r/sysadmin • u/abaddon82 Sysadmin • Dec 04 '18
Microsoft Microsoft discontinues Edge
For better or worse, Microsoft is discontinuing development of Edge, and creating a new browser, codenamed "Anaheim".
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft-chrome-browser-windows-10-edge-chromium
323
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
Sooo.. What about sites that don't work in Chrome/Firefox, barely work in Edge, and "require" IE <insert version>?
Like, off the top of my head, Siebel's CRM pile of shit? That laughs in IE6-level broken with things like Chrome or Firefox?
210
u/PM_ME_FEMBOY_FOXES Dec 04 '18
Microsoft windows 10 Pro and LTSB and also Enterprise come with a version of Internet Explorer that has a “shitty old websites” mode, where it can be compatible with websites that require ie 4-9 or something around that.
135
Dec 04 '18
And Silverlight. If you have an app that runs on silverlight
sobs
6
u/pbjamm Dec 04 '18
Rand McNally Truck Map (I work for a trucking company) is still Silverlight so IE required! Also for a Java web app we have to use.
We are doomed.
13
u/carnesaur Dec 04 '18
God, our fkin company org chart was made on it. You don't know how many chrome users call me with " I installed silverlight but it still won't go"
→ More replies (5)3
u/darps Dec 04 '18
Like the web-based 2010 Hyper-V Manager that our current DC provider has no plans of replacing.
30
u/Scrubbles_LC Dec 04 '18
I'm going to start referring to compatibility mode as "shitty old websites" mode from now on. Thanks.
5
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
Enterprise is right out in all the places I used to visit, and yeah, the old-hat version of IE was a life saver in multiple situations - I can only hope that the axing of Edge doesn't lead to the 'ah fuck it' mentality with that.
4
u/ESCAPE_PLANET_X Dec 04 '18
I can think of at least a few companies that will lose their fucking minds if MS ditches IE abruptly.
Soooo much garbage built on IE, and no one knows how it works as it's some uncommented horror show monolithic monster.
→ More replies (5)3
u/electriccomputermilk Dec 04 '18
Even with compatibility mode, IE in Win10 it won't load this crappy government website one of our staff members needs to use. I have to keep a Win 7 box running IE 10 just for this shitty website. Thought about creating a VM but would likely confuse the hell out of the staff member.
→ More replies (2)28
u/jurassic_pork Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
Heavily isolated and firewalled virtual instances of a 'never to be patched, snapshot in time' of a particular OS build that works for their needs and literally nothing else, served as a Xen style container app, where the end users don't even know that it isn't 'locally' installed, while you keep them up to date and fully patched. Now you just need to find room in the budget, and afford the man hours, training, and licensing to figure out how to deploy and maintain that. You can also use the same setup to access legacy admin portals of enterprise tools that need a particular legacy Java or ActiveX etc.
9
u/egamma Dec 04 '18
Thanks EMC VNX and Brocade Fabric Switches!
2
1
u/No_Im_Sharticus Dec 04 '18
Yeah no doubt. Hopefully we can convince TPTB to get rid of our 5300 in the DR datacenter this coming year. I actually found a download from EMC that has a portable version of Firefox with the right Java version embedded so you can still run Unisphere.
1
u/GMginger Dec 05 '18
Wow, worked with EMC storage since Clariion days and never heard of that - is it easy to locate once you know it's there?
1
1
Dec 05 '18
Just chucked out that exact combo for a Nimble and 10GE SFP+.
I had a writeup, in detail, and with my boss's helpful cursing, for every 4-8 weeks when we got a shiny new EMC rep of why we were not buying another product from them ever again.
1
u/egamma Dec 05 '18
The EMC Unity has a HTML5 interface, I'm considering getting one. I'd like to know if your reasons would still apply to the Unity, could you maybe post here (or to pastebin, wherever) your writeup?
1
16
u/PlanEx_Ship Dec 04 '18
The word Siebel just gave me a chill through my spine..
18
u/BeerJunky Dec 04 '18
Did you also start vomiting uncontrollably?
10
u/IBringPandaMonium Dec 04 '18
Oh man, there's more of us than I expected. Siebel was a NIGHTMARE to support. Glad I'm out of the company that used it.
2
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
It haunts me. I got out of where it was used, but I feel like it's going to find me again..
48
u/rgnissen202 Dec 04 '18
I love sites that absolutely require the least used browser period. Sounds like some people really need to get their head out of their own nether regions when developing their requirements
42
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
The ability of some web-interface based products to be unbearably behind the curve is just staggering.
