Makes sense. No matter how much Microsoft flags that IE should not be used, there are still so many people out there who use it because that's how they learned to use computers and are either...
Makes sense. No matter how much Microsoft flags that IE should not be used, there are still so many people out there who use it because that's how they learned to use computers and are either disinterested or afraid from moving past that.
Even last week, I had to tell some people at my company that the reason they were encountering issues with some of our SaaS tools is because they were using IE, which wasn't supported. Our company doesn't even mandate IE for anything, that's just how some people have always associated "the internet".
Short of removing IE from Windows entirely, elevating the "please stop using IE" messages by incorporating stops like this is the only way some users will figure it out.
Is this a case of choosing to use IE over modern browsers? I can't imagine anyone out there is choosing to use IE on SaaS tools like Asana. Many who are still using it are doing it out of inertia....
Is this a case of choosing to use IE over modern browsers? I can't imagine anyone out there is choosing to use IE on SaaS tools like Asana. Many who are still using it are doing it out of inertia. There's plenty of good security reasons to force those users off and show them, one way or another, that IE isn't the internet.
When my previous group in my old workplace, which ran the org's official website, got fed up with supporting IE with all its unique, archaic demands, we simply just... turned it off. Displayed a message to our entire organization (where IE6 was still the default browser in 2012!) to say "We no longer support this, use a modern browser." A month later, IE 11 was the new default browser and nobody minded at all. Sometimes, it just takes a push to improve things.
Also the method here only affects IE, I don't think any third party browser uses system .dll files. Frankly, I'd bet that Apple would force users to use their own first-party browser for certain sites before Microsoft would.
I wouldn't say so. That's a very different situation than this, and a big leap. IE's demise has been a long time coming. It's factual that it's an outdated, insecure browser. Plenty of web devs...
I wouldn't say so. That's a very different situation than this, and a big leap.
IE's demise has been a long time coming. It's factual that it's an outdated, insecure browser. Plenty of web devs have been asking for it to be completely deprecated. Many Windows users have wanted Windows to stop using IE as a basis in the OS for many functions. Microsoft's been trying their best to wean people off of it for years at this point. They're not restricting use of any third party browsers, simply moving people off of one of their own deprecated products to their replacement one. It shouldn't interrupt anyone else's bottom line either.
And despite all that, IE will still be available for use, probably because of things like business intranets that were made by Oracle and still require Java 6 to use, for example.
It's a whole other realm to say "you must use our product and no others on our OS, and we say it is for 'security'" since that statement has multiple problems within it:
a) no proof of insecurity in other browsers
b) suggesting other third-party browsers are insecure at all
c) preventing people from installing or using other programs on Windows (which, despite the other conversation here, I've never actually seen happen in 25 years of using Windows even after that panic with W8 and the Windows Store that made Valve and ex-MS employee Gabe Newell start looking into Linux seriously)
d) this falls back into anti-trust since they got famously charged for something akin to this in the 90's
And, again, I'd peg Apple to do this long before Microsoft at this point, especially since Microsoft's current MO seems to be to increase access, not restrict it.
Both those situations could just be chalked up to odd update bugs, really. It's not like we haven't seen the recent OSX updates also do strange things to user programs and installations. To both,...
Both those situations could just be chalked up to odd update bugs, really. It's not like we haven't seen the recent OSX updates also do strange things to user programs and installations. To both, I have the same response:
I wonder about this, I see it reported a lot but I've never experienced it, nor has anyone in my immediate group of friends and family. It's not that I doubt that it can happen but I wonder how it happens, and that I've never been able to go into a machine and take a look when this did happen means I don't have the first clue about how or why this happens. I'm not sure if this is by design, a stuck group policy, an insidious A/B test, or what, but that it's not 100% the case prevents me from suggesting that it's something that they're doing on purpose and may just be an oddity caused by W10's new approaches to programs rubbing up against some other processes.
(Also, generally, I wouldn't trust user comments about software oddities in general, they've repeatedly been shown to be overblown or false, like when Steam accidentally displayed other users' profile pages on Christmas season and there was a mass hysteria of false claims about "other people buying games on my account". Beyond that, the amount of misinformation I've seen spread about Windows 10 on various tech forums and tech subreddits could fill its own book.)
Further complicating this, I have all the same programs mentioned in that second article. They've never been automatically removed for me, and I've run all the build updates, up to the very latest. Meanwhile, I'm still hearing from OSX-using friends who aren't able to play games with me anymore thanks to Catalina dropped all 32-bit support across the board.
