time, Microsoft’s strategy is that this is only to provide legacy support. Edge will be the default browser on all new Microsoft operating systems, including desktop, tablet, mobile and game systems.

Which brings us to now…

Here are the key reasons for my opening “No!”

  1. Microsoft has announced it will drop support for Internet Explorer 8 on Windows beginning January 12, 2016. It goes further than that; they have stated that they now only support the most recent version of Internet Explorer available on the OS, so if you are unfortunate enough to be using Vista then you can only claim support for IE9 and Windows 7 means IE11.
  2. In fact, Microsoft have declared that support for all old browsers will be dropped from January 12th 2016.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-internet-explorer.aspx

  1. All modern sites and web applications rely on the later HTML standards, with a rapid move towards HTML 5, and with widespread adoption of CSS 3. These just don’t work properly in the old browsers. So if you want to use Facebook, YouTube, Google apps, etc. then you need a standards compliant browser. If you want to use Office 365 applications you need a standards compliant browser.
  2. Hardly anyone else uses IE8 (2.6%). So the cost of developing or supporting IE8 applications has to be spread across very few actual users, meaning the cost per user is high.

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Other vendors (Apple being the most visible example) have ruthlessly dumped older technology and that hasn’t hurt their market position (Apple are remarkably good at spinning the story). However we understand the need for managed lifecycles/releases of corporate systems and the understandable desire to continue to support legacy applications.

Microsoft’s desire to support the legacy has led to a situation where organisations don’t feel the pain of out of date technology nearly acutely enough.

  • They have excuses for sticking with things that should have been replaced years ago.
  • They have been stuck with the old “wait too long then put everyone through a massive upgrade upheaval” business process rather than moving into the 21st century of dynamically upgraded technology.
  • They have let technology vendors get away with not bothering to update their solutions, (even though these companies charge clients significant support contracts) and allowed these to shift the blame onto Microsoft for daring to try to move ahead like everyone else in the OS and browser industry.

Conclusion

The Bottom Line is that this situation is only going to improve by renegotiating contracts with lenders to ensure they support current and future technology. Anything else creates massive inertia that holds organisations back and creates competitive and financial disadvantages.

Standing still means you fall further behind and catching up will hurt more.

In many cases the applications we describe will work acceptably well in IE 11 Enterprise Mode. If you are not actively evaluating this as an organisation in this predicament and are in denial, then you are storing up greater problems for the future. If you have completed the evaluation and found that IE 11 can’t be made to work the new need an active strategy for placing your legacy systems and providing workarounds in the short term to allow the rest of the organisation to move forward.

 

I feel your pain. It sucks to be you. But no still means no.

 

 

 

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