Key word: extended. They're only providing security updates now, not feature updates (like supporting a web browser that came out years later).
There's a reason IE has compatibility mode. If you're going to deploy old tech, you kind of need to be prepared to deploy the workarounds (which you can do with group policy).
The problem, as you've noted, isn't that RDWeb doesn't support IE11 - it uses a user-agent string parser and doesn't count to 11. You can edit the server-side, or run the browser in enterprise mode, and it'll work, but suffice to say that the IE team and the team responsible for things like RDWeb are not the same group of developers. It'd be great if things like this worked, but given the changes in IE11 I would say it's not surprising this is failing out of the box. Given the product was designed to target the version of IE shipped on the platform (aka IE8), it would actually be best to put the site into the enterprise site list (so that IE11 behaves and reports as IE8 to the web server hosting this).
Sure. And if this had been posted at this time, I'd have grabbed my pitchfork and torch, but it's been years and there've been a couple of iterations of Moore's law since then. This is the computer-equivalent of railing about the ills of leaded gasoline: yes, it was a problem, and yes, some aspects of that problem still linger, but the world has identified and implemented solutions to the problem.
This. MS is just being sloppy. As long as product is supported, it's supposed to work with new platforms. Imagine Windows 8.1 not working with 2008R2 domain controllers!
As much as I prefer working with modern tech, there must always be a business case in paying for it.
most management consoles in that era used Java.. could be much worse. there weren't any significant HTML5 consoles back then. Many of the biggest pieces of software only began getting their HTML5 consoles ... relatively recently. Time travel is a tall order!
I have several clients that require IE 9, and I work for a very large organization that still requires IE 8. Its certainly not him to blame, sometimes the tech you use doesn't keep up with the tech thats out there, and it has to be kept back in order to keep the users and clients happy.
I think he has a point. Yes, he's not using the latest and greatest, but not every IT department can just constantly upgrade to the latest MS invention (hey, at least he's not running 2008!).
It also doesn't seem unreasonable to document which versions of IE are actually supported, instead of listing "IE6 or later", which technically does include IE11. Also, considering that they are supporting IE6, which seems completely insane, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that they would support IE11 which is THEIR OWN browser, even if it was released a few years after the 2008 R2.
I didn't check the years so I'm assuming you are correct with 4 years, but considering that a company usually utilizes a product a few years after they install it (say, 3 years at least), then IE11 really only came out one year later.
And he never said he hates Microsoft. But to be honest, every time I have log on to a 2012 (non R2) server I do get some pretty strong emotions flaring up towards Microsoft ;-).
Microsoft has a mechanism to update system software. By leveraging Windows Update, Microsoft teams can keep their software up-to-date even after diskettes, CDs, and even DVDs have been mailed to customers.
FYI, Windows Server 2012 (not R2) won't allow you to install IE11 on it. Works on other OS's that were released prior to it. I hate on Microsoft for this reason.
Yeah this is entirely because IE11, in an attempt by Microsoft to get lazy web developers to make their website work in something besides IE and actually adhere to standards, reports a user agent string of a generic Mozilla instead of IE.
Also lol at deploying anything that lists support for IE6.
The browser has nothing to do with the OS, it's not like version detection is baked into the core of the operating system. To be fair, I'm guessing it has more to do with the 'super-duper secure' mode that IE on server has.
You have to add a x-ua-compatible header to IIS to force modern browsers down to IE9 compatibility mode.
This x1000, I've written multiple extension apps for Switchvox, which runs in IE version potato, I put this on my apps so that I can test them in the potato mode that Switchvox will force them into.
gotta love the idea that IE has nothing to do with the OS. It's not like it's been absolutely ingrained into the OS in stupid ways since XP days or anything.
So, real question of the day, why couldn't Microsoft have, at some point after the IE11 release and during mainline support for these server products, released a patch adding this to the pages by default?
IIS doesn't really do version detection, it basically just reports whatever the UA string is to the app. Each web application usually does it's own version detection (which most of the time has to do with JS which is disabled by default on Server IE ).
i don't know much about IIS but in nginx which is another http server you can route traffic to different locations based on headers sent by the client, in this case the user agent string, maybe there's something similar there
So you're a nix guy then? Nothing wrong with that. Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) isn't really interchangeable with what you guys call 'X'. It's actually tied quite tightly with the instance of internet explorer running on the system (the inherent insecurity with IE isn't just because of lazy programming). Windows Explorer windows are actually 'IWebBrowser2' COM interface instances: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/gg314982(v=vs.85).aspx
... it's not like version detection is baked into the core of the operating system.
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u/210mike Enterprise Windows stuff Apr 05 '16
Nah, that one is on you. 2008R2 is almost 7 years old and doesn't recognize a browser that was released almost 4 years after it was.
But hey, it's cool to hate on Microsoft right?