Microsoft never forced anyone to use IE6, and I think it is incredibly unlikely they would ever prevent competing browsers from running on Windows. They've already faced antitrust scrutiny over...
IE6 all over again.
Microsoft never forced anyone to use IE6, and I think it is incredibly unlikely they would ever prevent competing browsers from running on Windows. They've already faced antitrust scrutiny over bundling IE as the default browser, and the ability to run third party apps is the key selling point of their platform. It also just goes against the grain of how they have been run as a company since Satya Nadella took over.
It certainly seems like something crappy Apple would do, but to their credit, they did just finally allow 3rd party browsers to become the default on iOS, which is a pretty big deal.
Frankly, I'd bet that Apple would force users to use their own first-party browser for certain sites before Microsoft would.
It certainly seems like something crappy Apple would do, but to their credit, they did just finally allow 3rd party browsers to become the default on iOS, which is a pretty big deal.
The only reason someone would choose IE over Edge (or any other evergreen browser) is because they are grossly misinformed. This is a rare case where taking some choice away from the user has no...
The only reason someone would choose IE over Edge (or any other evergreen browser) is because they are grossly misinformed.
This is a rare case where taking some choice away from the user has no downsides.
This is a developer issue. It's our job to make sure our software works for our users without creating problems. Requiring IE is a failure on our part, and I don't think MS has any obligation to...
There are a lot of websites out there, especially internal web interfaces, that only work on Internet Explorer, and there's nothing users can do about this.
This is a developer issue. It's our job to make sure our software works for our users without creating problems. Requiring IE is a failure on our part, and I don't think MS has any obligation to continue supporting our failures. MS killing IE would actually force companies to take responsibility for their poorly made internal software.
I'm of the opinion that certain things should be harder for "normal" users to do. Way too many, ahem, older people end up installing malware just by clicking on popups and doing what they say....
I'm of the opinion that certain things should be harder for "normal" users to do. Way too many, ahem, older people end up installing malware just by clicking on popups and doing what they say. Features like Gatekeeper help ensure that these actions are only carried out by people who know what they are doing.
Going to the security section of the settings app to permanently "bless" an app is not difficult or time consuming for people who know what they are doing. It is intentionally designed to not be immediately obvious to prevent idiots from accidentally being funneled through the process.
The problem isn't ease of use. The problem is, a user goes on a website and sees a popup that looks like a legitimate security notification and provides instructions on how to run a "virus scan"...
The problem isn't ease of use. The problem is, a user goes on a website and sees a popup that looks like a legitimate security notification and provides instructions on how to run a "virus scan" to fix it. It downloads an executable, and the popup instructs them to run it. Now their system is infected.
Simple warning messages (like UAC prompts in Windows) aren't enough, as users are quickly conditioned to just hit yes.
I see it as a speed bump intended to ensure that only techies can do it, so making it intuitive would defeat the purpose. I’m reminded of the instructions for turning on developer mode on Android,...
I see it as a speed bump intended to ensure that only techies can do it, so making it intuitive would defeat the purpose. I’m reminded of the instructions for turning on developer mode on Android, which is undiscoverable (without a web search) for similar reasons.
The bar seems fairly low to me since it’s not really a secret and doing a web search isn’t unreasonable. Isn’t that how we learn all sorts of technical tricks?
But one thing I don’t understand is how hard is it, really, to get an app signed? Some open source apps are signed and others aren’t, but I don’t know if that’s because it’s hard or because they didn’t bother?
If I wrote a Mac app, I’d be tempted to leave it unsigned until I thought it was good enough for non-technical users to use without help, and maybe that’s never because it’s a pretty high bar for usability. But a side-effect is that you can’t run it on locked-down machines.
While I’m not entirely happy separating techies from non-techies via this sort of gatekeeping, it seems like a realistic response to the difference in skill levels. And after all, any command-line tool is also undiscoverable if you don’t know its name or it’s not in your PATH.
I used to think the same thing, but it's 2020 and malware (particularly ransomware) still runs rampant. Now I believe systems should be safe by default. Because most of the people using them do...
I used to think the same thing, but it's 2020 and malware (particularly ransomware) still runs rampant. Now I believe systems should be safe by default. Because most of the people using them do not understand how they work, and that is likely never going to change. That is my observation after 6 years in tech support and another 6 as a software engineer.
