Internet Explorer’s Ghost Still Haunts Microsoft Today
Internet Explorer could be one of the most controversial applications in history. Included with each copy of Windows after Windows 95 and several versions of 95 itself, this browser gave Microsoft many legal headaches, but it also developed a bad reputation from a technical point of view.
Finally, Microsoft put an end to the reign of the mediocrity of IE and Microsoft Edge is just another implementation of chromium, but while the corpse of the Rots ie in the ground of history, its Acrid ghost is still dragging.
Death that has never stuck
Microsoft put an end to the Internet Explorer with IE 11, withdrawing it in mid-2022. The problem is that many websites only operated properly using the Internet Explorer. Something that I know very well, because until very recently, the tax declaration website in my country would only work with the help of the Internet Explorer, which meant that if you were a Mac or Linux user, you had about any means of depositing your taxes!
This is true for many inherited systems, some of which face the public (that is to say the government or major corporate sites) or, more likely, internal websites that have not been changed or updated for decades, but are always crucial for many companies, or institutions such as universities or hospitals to function.
This is why we have the Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge. This allows you to pretend to be IE, so the inherited sites and systems will work. Microsoft has promised that this mode will remain available “at least” until 2029, but you know with the speeds that some large organizations move, it will have to stay longer than that.
The weight of rear compatibility
Businesses are often at the top of the decades of cast cost invested in applications dependent on the EI – Activex components with internal reporting tools. These applications have never been designed for modern browsers, and rewriting them en masse is painful, expensive and risky.
The weight of the accumulated code (generally poorly developed, if not at all) makes you just wipe the slate and update everything. The greatest danger is to disrupt daily operations. I worked in the IT department of a large organization for years and I looked at how the developers who maintain and update the servers had to work at the speed of the molasses for fear that they suddenly do millions of dollars in depression of productivity due to a single error.
The problem is that it is like a game of JENGA, but there are thousands of blocks, and you do not know how they all interact. And so, running your systems with modern browsers is not as simple as it could. Most of the time, it is only the websites accessible on the stock market of a company that work with modern browsers, because this is what customers use, but below the surface, it all depends on a laptop to hamster performing the basic code that none dares to touch.
Why Microsoft can’t just say “no”
The ghost of IE always haunts us for the same reason why the Windows control panel is still there. You see, large companies will not sign these lucrative software offers if they do not have certain guarantees that you will not draw the carpet under them. As a normal customer, you and I are not allowed to complain when Microsoft suddenly removes a functionality on which you depend, or decides to stuff unsolicited announcements in your operating system.
There are these little things called “contracts” and “level of service” agreements where the software provider promises that you will always have a certain level of stability and support. This means that Microsoft must actually consult these large customers before unilaterally changing things in their own software.
Something like IE mode exists so that MS can have them in both directions. It can implement a modern browser in accordance with the same standards made by other browsers, while giving inherited systems a way to work that may not be the most secure solution, but it is always better than running Windows XP on a virtual machine so that the critical infrastructure can remain functional.
The ghost that will survive us all
Even with the official retirement of ie, its shadow will linger for years – decades, perhaps – through business inertia, regulatory gap and compatibility needs. This is an example of what business people like to call “technical debt”, which is a polite way of saying that shortcuts from the past must now be paid.
It is a big edifying story about the way in which the early domination of a single software can link a boat anchoring to progress. Just as PDFs have become popular via the free acrobat reader, IE has become the default browser for organizations and people simply because it was included with Windows. It is not a problem in itself, but because that is to say was not a very good browser and that all kinds of idiosyncrasies, it distorted the web itself.
Now that we have exceeded IE itself, its training effects remain and will probably always be hidden somewhere in the bowels of the web.
