IE 11....What a Mess!

I don't know about you folks but I am sick of seeing IE11 scew up! Every day
I get messages about how it must close, or has stopped working...or even
that it has stopped working when it clearly is working. If anyone knows how
to repair this mess let us know. I'm using Win 7 / 64 / Pro. But this
browser wouldn't even qualify as a Beta program based on its current
unreliability!

Oreally

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 10:20:50 -0800, "OREALLY"
wrote:


I don't know about you folks but I am sick of seeing IE11 scew up! Every day
I get messages about how it must close, or has stopped working...or even
that it has stopped working when it clearly is working. If anyone knows how
to repair this mess let us know. I'm using Win 7 / 64 / Pro. But this
browser wouldn't even qualify as a Beta program based on its current
unreliability!


I don't use IE, so I haven't had you experience. But I know that if I
did use it and had such problems, I would simply switch to a different
browser.

My favorite is FireFox.

There are significant advantages to IE. But Microsoft doesn't seem to give a
hoot about its reliability!

"Ken Blake" wrote in message
...

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 10:20:50 -0800, "OREALLY"
wrote:


I don't know about you folks but I am sick of seeing IE11 scew up! Every
day
I get messages about how it must close, or has stopped working...or even
that it has stopped working when it clearly is working. If anyone knows how
to repair this mess let us know. I'm using Win 7 / 64 / Pro. But this
browser wouldn't even qualify as a Beta program based on its current
unreliability!


I don't use IE, so I haven't had you experience. But I know that if I
did use it and had such problems, I would simply switch to a different
browser.

My favorite is FireFox.

"OREALLY" wrote

| There are significant advantages to IE.

I can't imagine what those might be. But if you really
want to use it, you might try using compatibility mode
more. I don't know if it will prevent "stopped working"
messages or not. You didn't mention any pattern to
those, so it's hard for anyone to guess the problem.
But for what it's worth:

IE11 and Edge have broken compatibility with traditional
IE approach. Support has been dropped for VBScript,
ActiveX, and all sorts of rendering details that used to
be standard in IE. For IE5-10, each version is slightly
incompatible with the last, but at least they're all IE. With
IE11/Edge, much of the IE functionality is broken or missing,
and it pretends to be another browser by spoofing the
userAgent. (I'm not joking here. MS have actually designed
IE11/Edge to trick websites about what browser you're using!)

For many years, websites would recognize IE by "MSIE"
in the userAgent. Most commercial sites will check the
userAgent and then customize the page accordingly.
In many cases they even serve different pages for diferent
IE versions. A typical IE userAgent would be like so:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)

With IE11 MS has spoofed it to look like Firefox,
adding "like Gecko" and "rv:" while removing "MSIE":

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

The Edge userAgent is designed to look like Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393

Pretending to be using a different browser can
cause all sorts of problems, but as with their past few
IE versions, MS protests that they now support web
standards and they don't want sites to cater pages
to IE. So they try to trick websites!

There's one major difference between IE11 and Edge.
The former still has normal IE functionality. It's just
disabled. (Edge, by contrast, is simply broken; a strippped
down version of IE.) You can set compatibility mode
for IE11 on a per-domain basis and then IE11 will enable
normal IE functionality and send a userAgent pretending
to be IE7. If you want to try that for problem websites,
first you may need to press Alt if the main menu is not
showing. Then click Tools - Compatibility View Settings
and add the domain of interest there.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 15:00:38 -0500, "Mayayana"
wrote:


The Edge userAgent is designed to look like Chrome:


Yes, I thought the same thing; ranking browsers from best to worst,
starting with Firefox at the top, to me the three worst ones are
Chrome, IE, and Edge, in that order.

But we all have different views. Two of the things that perplex me are
how many people like Chrome and how many people like Edge.

On 02/18/2017 06:05 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
But we all have different views. Two of the things that perplex me are
how many people like Chrome and how many people like Edge.
It may have a lot to do with browser history. If I view a ton of sites
other than yours, I may never see those issues. I use Chrome and have
no browsing issues. Of the one in 300 pages that give me issues I jump
to Firefox.