There is probably a happy middle ground somewhere. I do not think anyone has found it yet (iOS goes too far, for example). In theory, I like MacOS Gatekeeper, but its execution leaves a bit to be...
There is probably a happy middle ground somewhere. I do not think anyone has found it yet (iOS goes too far, for example). In theory, I like MacOS Gatekeeper, but its execution leaves a bit to be desired.
One thing that I think is great is the variety in operating systems we have today, all existing in different places on the spectrum. We have Linux on one end and iOS on the other. They all work better for different use cases. So maybe the path forward is to just pick the best one for a given set of user requirements rather than try to make one operating system do everything for everybody.
The skill gap has always been there. It just manifested itself in different ways. When I got into computers, there was no separation because most ordinary people didn’t use computers at all. And...
The skill gap has always been there. It just manifested itself in different ways. When I got into computers, there was no separation because most ordinary people didn’t use computers at all. And computers used to be much more hostile. Case in point, the Unix ‘rm’ command.
A lot of geeks thought Macs were crap when they came out. Overpriced toys.
The easiest thing to do when you see ordinary users screwing up constantly is blame the user. If they get phished or download malware, that’s because they were ignorant. If we were just able to teach them what we know, or not even that but really basic stuff, they wouldn’t screw up. If they don’t want to upgrade off of Windows XP because nothing else works the same and they don’t want to learn how to use a computer all over again, well, they deserve what they get.
Or you can do something about it. App stores are a way that big tech companies keep their control, sure, but they also serve a purpose.
Sure, these architectural changes are useful as far as they go, but this is too low-level, not really meeting users where they are. For technical users, being in control means learning to do more...
Sure, these architectural changes are useful as far as they go, but this is too low-level, not really meeting users where they are.
For technical users, being in control means learning to do more things yourself and customizing your electronic equipment to your whims. It might mean writing your own programs or having root. But here's the other end of the spectrum: touch screens can be confusing, because sometimes just pointing at something on the screen (not quite touching it) causes the screen to change unexpectedly, and they don't know what happened or how to get back to where they were. If you're having trouble just understanding the UI, you are not in control.
We need to take seriously the needs of people with very different skill levels. Let's say it's someone in a nursing home. Video chat could greatly improve their life, but they don't care at all about being able to install their own programs, or even being able to talk to anyone they like. There are just a handful trusted relatives that they even want to talk to and everyone else is a scary stranger. Having more ability to customize just means having more ways to get confused or scared.
From the point of view of a technical user, this is absurdly limited, but for others this can be a huge improvement to their lives.
Of course, someone needs to set it up for them. Having control often means having someone working for you who is more capable and can set up the equipment for you and fix it when it breaks. This is where the divide between technical and non-technical users starts.
When doing it yourself isn't an option, it's all about customer service. The less capable people are, the more they rely on other people they trust. The individualist mindset often isn't realistic.
And this is why one UI does not fit all. These people, the end-user and the techie who is working for them, have different needs.
It's the thing that enforces signing verifications on macOS apps. For the most part, I think it's no problem. It doesn't affect command line applications like ffmpeg or youtube-dl, just app...
It's the thing that enforces signing verifications on macOS apps. For the most part, I think it's no problem. It doesn't affect command line applications like ffmpeg or youtube-dl, just app bundles I guess. But plenty of open source projects just don't bother with signing/notarizing. So for example I can't run FreeCAD on the lab computers on my campus, have to save that for home.
Makes sense. No matter how much Microsoft flags that IE should not be used, there are still so many people out there who use it because that's how they learned to use computers and are either disinterested or afraid from moving past that.
Even last week, I had to tell some people at my company that the reason they were encountering issues with some of our SaaS tools is because they were using IE, which wasn't supported. Our company doesn't even mandate IE for anything, that's just how some people have always associated "the internet".
Short of removing IE from Windows entirely, elevating the "please stop using IE" messages by incorporating stops like this is the only way some users will figure it out.
Is this a case of choosing to use IE over modern browsers? I can't imagine anyone out there is choosing to use IE on SaaS tools like Asana. Many who are still using it are doing it out of inertia. There's plenty of good security reasons to force those users off and show them, one way or another, that IE isn't the internet.
When my previous group in my old workplace, which ran the org's official website, got fed up with supporting IE with all its unique, archaic demands, we simply just... turned it off. Displayed a message to our entire organization (where IE6 was still the default browser in 2012!) to say "We no longer support this, use a modern browser." A month later, IE 11 was the new default browser and nobody minded at all. Sometimes, it just takes a push to improve things.