Renault's warranty system for at least their Trucks division required IE8 for a long, long, time. I believe the system that required IE8 (Java'd version of an old CLI) was just ignored in favour of paper/email instead of upgrading anything when IE8 became difficult to obtain.
Technically they didn't support Win10 until about 18 months ago - Although the majority of what needed to work did work, which was more luck than judgement.
9
u/Phayzon Dec 04 '18
Not too long ago when I worked for a Honda Power Equipment dealer, Honda’s system required some ancient version of IE as well. Most of the things I needed to use worked in Chrome though. When they finally got around to supporting Chrome, it wasn’t even for the latest version. Supports up to Chrome 44, and 45 had launched a few months prior and was stated as explicitly incompatible...
8
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
Eugh. Tell me about it. The automotive industry seems to be spectacularly bad with software - And I can't fathom how they're so shit at it.
Ford's ETIS system is a pile of dogshit, and last time I used it, it was IE only too. That was two or three years back though.
1
Dec 04 '18
Jaguar's scan tool SDD STILL, TO THIS DAY, requires IE6 running on Win7 32 bit and all kind of bullshit security GPOs to run correctly. Now that Pathfinder is the new hotness, they'll probably never update/fix SDD.
1
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
That's the most frustrating thing - ECU changes force software changes which force the older stuff into abandonware territory. And ECU's change every ten frigging minutes it seems.
1
u/PublicSealedClass Dec 04 '18
I know an organisation in the UK that has a web based operations environment that has to run in....
...Nutscrape. I shit you not. It dates back to about 2001, and is still in production use today.
1
0
Dec 04 '18
16
u/spamyak Dec 04 '18
That's good, because I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36.
14
Dec 04 '18
10
u/Speaknoevil2 Dec 04 '18
Not sure which arm of the DoD you’re with, but we (AF) changed our image of Win 10 a year or so ago to auto configure IE as the default. We still have a few that fail the post-image configuration changes from time to time and we have to manually change the default, but otherwise it’s worked like a charm for us.
5
u/Androktasie Dec 04 '18
Depends on your command. We went out of our way to hide Edge from the taskbar and start menu, and set up IE instead. Too many old govt sites still require the Java plugin or IE7 rendering mode :'(
2
u/SilentLennie Dec 04 '18
The US is the country that spends the most money on the military in the world, more than the top 10 next countries combined or even more.
This is just... ridiculous.
12
u/VexingRaven Dec 04 '18
You make it sound like it's a deliberate decision and not sheer incompetence.
8
u/rgnissen202 Dec 04 '18
There was a common saying at my previous office: "Never attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity". Never could seem to learn that lesson...
0
u/bregottextrasaltat Dec 04 '18
all browsers i know of today update themselves, i don't see the reason to be on an old version
1
u/pdp10 Dec 04 '18
It wasn't better if they required the most-used browser, you just weren't presumably affected then.
1
u/reddit-MT Dec 04 '18
The devs just copied example code that happened to be tied to an unpopular or out-of-date browser. They didn't know how to write it in the first place so they can't know now to fix it.
→ More replies (51)11
u/Stompert Dec 04 '18
VMware VC page's don't always work well in Chrome/Firefox for me.
→ More replies (3)8
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
Don't get me started on how shoddy VMWare pages can be..
I recently went through a delightful process of pulling a VM off an ancient (HP G4 hardware) server, ESXi (Unlicensed) 3.5. I think I lost more hair trying to get the appropriate bits and pieces together to pull that off than I did any other project that month.
1
u/SilentLennie Dec 04 '18
Boot Ubuntu ISO, apt-get install vmfs-tools; vmfs-mount
done ? :-)
2
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
Sadly, no.
To add some spice to the mix I had to get it to Hyper-V as the end destination.
I ended up going 3.5-6.0-InstallHyper-Vtools-Microsoft VMC 3
There was a lot more fannying about getting 6.0 (The last version we had a license code for, since VMC needed v-sphere..), and I can't recall now whether I had to bump 3.5 to 4.0 or something to get it to 6.0..
It would probably have been infinitely smoother with paid-for products, but since that wasn't in the budget.
1
u/mimic751 Dec 04 '18
6.7u1 works pretty well actually...
1
u/nirach Dec 04 '18
Sadly I've not used VSphere/ESX properly since about 5/5.5.
I like(d) it, I just think it's kinda 'meh' for anything too small.
