I was talking about Microsoft using legacy crap in Windows as a “feature” to lock people in who were stupid enough to design things based on it.
“Near the end, Trident’s rendering capabilities weren’t that bad, but Microsoft just kept adding modes that essentially froze the state of the engine and then made a new one on top that behaved differently.
If you don’t specify a doctype, then to Internet Explorer, the DOM is still where it was at in 1999.
This is because Microsoft encouraged abusing it to write Intranet sites and ActiveX crap that will never be fixed.
There are still ways to launch IE and browse with it in Windows 11 although they obscure how to get at it. But you can force it to launch.
The bulk of [Internet Explorer] is never going away though. It would break some thing that some business or government uses internally and they’d go “Well, shit. Since that’s gone, we may as well ditch Windows too because that’s literally the only reason we were paying for it.”.
Windows has a lot of attack surface that most people never think about because people pay to keep it crufty.
The way to deal with applications that old of course could be something like IEs4Linux where you just shove them into WIne, or stick an old copy of Windows 2000 into a virtual machine and only allow it on the Intranet, but if you’re a big company, Microsoft’s BSA will come audit this and find out you’re using “their software” in a way they don’t like.
Microsoft’s BSA is a bunch of lawyers that figure out who suddenly hasn’t paid up in a while and is trying to get away from them and then demands audits and exit taxes and Windows licenses for machines that don’t even run Windows. It served their purposes that you should paint yourself into a corner using the mess that they provided over the years. You know, for “free”, of course.
It’s like trying to get out of California and they figure all you’re good for is to soak one last time, so you get a tax audit.”
So you “get out of California” and life’s good until the California tax people send you a letter in the mail and say “You owe this because reasons.” and you end up paying them something even if you don’t owe them anything because otherwise they’ll take you to one of their tax courts where they always win.
Microsoft’s lawyers are like this.
-Me on a Matrix chatroom
If that’s not bad enough, if you get on Facebook, the BSA is always offering to pay people to narc out large users of their software who are violating the EULA.
Chances are one of your own employees will see that, decide that being a rat pays pretty well, and anonymously turn you in, and then use the money they got to go on vacation and pay their car note off.
People who are not already in a predicament like this should avoid getting caught in Microsoft’s tar pit.
People who are in a predicament like this need to avoid the one time expenses of freeing themselves from their Microsoft dependencies and migrating away vs. total expense of just paying and paying.
The total expense is more than just the licensing fees for Microsoft products, where you’ve already paid for Windows a million times over and here you are paying for it again.
Microsoft products are not secure and are constantly being taken over by ransomware and nation state malware, and even failing that somehow, are of poor technical quality and just have a habit of blowing up on you at the worst possible time due to inferior craftsmanship. ⬆