Also the method here only affects IE, I don't think any third party browser uses system .dll files. Frankly, I'd bet that Apple would force users to use their own first-party browser for certain sites before Microsoft would.
I wouldn't say so. That's a very different situation than this, and a big leap.
IE's demise has been a long time coming. It's factual that it's an outdated, insecure browser. Plenty of web devs have been asking for it to be completely deprecated. Many Windows users have wanted Windows to stop using IE as a basis in the OS for many functions. Microsoft's been trying their best to wean people off of it for years at this point. They're not restricting use of any third party browsers, simply moving people off of one of their own deprecated products to their replacement one. It shouldn't interrupt anyone else's bottom line either.
And despite all that, IE will still be available for use, probably because of things like business intranets that were made by Oracle and still require Java 6 to use, for example.
It's a whole other realm to say "you must use our product and no others on our OS, and we say it is for 'security'" since that statement has multiple problems within it:
a) no proof of insecurity in other browsers
b) suggesting other third-party browsers are insecure at all
c) preventing people from installing or using other programs on Windows (which, despite the other conversation here, I've never actually seen happen in 25 years of using Windows even after that panic with W8 and the Windows Store that made Valve and ex-MS employee Gabe Newell start looking into Linux seriously)
d) this falls back into anti-trust since they got famously charged for something akin to this in the 90's
And, again, I'd peg Apple to do this long before Microsoft at this point, especially since Microsoft's current MO seems to be to increase access, not restrict it.
Both those situations could just be chalked up to odd update bugs, really. It's not like we haven't seen the recent OSX updates also do strange things to user programs and installations. To both, I have the same response:
I wonder about this, I see it reported a lot but I've never experienced it, nor has anyone in my immediate group of friends and family. It's not that I doubt that it can happen but I wonder how it happens, and that I've never been able to go into a machine and take a look when this did happen means I don't have the first clue about how or why this happens. I'm not sure if this is by design, a stuck group policy, an insidious A/B test, or what, but that it's not 100% the case prevents me from suggesting that it's something that they're doing on purpose and may just be an oddity caused by W10's new approaches to programs rubbing up against some other processes.
(Also, generally, I wouldn't trust user comments about software oddities in general, they've repeatedly been shown to be overblown or false, like when Steam accidentally displayed other users' profile pages on Christmas season and there was a mass hysteria of false claims about "other people buying games on my account". Beyond that, the amount of misinformation I've seen spread about Windows 10 on various tech forums and tech subreddits could fill its own book.)
Further complicating this, I have all the same programs mentioned in that second article. They've never been automatically removed for me, and I've run all the build updates, up to the very latest. Meanwhile, I'm still hearing from OSX-using friends who aren't able to play games with me anymore thanks to Catalina dropped all 32-bit support across the board.
Oh I understand, I'm just trying to separate purposeful action from general OS oddities since reports can get real fuzzy between the two.
Microsoft never forced anyone to use IE6, and I think it is incredibly unlikely they would ever prevent competing browsers from running on Windows. They've already faced antitrust scrutiny over bundling IE as the default browser, and the ability to run third party apps is the key selling point of their platform. It also just goes against the grain of how they have been run as a company since Satya Nadella took over.
It certainly seems like something crappy Apple would do, but to their credit, they did just finally allow 3rd party browsers to become the default on iOS, which is a pretty big deal.
The only reason someone would choose IE over Edge (or any other evergreen browser) is because they are grossly misinformed.
This is a rare case where taking some choice away from the user has no downsides.
This is a developer issue. It's our job to make sure our software works for our users without creating problems. Requiring IE is a failure on our part, and I don't think MS has any obligation to continue supporting our failures. MS killing IE would actually force companies to take responsibility for their poorly made internal software.
Fall, stupid Babylon, fall.
I'm reminded of this story where the YouTube engineers engaged in a conspiracy to murder IE 6.
I'm of the opinion that certain things should be harder for "normal" users to do. Way too many, ahem, older people end up installing malware just by clicking on popups and doing what they say. Features like Gatekeeper help ensure that these actions are only carried out by people who know what they are doing.
Going to the security section of the settings app to permanently "bless" an app is not difficult or time consuming for people who know what they are doing. It is intentionally designed to not be immediately obvious to prevent idiots from accidentally being funneled through the process.