116
u/Matt_NZ Dec 04 '18
I guess we'll know soon enough but I don't think Edge as a brand is going away but the Edge engine is. I suspect Edge will continue looking the same as it does now and will continue to be called Edge...however underneath it will be using Chromium as the engine. Similar to what they do with Edge on Android (and iOS, although they never had a choice there).
15
u/Irkutsk2745 Dec 04 '18
It could also be a dual engine browser. It would not be the first of its kind.
45
u/olyjohn Dec 04 '18
Fuck me, knowing Microsoft, it'll be a 3 engine browser. Chromium-based, with fallback to Edge for "Modern Legacy" apps, and a second fallback to IE for "Enterprise Mode."
And we'll have 6 control panels to tweak all the settings, and the documentation will be constantly out of date.
→ More replies (2)1
19
u/mixduptransistor Dec 04 '18
they will need to rebrand it, or it will never take off. the most hardcore nerds will understand that it has a new rendering engine, but most every day rando users won't
34
u/CleaveItToBeaver Dec 04 '18
they will need to rebrand it, or it will never take off.
Now introducing Microsoft Drink! "Just to take the Edge off."
→ More replies (1)69
u/myotheraccwasstolen Dec 04 '18
Most every day rando users don't care who developed the thing behind the icon that opens google for them
→ More replies (2)2
1
u/nemec Dec 04 '18
Honestly I'm really surprised at this. They just put Chakra (the JS engine built for Edge) into Excel earlier this year
Opera did the whole wrap-and-rename-chromium thing and it didn't work out too well for them...
→ More replies (1)1
u/reeepy Dec 04 '18
The worst thing about Edge isn't the rendering engine. The worst part is the interface.
Want to update a bookmark. No sorry. Want to change a setting that every other browser has. No sorry. Want your link info status bar back. No sorry.
→ More replies (1)
132
u/Toakan Dec 04 '18
I hope this extends into their Office package. Getting rid of the abysmal implementation of WordsHTML renderer in Outlook would make supporting marketing a god-send.
64
u/ilrosewood Dec 04 '18
1000x this
I love my marketing team but once a year I have to remind them that outlook hates beautiful emails.
47
0
Dec 04 '18
1
u/grep_var_log Dec 05 '18
It's even worse when the marketers haven't even supplied the text/plain part and the whole thing is total unreadable for us purists.
10
u/marek1712 Dec 04 '18
Don't you like when marketing agency prepares HTML signature template for Outlook in Word? That's what happened in my previous job - didn't even want to ask how much they paid for that garbage...
EDIT: Here, catch :)
<style> v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Revision>2</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>1</o:TotalTime> <o:Created>2018-12-04T20:44:00Z</o:Created> <o:LastSaved>2018-12-04T20:44:00Z</o:LastSaved> <o:Pages>5</o:Pages> <o:Words>1735</o:Words> <o:Characters>10411</o:Characters> <o:Lines>86</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>24</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>12122</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>16.00</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:DisplayBackgroundShape/> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:HyphenationZone>21</w:HyphenationZone> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>DE</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:UseWord2010TableStyleRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> </w:Compatibility> <w:DoNotOptimizeForBrowser/> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>16
u/Briancanfixit Dec 04 '18
But my WinHTTP can support TLS1.2 with a simple registry key!
I still can’t believe it’s not enabled by default.
234
u/Vendel2698 Dec 04 '18
It's over Anaheim, I have the high ground
17
Dec 04 '18
r/prequelmemes fan over here?
12
Dec 04 '18
I'm sure the venn diagram crossover between sysadmin nerd and star wars nerd is pretty much 99% of the venn diagram lol
→ More replies (2)-3
180
Dec 04 '18
So was Edge just a 3 year experiment to catch up on technical debt and build a team before moving on to a common standard?
131
u/myotheraccwasstolen Dec 04 '18
common standard?
Since when is chrome a common standard?
51
u/davesidious Dec 04 '18
It's a de facto standard due to the size of its user base.
→ More replies (6)4
-21
u/BeerJunky Dec 04 '18
Chrome is not a standard itself but Chrome is built with W3C standards in mind that Microsoft has almost completely ignored. Same with Firefox, much closer to the standards.
→ More replies (6)-26
Dec 04 '18
Chrome is the most popular browser, opera is s folk of chromium I think and now edge. Once you have 70% market share I call that a standard.
→ More replies (15)-19
u/sofixa11 Dec 04 '18
Since it has been the most popular browser base and used in a bunch of stuff, including as a cross-platform app development toolchain (Electron), OS (ChromeOS) and plenty of browsers?
