In a place where the standard is MS Windows on a company issued machine, it’s hard to go with another standard for a browser, though.
Even in a BYOD environment, that would likely be the case. Though in that case, the company would likely be using VDI or published apps for anything company related via Citrix, etc…, that it would be the backend standard by default…
I worked from home a lot at my last company with my Mac, connected to a virtual Windows desktop via Citrix and did everything I needed to do that way. I had a Windows laptop, but left it on my desk at work and didn’t actually keep much of anything local. Nothing I cared about… If you do, you’re a dummy, anyway.
The other side of the coin are places like the one I’m in. IE is banned on all systems with the exception of systems used to connect to IE only websites for B2B purposes.
What I’m curious to know is whether Active X controls introduced by IE are still going to be supported. IE only websites need to go away.
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It was all driven by a need to defend the proprietary Wintel platform from platform-independent web browsers and Java. Plenty of folks could already see in 1995 that Netscape, which worked well on Windows, OS/2, Mac, *nix and probably other platforms, had the potential to make Windows (or any desktop operating system) irrelevant. So Microsoft bought Mosaic (Netscape’s predecessor), added some proprietary features (ActiveX, etc.) to make the web less platform independent, and gave it away (eventually integrating it into Windows starting around 1997) to assure high adoption rates. It was a very astute business plan and was probably key to extending the dominance of Windows for another decade or so, but was just as reactive as proactive.
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I use Chrome myself - at work - and use Safari at home. Most people download and use Chrome or FF, whatever. But that doesn’t mean you can support it. And if they muck up their machine, it gets reimaged anyway…
Try working at a company with 30K employees and then trying to support every single browser. There’s a Windows image that’s deployed in any properly run IT shop with standards for apps and security.
I’ve been working in corporate america for 30 years, the problems inherent to any company that is crap to work at has zero to do with their browser standard.
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From my years of doing web design, IE was evil incarnate. I haven’t done anything with its most recent versions, but for many many years, MS refused to adopt common standards with IE. Anything involving CSS or any scripting needed to be designed for the crappiest, least common denominator, which was always IE. We’d often develop two completely different versions of a website: one for Firefox/Chrome/Safari and one for IE that removed all the snazzy touches that are standards everywhere else.
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I’ve worked high tech in lots of sectors (including academia, defense and finance) for a bit longer than you, and I agree. But refusing support for browsers that don’t implement ActiveX (mad shoutz, @dacree!) could be symptomatic of other problems. Certainly I’ve found it to be a red flag when I’m dealing with hospital IT groups… it’s one of the ‘tells’ I look for (others include change management committees staffed by non-technicals, and paper documentation requirements for software.)
Like I said, I hope you one day get to work at someplace that is equally supportive of all users, so you can see for yourself if the differences in corporate culture that I see are equally apparent to you. Maybe I’m wrong, but I hope you’ll consider the possibility that I might be right?
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I got to stop targeting IE6 in 2013. yaaay for slow-moving clients. Nothing MS can really do to get IT departments to upgrade VPs who insist they like what they have, and any new system must work with it. UGH.
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This headline is a bit misleading as IE is being replaced by a new browser called Spartan.
I get what you’re saying, dude. It’s not that I necessarily disagree, it’s that I lean more towards a standard. In the real world, everyone uses whatever they want (unless it’s a VDI or published desktop like I noted in another comment) but desktop engineering will likely draw a line with end users. And thankfully, I don’t really care as I haven;t been in that world for a long time.
As for your comment on change control - I have had plenty of run ins with idiots in that regard. It’s painful when some non-technical paper pusher questions your change. “Mike, why do you have to implement this change so soon?”
Um, because I say so? Because my boss approved it per my request.
I dressed down the change manager for about 15 minutes one time - staying within the confines of proper decorum - about just that thing one time…
I’d suggest that you maintain a blog promoting VB6 over .NET, but that would be making disparaging personal remarks not supported by your actual display of “knowledge” and I know you don’t like that sort of thing.