The problem isn't ease of use. The problem is, a user goes on a website and sees a popup that looks like a legitimate security notification and provides instructions on how to run a "virus scan" to fix it. It downloads an executable, and the popup instructs them to run it. Now their system is infected.
Simple warning messages (like UAC prompts in Windows) aren't enough, as users are quickly conditioned to just hit yes.
I see it as a speed bump intended to ensure that only techies can do it, so making it intuitive would defeat the purpose. I’m reminded of the instructions for turning on developer mode on Android, which is undiscoverable (without a web search) for similar reasons.
The bar seems fairly low to me since it’s not really a secret and doing a web search isn’t unreasonable. Isn’t that how we learn all sorts of technical tricks?
But one thing I don’t understand is how hard is it, really, to get an app signed? Some open source apps are signed and others aren’t, but I don’t know if that’s because it’s hard or because they didn’t bother?
If I wrote a Mac app, I’d be tempted to leave it unsigned until I thought it was good enough for non-technical users to use without help, and maybe that’s never because it’s a pretty high bar for usability. But a side-effect is that you can’t run it on locked-down machines.
While I’m not entirely happy separating techies from non-techies via this sort of gatekeeping, it seems like a realistic response to the difference in skill levels. And after all, any command-line tool is also undiscoverable if you don’t know its name or it’s not in your PATH.
I used to think the same thing, but it's 2020 and malware (particularly ransomware) still runs rampant. Now I believe systems should be safe by default. Because most of the people using them do not understand how they work, and that is likely never going to change. That is my observation after 6 years in tech support and another 6 as a software engineer.
There is probably a happy middle ground somewhere. I do not think anyone has found it yet (iOS goes too far, for example). In theory, I like MacOS Gatekeeper, but its execution leaves a bit to be desired.
One thing that I think is great is the variety in operating systems we have today, all existing in different places on the spectrum. We have Linux on one end and iOS on the other. They all work better for different use cases. So maybe the path forward is to just pick the best one for a given set of user requirements rather than try to make one operating system do everything for everybody.
The skill gap has always been there. It just manifested itself in different ways. When I got into computers, there was no separation because most ordinary people didn’t use computers at all. And computers used to be much more hostile. Case in point, the Unix ‘rm’ command.
A lot of geeks thought Macs were crap when they came out. Overpriced toys.
The easiest thing to do when you see ordinary users screwing up constantly is blame the user. If they get phished or download malware, that’s because they were ignorant. If we were just able to teach them what we know, or not even that but really basic stuff, they wouldn’t screw up. If they don’t want to upgrade off of Windows XP because nothing else works the same and they don’t want to learn how to use a computer all over again, well, they deserve what they get.
Or you can do something about it. App stores are a way that big tech companies keep their control, sure, but they also serve a purpose.
Sure, these architectural changes are useful as far as they go, but this is too low-level, not really meeting users where they are.
For technical users, being in control means learning to do more things yourself and customizing your electronic equipment to your whims. It might mean writing your own programs or having root. But here's the other end of the spectrum: touch screens can be confusing, because sometimes just pointing at something on the screen (not quite touching it) causes the screen to change unexpectedly, and they don't know what happened or how to get back to where they were. If you're having trouble just understanding the UI, you are not in control.
We need to take seriously the needs of people with very different skill levels. Let's say it's someone in a nursing home. Video chat could greatly improve their life, but they don't care at all about being able to install their own programs, or even being able to talk to anyone they like. There are just a handful trusted relatives that they even want to talk to and everyone else is a scary stranger. Having more ability to customize just means having more ways to get confused or scared.
From the point of view of a technical user, this is absurdly limited, but for others this can be a huge improvement to their lives.
Of course, someone needs to set it up for them. Having control often means having someone working for you who is more capable and can set up the equipment for you and fix it when it breaks. This is where the divide between technical and non-technical users starts.
When doing it yourself isn't an option, it's all about customer service. The less capable people are, the more they rely on other people they trust. The individualist mindset often isn't realistic.
And this is why one UI does not fit all. These people, the end-user and the techie who is working for them, have different needs.
It's the thing that enforces signing verifications on macOS apps. For the most part, I think it's no problem. It doesn't affect command line applications like ffmpeg or youtube-dl, just app bundles I guess. But plenty of open source projects just don't bother with signing/notarizing. So for example I can't run FreeCAD on the lab computers on my campus, have to save that for home.