But you said it "We all have different views" and a poll (and some have
been done of course) will show all sorts of variances depending on maybe
a biased poller?!

"Ken Blake" wrote


But we all have different views. Two of the things that perplex me are
how many people like Chrome and how many people like Edge.


I didn't know people liked Edge. My understanding
is that Edge and IE are dropping very quickly. But
I am surprised how many people are happy to use
a spyware browser from Google. I think it's more
than half. I suppose that as with Macs and GMail,
simplicity is a big selling point. If there are no
settings there's nothing to learn.

On 18/02/2017 11:05 pm, Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 15:00:38 -0500, "Mayayana"
wrote:


The Edge userAgent is designed to look like Chrome:


Yes, I thought the same thing; ranking browsers from best to worst,
starting with Firefox at the top, to me the three worst ones are
Chrome, IE, and Edge, in that order.

But we all have different views. Two of the things that perplex me are
how many people like Chrome and how many people like Edge.


After using Firefox from it's inception I dropped it in favour of Chrome
a short while back. There were several other reasons, but the main one
was Firefox's lack of compatibility. It's OK in the desktop version, but
on a phone or tablet it's useless. Chrome runs just fine on all of them
(even with the proviso that it takes up a lot of memory on the desktop)
and the data syncs between all of them just fine. In these multi-device
days, Chrome is the only real option, despite any faults it may have.
I'm with you with Edge though - that is singularly useless.

--
Bob
Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England

You know you're old when your partner says "come upstairs and make love"
and you know you can't do both.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 16:05:23 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
Two of the things that perplex me are
how many people like Chrome and how many people like Edge.

People's loyalties to software bring up Chateaubriand's "Le coeur a
ses raisons".[1][2] There's a guy at work who actually uses Bing for
his preferred search engine, even though on several occasions he
failed to find something he was looking for and I immediately turned
it up in Startpage, using the same terms.

Firefox is my workaday browser, but I do occasionally use Chrome. For
instance, I was on a site that wanted to do a popup, which I wanted
to see, but Firefox never gave me a chance to allow it. (I do get
permission prompts from Firefox for other sites.) I was able to view
the page in Chrome.

Chrome's developer tools also feel a little bit smoother to me, and I
like the ability to explore the effects of different window sizes
right in the browser, without actually resizing the window.

[1] A bit of research shows that it was actually Pascal, rather than
Chateaubriand:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dict...3ur%20a%20ses%
20raisons%20que%20la%20raison%20ne%20conna%C3%AEt% 20point

[2] Apparently there was a French comedy series that ran for three
seasons:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0444950/
After the first couple of hits in Startpage, most seem to be about
that.



--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

On 02/18/2017 05:05 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 15:00:38 -0500, "Mayayana"
wrote:


The Edge userAgent is designed to look like Chrome:


Yes, I thought the same thing; ranking browsers from best to worst,
starting with Firefox at the top, to me the three worst ones are
Chrome, IE, and Edge, in that order.

But we all have different views. Two of the things that perplex me are
how many people like Chrome and how many people like Edge.


I once thought Opera had potential to become the best browser. However,
recent versions are too much like Chrome.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of
the few." -- Marie Henri Beyle (Stendhal)

On 18/02/2017 8:00 pm, Mayayana wrote:
"OREALLY" wrote

| There are significant advantages to IE.

I can't imagine what those might be.

The main one is the amount of memory it uses. I have an old laptop with
limited memory running Windows 7, and both Chrome and Firefox have
become so bloated that neither will run successfully on it at all.
Internet Explorer 11 loads in a fraction of the time the others take and
then runs just fine, albeit slowly. Other than that, I agree with you.

--
Bob
Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England

You don't stop laughing because you grow old, you grow old because you
stop laughing!!!

"Bob Henson" wrote

| | There are significant advantages to IE.
|
| I can't imagine what those might be.
|
| The main one is the amount of memory it uses. I have an old laptop with
| limited memory running Windows 7, and both Chrome and Firefox have
| become so bloated that neither will run successfully on it at all.
| Internet Explorer 11 loads in a fraction of the time the others take and
| then runs just fine, albeit slowly. Other than that, I agree with you.