The headline is not “stupidly misleading” - it’s accurate. Microsoft is going to retire, or “kill”, the Internet Explorer brand. They still haven’t figured out what to name the new browser, but they will be going with “Microsoft foo” whenever foo is decided upon.
Correct me if I’m wrong*, until Windows 10, there hasn’t been a modern Windows release without Internet Explorer.
* Since you seem so shy and retiring, I’m issuing an explicit invitation.
And since 1995 the first thing I’ve done every time after installing a fresh OS is to launch IE. To download another browser. 
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For what it’s worth, IE11 is just fine (as a browser) for the majority of people and websites these days. I generally run into more weird “WTF is going on here?” browser-specific issues with Chrome than I do with IE lately. And IE seems to do a MUCH better job of resource management than either Chrome or Firefox, at least in my personal experience (I still use both Chrome and Firefox the majority of the time, but god DAMN they love to suck up the memory).
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Windows is increasingly common in media industries as well. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Mac exclusive video editing unit. Most seem to be at least mixed, if not whole sale switched to PC. Apple seems to have sort of abdicated/ignored the high end professional market to a certain extent. Particularly hardware wise, though I’m sure recentish changes to Final Cut didn’t help. Anyone using Avid (Network TV, lots of cable, major films) seems to be PC these days. Mac exclusive still seems to be common in graphic/web design though.
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You’re right, IE has become a vast beast and like any complex tech sometimes you give up shiny newness for the thing that you at least know works.
IE is thus a bit like the fossil fuel of browsing. It works, we have a lot of experience with it and this makes the tech reliable. My non-electric car will take me hundreds of miles without fear of running out of juice, despite having a box of easily ignited fuel, fires are extremely rare and it cost very little to build. Electric cars may or may not be better for the environment, maybe they’re the future, but I need to get somewhere today and if that means using last century tech that is what I will do.
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Sometimes that’s the only way to retain sanity! 
I used to have to go to a “star chamber” style change control committee review process, where the committee members asked probing questions to show off to each other how smart they were. The head of that committee once asked me “what is your backout plan” even though the change control form had a standard section titled “backout plan” under which I had written “turn power off on new machine”. I said “my plan is to shoot all the witnesses and look for a new job” which was not well received… I think there’s probably a note about that in my personnel record; I should have stayed within proper decorum. You can’t even joke about shooting people any more.
My current employers dissolved their change control committee years ago. Totally not kidding. But you can’t go without change control unless your staff with root privs is small and extremely tightly integrated, which typically means <500 employees and highly skilled techs. We shrank so much when the Bush/Obama Miracle Economy hit (70+ million USD overnight loss, thanks to TARP) that we no longer need formalized change control.
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I had a co-worker that actually submitted this as the back out plan - because some things just cannot be un-done:
“Build a time machine and go back to Friday night prior to the change and don’t do it.”
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I ran into a CSS bug on a site a while ago that looked fine in IE but was pretty broken in Firefox. At fault was a line of the form background-image: url(’);, wherein the parentheses are supposed to contain two single-quotes and not one. It seems Firefox just assumed that everything following the single quote was just supposed to be one long miscellaneous string, whereas IE stopped looking at the close-paren. Seems to me the IE approach is much more sensible, but on the other hand I suppose one mustn’t let people get away with writing bad code.
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Not where I work (Mozilla) but then most of us run OS X or Linux. We don’t deploy IT images for the Windows machines that folks do have except for “We paved over your machine with a fresh copy of Windows to remove bloatware. Here you go.”
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It isn’t 2006 anymore. IE7, IE8, etc. have been pretty standards compliant. (Caveat: I worked on IE7 before I went to Mozilla.)
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I’m not so sure about IE7… At least, if the compatibility mode in IE11 (which is supposedly IE7-equivalent) is anything to go by. Just about every site we have breaks terribly in compatibility mode, damn near gives me a heart attack every time a tester gets a new machine (since IE11 has “set compatibility mode on for internal websites” on by default). Though that could be a .Net thing as well, now that I think about it.
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