Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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I can't understand why Microsoft doesn't just ship a recompiled version of IE6 (for all OSes) that:

1. can't be set to be the default browser;

2. has no address bar, bookmarks menu, or any other "user navigation" feature besides interacting with the pages themselves;

3. and, most importantly, requires a GPO for each set of Intranet domains you want to grant it access to, with a hard-coded start page. All navigation to domains outside the allowed list would trigger the default (modern) browser to open the link instead.

This effectively would make IE6 not a web browser, but just another runtime for ordinary installable software, which just happens to run mostly by loading external code from the web. (Sort of like node-webkit, actually.) Microsoft could re-brand it, with their usual flare, as the "Legacy Intranet Services Application Framework", and tout it as a "transition tool" for any enterprise "lagging behind."

All the people needing IE6 for something could safely upgrade to a new OS, knowing their old web-apps would continue working for as long as LISAF is supported; and all the people developing for the web would be released from the burden of seeing IE6 outside an Intranet ever again.

Because they want it to die.

Presumably they want MS-DOS and Win16 to die, too, but they still ship versions of those with every copy of Windows, and will continue to indefinitely. They're just very, very sandboxed :)

Only the 32-bit versions. And those appear to be dying out (even cheap low-end laptops nowadays come with 4 GiB of RAM and a 64-bit version preinstalled).

But MS-DOS and Win16 isn't software anyone still have to deal with when making new content because the software isn't used by anyone to deal with any content, only legacy software that won't hurt anyone. It's isolated.

But a browser doesn't get stuck in time like a OS does when it dies, they don't surf on the same Web as when they were popular while an old outdated OS still runs its old outdated software just fine. MS-DOS and Win16 also weren't garbage, IE6 is.

IE6 wasn't garbage when it came out. It generally got good reviews. Mostly, people adopted it because it was better than Netscape.

Windows 7, at least the 64bit version, will not run Win16 programs. Ran into that limitation trying to install some old software from the Win98 days that was still using essentially a Win3.1 installer.

Did you try doing it via XP mode?

That's not really Win16 support. It's like saying it supports DOS because it can run DOSBox.

64-bit x86 processors running in "long mode" can't be put into "virtual 8086 mode".

Well, there's IE6 Compatibility Mode.

Is there? How to enable it? The farthest down I can go with stock IE is IE7 (which arguably isn't really much better than IE6, but still)

Browser Mode goes down to IE7, but Document Mode goes down to IE5.

"IE5" document mode is basically IE7 Quirks mode.

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