I think one reason IE loads instantly is because
it's already running, for the most part. It's very
much tied into the system, and to Explorer. Only
the tiny iexplore.exe graphical front-end and a couple
of things like shdocvw.dll actually need to be loaded.
IE graphics is Windows graphics. IE cookies and cache
are defined as Windows cookies and cache. Much
of the Windows network API is indistingushable from
the IE API. Other browsers bring their own versions
of those things.

I wouldn't argue with the point about bloat, but I
don't find any problem running FF on an average
Win7-64 system or on this XP system where I spend
most of my time. I've got about 3 GB RAM to spare,
after accounting for graphics. But I almost never
get close to using that. Both Pale Moon and Firefox
load pages almost instantly. I should note that I
don't normally enable script, don't enable video to
load, and rarely leave a lot of windows open. But
you're saying they won't run at all. I just don't
see anything like that.

I haven't allowed IE online since about '99. It
started out because IE5 started running like
molasses and I couldn't figure out why, so I switched
to Netscape. But then I got into programming
and began to realize just how dangerous the IE/
system tie-in is. I love the options IE provides,
like writing HTAs. But I would never allow it past
the firewall.

By the way, thanks for your other comment about
Chrome on phones. That's the first time I've heard
anything that might explain the popularity of Chrome
and the falling number of Firefox users. As someone
who rarely uses a computer phone and has never
needed to "sync" anything, I've been unaware of
that aspect.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 11:36:54 -0800, "OREALLY"
wrote:

There are significant advantages to IE.


If that's your view, that's fine with me. But it's not mine at all. In
my opinion, Edge is the worst browser out there, and IE is a close
second. Almost any other browser is preferable.



But Microsoft doesn't seem to give a
hoot about its reliability!


I have very little experience with IE11, but the few times I've tried
it I haven't had such problems. And back in the days when used older
IE versions, I also had no such problems.

And none of the many people I know who use IE11 have had such
problems.


"Ken Blake" wrote in message
.. .

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 10:20:50 -0800, "OREALLY"
wrote:


I don't know about you folks but I am sick of seeing IE11 scew up! Every
day
I get messages about how it must close, or has stopped working...or even
that it has stopped working when it clearly is working. If anyone knows how
to repair this mess let us know. I'm using Win 7 / 64 / Pro. But this
browser wouldn't even qualify as a Beta program based on its current
unreliability!


I don't use IE, so I haven't had you experience. But I know that if I
did use it and had such problems, I would simply switch to a different
browser.

My favorite is FireFox.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 13:05:02 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 11:36:54 -0800, "OREALLY"
wrote:

There are significant advantages to IE.


If that's your view, that's fine with me. But it's not mine at all. In
my opinion, Edge is the worst browser out there, and IE is a close
second. Almost any other browser is preferable.


Ken, I suspect you've fallen for a troll. The initial rant was silly
enough, since -- as you rightly pointed out -- it's quite easy to
switch to a real browser. But the claim of "advantages" to IE11 is
even more silly, and I can't imagine that anyone including the OP
believes it.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

Stan Brown wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 13:05:02 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 11:36:54 -0800, "OREALLY"
wrote:

There are significant advantages to IE.

If that's your view, that's fine with me. But it's not mine at all. In
my opinion, Edge is the worst browser out there, and IE is a close
second. Almost any other browser is preferable.


Ken, I suspect you've fallen for a troll. The initial rant was silly
enough, since -- as you rightly pointed out -- it's quite easy to
switch to a real browser. But the claim of "advantages" to IE11 is
even more silly, and I can't imagine that anyone including the OP
believes it.


No, that's what happens when someones Internet Banking only
works with a specific version of Internet Explorer (ActiveX
etc.). Other than some quirk like that, it doesn't really
have any advantages at all. But your bank probably likes it.
The banks even like to drag their heels, optimizing for
IE10 when IE11 is out.

Paul