→ More replies (9)-14
u/mixduptransistor Dec 04 '18
it's based on webkit, so between Safari and Chrome across all platforms (desktop and mobile operating systems) webkit-based browsers have something like 80% market share. that makes it pretty common
→ More replies (4)20
Dec 04 '18
Edge wasn't even caught up on technical debt. A lot of known issues in edge that have now been put off forever.
70
u/AJGrayTay Dec 04 '18
But... but they JUST FRIGGIN' LAUNCHED IT.
47
u/uebersoldat Dec 04 '18
March 30 2015...almost 4 years old now. But you are right, in the world of Microsoft it was just now beginning to settle in.
4
u/DeadOnToilet Dec 05 '18
Accepting a failure this early shows a new maturity in Microsoft’s development mentality.
1
u/grep_var_log Dec 05 '18
Maybe they're taking notes from Google. Expect two browsers in the future, one for social media and one for common websites (and then inevitably get canned after a 2 year 'beta' phase).
55
u/Trout_Tickler Dec 04 '18
Idk if 9 commits is evidence that they're completely dropping Edge but what do I know.
-4
u/uebersoldat Dec 04 '18
It's all over the web man.
7
u/Trout_Tickler Dec 04 '18
Yes, that's how sensationalism works. Follow the sources and it literally boils down to those 9 commits.
→ More replies (2)0
Dec 04 '18
10
u/Trout_Tickler Dec 04 '18
A bunch of other sites have posted too. It could be anything, they were various ARM fixes.
→ More replies (5)
109
u/AnotherAccount5554 Dec 04 '18
Adopting Chromium as the default rendering engine for Windows 10 will end Microsoft’s hostility towards Chrome. Microsoft has regularly pushed notifications to Windows 10 users
Hahahahahahaha. Good one!
150
u/myotheraccwasstolen Dec 04 '18
Try browsing any google site with edge. Google nags you several times a day to to try chrome.
37
u/bearxor Dec 04 '18
Shit, the only thing Google I really use is YouTube and every time I download the app on my phone I get an email a few minutes later “your phone doesn’t have the latest Google apps!”
26
10
u/jatorres Dec 04 '18
Try opening a link in an email from the iOS Gmail app, it always gives you the choice between opening in Safari or installing Chrome, no matter how many times you select “Always Use Safari”
2
0
Dec 04 '18
20
u/zopiac Dec 04 '18
WinDirStat
Give Wiztree a try. Way faster due to its use of filesystem headers/journals/cache/something.
2
73
u/WarioTBH Dec 04 '18
If it doesn't have extension support like Chrome / FireFox it will just fail again.
48
u/Creshal Dec 04 '18
The new browser will be using Chrome's engine, so unless Microsoft deliberately goes out of their way to make extensions not work, it'd be compatible with Chrome's.
46
u/steamruler Dec 04 '18
The extension API isn't part of the core engine though, AFAIK. I assume it's not just going to be a rebranded Chromium, in which case what they will be sharing is Blink.
→ More replies (2)6
u/fizzlefist Dec 04 '18
Microsoft would never do that, though. I’m sure it’ll all be fine.
→ More replies (1)1
u/rivalarrival Dec 04 '18
so
unlesswhen Microsoft deliberately goes out of their way to make extensions not work,FTFY
→ More replies (4)-2
u/billy_teats Dec 04 '18
You might be giving them way too much credit. I would not doubt at all that they deliberately break features and then act surprised when no one uses it
1
u/grepnork Dec 04 '18
It’ll be like Microsoft’s mobile offering though, not enough audience share to attract developers. MS literally tried paying people to write apps for it and even that didn’t work!
11
u/lifeis_amystery Dec 04 '18
Enterprise rollouts wise.. Does chrome handle IE zones, i.e internet /intranet and how about chrome GPO polices vs IE ?
16
u/strib666 Dec 04 '18
Yes. Chrome actually uses the IE settings for most of that stuff, and there are GP templates available.
8
u/WordBoxLLC Dec 04 '18
GPO wise it's pretty configurable: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/187202?hl=en
5
u/olyjohn Dec 04 '18
We shoudn't be using zones in the first place. Every site should be treated as untrusted, and sites shouldn't need special permissions to do shit on my computer. All people ever do with zones, is whitelist some site so that it works right. All that ever does is open you up, simply because the developers are too shitty to make a proper website.
2
3
u/SilentLennie Dec 04 '18
The 'new edge' won't be using any of that, it will very likely only use the rendering engine and possibly javascript engine.
