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dandy72 wrote: no compelling reason to switch
Here's a few: Broken Browser – Fun with Browser Vulnerabilities[^]
And yes, I know other browsers have vulnerabilities too. But some of the IE/Edge vulnerabilities that Manuel has found seem ridiculously simple once you see them.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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If there's nothing that prevents me from doing what I'm trying to do, then nothing on that site qualifies as a "compelling reason".
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I can imagine a few reasons. Maybe the truth is a combination of these:
1. IE is available on all PCs and typically preinstalled, requiring no additional work.
2. It's auto-updated with Windows Update, requiring no additional maintenance effort
3. Companies often have some industry-level contract with M$ to support theit Windows, Office, and other M$ products installments. Therefore, even if unexpected problems turn up, they can rely on M$ support, and that of course includes IE.
4. Since more than 20 years, all web developers make sure to be compatible with IE. Unfortunately, even today, the same is not true for any other browser - possibly including Edge.
5. In large companies or holdings consisting of many individual subsidiaries, it's easiest to implement web-based services on IE. Of course you could throw more money at it to make those same services run with Firefox or Chrome, but why would they, when the alternative - to make IE mandatory - costs nothing at all?
6. At the management level deciding on such things, knowledge of browser alternatives is often ... incomplete. Rather than risk a switch for unknown benefits at an unknown cost, they stick with what they know 'just works'.
I've had a lot of contact with IT over these and similar topics, and I've come to believe that the first three are the main reasons. The others could be overcome, if you can convince management that it would be more secure or cost-effective to switch to another browser.
There's also another, newer reason: most modern browsers, except IE, have stopped supporting NPAPI, and that means Java, ActiveX, and Silverlight (among other things). Edge does not support plugins either (except Flash), and - since version 52.0 - Firefox doesn't either, although Firefox ESR is going to hold out for another year or so.
That leaves IE 11 as the only browser fully supporting plugins without a known deadline. Companies relying on Java et al to implement their internal services would need to make a major investment if switching to another browser. Of course, sooner or later, support for IE 11 will run out and they'll need to find another solution anyway.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Stefan_Lang wrote: ... Java, ActiveX, ...
No browser except IE has ever supported ActiveX.
And that's a good thing. Who in their right mind wants to download and run an unrestricted executable from a random website? 
Java in the browser isn't much better; just look at the long list of security vulnerabilities. But at least it had some semblance of a "sandbox" to try to protect your computer from malicious code.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Who? Who ever downloaded Firefox/Chrome extensions, advocated as main selling point. [^]
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Extensions are programs that the user chooses to download and run. Unless there's a security vulnerability in the browser, no website can cause your browser to download and install an extension without your help.
ActiveX components are programs that the website tries to download and run on the user's computer. Often without the user's knowledge or consent.
Oh, sure, you can change your settings to block ActiveX controls not marked as "safe for scripting". But who decides what's "safe for scripting"? The author of the ActiveX component. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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No, ActiveX controls are not downloaded without user consent. That is an excuse made up by people who clicks any button to get a celebrity nude.
Websites are convincing users to download extensions to interact better, so this is the same.
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Stefan_Lang wrote:
4. Since more than 20 years, all web developers make sure to be compatible with IE. Unfortunately, even today, the same is not true for any other browser - possibly including Edge.
That's a little bit of a skewed view of things. The reality is that yes they work extra hard to make sure it's compatible with IE, but that's because it just works on Chrome and Firefox and IE historically (though less so today, and many of the differences are now hidden by frameworks and libraries) didn't follow the standards and had to do things it's own way. There was a time 15-20 years ago when some developers targeted only IE, but they got burned so many times when IE specific things didn't even work in subsequent versions of IE that they learned their lesson. Everyone I know develops web apps that they expect to sell (as opposed to those who develop custom internal apps) primarily uses Chrome (because the tools are better and it runs on MacOS and Linux) and then scrambles at the end of the development cycle to go back and account for the places where IE still doesn't follow the standards.
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Most places I've worked at least the the devs and certain others have always been allowed their browser of choice.
Immanentize the Eschaton!
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For web devs there must be a whole raft of browsers for testing.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Yes, obviously, but what I meant was we had no constraint as to what to use as our normal, non-dev, inter and intra -net browsers.
Immanentize the Eschaton!
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One word: Managebility. IE/Edge can be configured via a wide set of group policies, Chrome can't.
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If you don't Google it then you can confidently say it can't...
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This is correct and the reason I have switched from IE to chrome. all the security crap we have installed on the machines bring IE and the machine to a stop CPU regularly hits 100% If IE is open. since the scanning tool/ policies don't recognize chrome I have a lot less trouble.
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Actually, at our fairly large company, our default browser is Chrome. But we use Google Docs and Gmail for our corporate email solution. There are still some corporate websites that we have to use IE on though for their Silverlight and older ASP compatibility.
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We allow multiple browsers, but one enterprise app will only print via IE (not our fault).
My apologies for the previous sig block. It's been ages since I posted anything on here.
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I don't know why, but base on my experience with Edge, Edge can display page content and run extension like flash and HTML5 at the same time during my VS installation process on my old and outdated Vostro1310 2GB 98 GB HDD with no battery - Im serious  .
My Experience: I usually run XAMPP, IIS, Visual Studio Community, SQL Express, Notepad++ and PAINT.NET at once everytime I want to develop ASP.NET web app (or I need to reinstall VStudio) and I still can open Edge to view code documents / tutorials / lurking on CP or I can even watch SD video on youtube quite smoothly while firefox and chrome struggle to run.
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I'm using a .sqlproj for my database. It lets you create tables using a semi-designer UI which is nice. However it tries to limit the amount of SQL it generates to reproduce the designer which can be a problem; in particular with default value constraints if you need to generate update scripts instead of always publishing to the DB in VS itself (eg because you're distributing a desktop app instead of a website). Eg this is what I get by default.
[IsDirty] bit NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
Looks harmless right?
Except that when you publish, in SQL Server you get a generated constraint with a name like DF__UserPermi__IsDir_49ACE3F2B. Even this could be livable, except that the number on the end is randomly generated and consequently multiple create scripts will result in different postfixes on the constraint names. This in turn results in databases that whenever a constraint is touched (and the sqlproj's love of dropping constraints while doing anything else to a table means this is more often than you might otherwise thing) you can't have a single universal update script.
If MS had gone with full table and column names in its generated constraint names instead of truncating and affixing a random 8 digit hex number this wouldn't've mattered.
If MS would've used randoms and truncation (presumably to maintain a max length) and then put the name in the SQL it generates to describe the table in the .sqlproj it wouldn't've mattered.
Since they did neither of those things I just wasted 2.5 hours of my life modifying hundreds of lines of SQL to look like this instead:
[IsDirty] bit NOT NULL CONSTRAINT [DF_UserPermissions_IsDirty] DEFAULT 0
ELEPHANTING SUNSHINES!
And for more fun down the line, AIUI there's no way to automatically enforce explicit naming of new constraints (never mind actually have the project do the explicit naming for us). I shudder to think of what would happen if we ended up repeating the original problem with hundreds or thousands of systems deployed in the future instead of just a handful of beta testers.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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do you have that many contraints that you need to adjust for updates every time?
Do that many of your update scripts really need to violate [default value] constraints? (Sounds a bitreally bodgy)
just hand script the few that matter (- there should be clear records of those few, if any, that matter)
- if it is a huge number rethink the design because that is nothing to ever brag about.
Sin tack
the any key okay
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In reality I suspect at least 99% of the time the constraints could be left in place (actually I can't think of any thing I've done since starting the app that would require removing one); but the update scripts that .sqlproj generates frequently decide to add/remove constraints before doing anything with the table. Once again Elephanting Microsoft Sunshines.
Theoretically I could edit every update script it generates to remove the add/remove constraint elephantery, but that would end up being an even bigger cumulative waste of time.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Did sound odd to me to keep flipping constraints in and out, but if it's from a script builder then as you say sensibility is also removed.
I guess I'm old fashioned and don't use auto generated scripts: if they work fine, but when they fail finding out where is somewhere on-par with looking at junior programmer multi threaded recursive class libraries in visual basic.
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I'm not sure this'd be my first choice project either; but my employer's decided to standardize on a single .net DB project type to minimize the differences in tooling between different projects and .sqlproj was the favorite of the senior dev who decided what we'd have to use. Funny how that works. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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That's to hold his spare Flux Capacitors [^].
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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