27
u/catwiesel Dec 04 '18
they dont understand. its not that edge was that bad...
the problem is that it is made by microsoft, married to the os and most of all, needs to be "forcefully made to step aside"
yes i am sure I want to use another browser, no I dont want to try your "recommendation" now!
19
Dec 04 '18
another step towards webkit world domination.
things are pretty bad.
5
u/nrobinaubertin Dec 05 '18
You mean blink
1
Dec 05 '18
same thing, i am afraid.
https://www.chromium.org/blink
Blink is implemented on top of an abstract platform and thus cannot be run by itself. The Chromium Content module provides the implementation of this abstract platform required for running Blink.
https://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module
https://www.chromium.org/_/rsrc/1308680052371/developers/content-module/Content.png
→ More replies (2)
26
Dec 04 '18
Bye Bye edge, the best PDF Viewer ever developed..
3
u/lzgr Dec 04 '18
I think SumatraPDF is a decent contender to that title. It does look like mid 00's shit, but it's lightweight and does it's job great.
1
u/gdogg121 Dec 07 '18
SumatraPDF
Except you have to put it up with that name. Some big Indonesian island.
0
13
u/hotdwag Dec 04 '18
Base chromium so how will integration differ from Chrome? I know... They should give web apps and sites full access to local file directories in Windows. No more explorer, just navigate the future anaheim local-connect style /s
12
u/Superspudmonkey Dec 04 '18
I don’t understand why browsers show websites differently. Don’t we have standards that state the way pages should work?
Who do we blame: Shitty browser coders Shitty webpage coders Both?
7
u/Brandhor Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
we do have a standard but it's quite complex and each browsers engine has to implement it their own way which leads to discrepancies, on top of that there are stuff that are not part of a standard and each browsers implement differently with their prefixes like -moz-, -webkit- or -ms-
4
u/SilentLennie Dec 04 '18
Things have become pretty good these days with standards.
They've all learned a lot about how to write and implement standards properly.
The problem is pretty much all about legacy stuff.
2
u/cluberti Dec 04 '18
Web standards are generally pretty solid standards now, but I remember the days when there were a lot more "should's" in standards where you could have multiple browsers handle web pages differently and still be "spec compliant" because the spec was mushy. This is an eternity ago for the web, but for corporate applications (including browsers like IE), it's the equivalent of a few days ago.
A lot of times web developers (still) will do UA string detection and serve content based on the browser they think they see, versus using feature detection and serving pages based on what the browsers actually support (and you can see this with tools like fiddler, where you can tell a site you're using Chrome while you're really running Edge or Firefox, and pages will render differently - the browser handles it fine, but the web developer/s didn't agree).
It still happens to this day, although it's getting better.
25
14
Dec 04 '18
I wonder if the guys at KDE, all that time ago, thought the KHTML engine for Konqueror would end being used in the one-day replacement for Internet Explorer.
8
0
Dec 04 '18
884
u/Hellman109 Dec 04 '18
We know you've opted out of new reddit 369 times, but here it is again, do you want to opt out again?
→ More replies (80)→ More replies (13)21
0
Dec 04 '18
→ More replies (7)34
u/enz1ey Dec 04 '18
This is the only thing on my Christmas wishlist. The default app association XML workaround never really works for us, and we use Ricoh copiers with a modified driver to force a locked print job. This requires the user to enter a name and passcode on every print job (which can be pre-filled in the printer preferences) and the dialog has to pop up for them to hit OK before the job is sent to the copier. Edge and other Windows 10 apps for some reason never display this dialog, which ends up causing the print job to hang in limbo at the top of the queue on the print server, creating a backlog of every print job that comes through afterwards.
I spend way too much of my time deleting these hung jobs from print queues. And it wouldn't be a big deal if you could just delete the job. You have to delete the job, restart the spooler, close and re-open Print Management, delete the job again, restart the spooler again, and close and re-open Print Management a second time.
Fuck Edge.
→ More replies (12)
1.2k
u/axelnight Dec 04 '18
Our organization has three big third-party apps we support.
One runs on this hyper-version-sensitive COM automation that breaks if it's not running the exact Office version it expects. The vendor is deathly afraid of Office 365's update model.
The second is a house of cards running on top of Java. The vendor is sweating bullets ever since Oracle announced that they're going to start charging for Java.
The third is a web app that runs exclusively in IE 11. The vendor has spent the last couple years working on modernizing it to run exclusively on Edge.
The moral of this story is clearly never develop anything ever.