You already know that a whopping 143 million Equifax records were compromised. The difference with this one is that a big-three credit bureau like Equifax tracks so much personal and sometimes confidential information like social security numbers, full names, addresses, birth dates, and even drivers licenses and credit card numbers for some.
It can be the difference between being able to buy a house or sometimes even get a job or not. This breach and the way they handled it, including the announcement, was what Brian Krebs rightfully called a dumpster fire.
The problem is that with this much personal information in the hands of the bad guys, highly targeted spear phishing attacks can be expected, and a variety of other related crime like full-on identity theft on a much larger scale.
These records are first going to be sold on the dark web to organized crime for premium prices, for immediate exploitation, sometimes by local gangs on the street. Shame on Equifax for this epic fail. They will be sued for billions of dollars for this web-app vulnerability.
So this Scam of the Week covers what is inevitable in the near future, we have not seen actual Equifax phishing attacks at this point yet, but you can expect them in the coming days and weeks because the bad guys are going to take their most efficient way to leverage this data… email.
I suggest you send the following to your employees, friends, and family. You’re welcome to copy, paste, and/or edit:
“Cyber criminals have stolen 143 million credit records in the recent hacking scandal at big-three credit bureau Equifax. At this point you have to assume that the bad guys have highly personal information that they can use to trick you. You need to watch out for the following things:
Phishing emails that claim to be from Equifax where you can check if your data was compromised
Phishing emails that claim there is a problem with a credit card, your credit record, or other personal financial information
Calls from scammers that claim they are from your bank or credit union
Fraudulent charges on any credit card because your identity was stolen
Here are 5 things you can do to prevent identity theft:
First sign up for credit monitoring (there are many companies providing that service including Equifax but we cannot recommend that)
Next freeze your credit files at the three major credit bureaus Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Remember that generally it is not possible to sign up for credit monitoring services after a freeze is in place. Advice for how to file a freeze is available here on a state-by-state basis: http://consumersunion.org/research/security-freeze/
Check your credit reports via the free www.annualcreditreport.com
Check your bank and credit card statements for any unauthorized activity
If you believe you may have been the victim of identity theft, here is a site where you can learn more about how to protect yourself: www.idtheftcenter.org. You can also call the center’s toll-free number (888-400-5530) for advice on how to resolve identify-theft issues. All of the center’s services are free.
Android 8.0 Oreo is here! Click through for a gallery of top features.
Google
Project Treble finally separates the OS from the hardware, which has big implications for updates, third-party ROMs, and security.
Notifications get sorted into buckets now, with a new, tiny notification section at the bottom called “by the way.”
Media notifications automatically get colored based on the album art.
Pull a notification to the side slightly, and you can snooze it.
Google Play Protect isn’t really new, but it gives reassuring branding to Android’s security features.
Every emoji has been redesigned in Android 8.0, and you get 69 new emojis!
Settings has a new color scheme, new icons, and has been totally rearranged.
A new Autofill framework can automatically fill in forms for you, and gives password managers a supported API for Android.
Android 8.0 Oreo is the 26th version of the world’s most popular operating system. This year, Google’s mobile-and-everything-else OS hit two billion monthly active users—and that’s just counting phones and tablets. What can all those users expect from the new version? In an interview with Ars earlier this year, Android’s VP of engineering Dave Burke said that the 8.0 release would be about “foundation and fundamentals.” His team was guided by a single question: “What are we doing to Android to make sure Android is in a great place in the next 5 to 10 years?”
Nabisco produced a limited run of Android-themed Oreos for the launch event.
Oreo
Take a closer look at Oreo and you really can see the focus on fundamentals. Google is revamping the notification system with a new layout, new controls, and a new color scheme. It’s taking responsibility for Android security with a Google-branded security solution. App background processing has been reined in, hopefully providing better battery life and more consistent performance. There’s even been some work done on Android’s perpetual update problem, with Project Treble allowing for easier update development and streaming updates allowing for easier installation by users. And, as with every release, more parts of Android get more modularized, with emojis and GPU driver updates now available without an OS update.Like its partnership with Nestle for Android 4.4 “KitKat,” Google is taking its alphabetical snack-themed codenames to the extreme with 8.0, and partnering with an actual snack company. This time Nabisco is sharing the “Oreo” brand with Google (We’ve yet to hear about any kind of monetary arrangement for this sort of thing). Google’s Eclipse-themed launch party was complete with custom Oreo cookies featuring an Android robot design and green filling.
Two billion users is a huge number, but with Android 8.0, Google shows that it still isn’t satisfied. A new initiative called “Android Go” targets the developing world, where cheap devices and limited access to data and power require taking a different look at how some parts of Android function.
Oreo will also serve as the base for three new Android form factors. It will be built into cars as “Android Automotive,” where Google works with car OEMs to integrate Android. Android 8.0 will also be the base OS for “Android Things,” an “Internet of things” (IoT) version of the OS designed to easily manage on embedded devices. Finally, Google’s virtual reality “Daydream” group will also launch a new form factor with Oreo—standalone VR headsets.
So, coming soon to your phone, your tablet, your watch, your TV, your car, your “things,” and your VR headset—it’s Android 8.0 Oreo. Let’s dive in.
Project Treble—Finally, real progress on the fragmentation problem
Treble separates the vendor code from the rest of the operating system.
Google / Ron Amadeo
The Vendor Interface is analogous to the Developer API. The Developer API gives Google and developers an agreed-upon standard to support, while the Vendor Interface gives Google and hardware makers an agreed-upon standard to support. Just as you can change the OS and have apps still work, you should be able to change the hardware implementation and have the OS still work.
Google’s description of the Android update process. Treble will let steps 1 and 2 happen at the same time.
While Android’s scale is impressive, the vast majority of Android users won’t get to use new versions of the OS quickly—or at all. Google’s own Pixel phones get updates immediately, third-party flagships get the update in six months to a year, and everyone else gets the update when they throw out their existing handset and buy a new one. Android’s biggest problem is easily the ecosystem’s inability to ship updates quickly and efficiently to every device.
Google’s past “solutions” to the Android update problem have involved little action and lots of talk. In 2011, it asked OEMs to do better and announced the “Android Update Alliance“—a group of Android OEMs that totally-pinky-sweared to ship updates quicker. After the big announcement, exactly nothing changed; the group was never mentioned again. In 2016 Google reportedly ranked OEMs by update speed and showed the list around the ecosystem in an attempt to “shame” OEMs into doing a better job. Little happened.
Asking OEMs nicely has not improved things, so in Android Oreo, Google is finally implementing a technical change to Android that should help with updates. The effort—called “Project Treble”—modularizes the Android OS away from the drivers and other hardware-specific code. As Android’s Head of Engineering, Dave Burke, put it in his interview with Ars, “Today, it just costs too much to do an upgrade of Android. The amount of work and dependencies are too high.” The goal with Treble is to make it easier, faster, and—most importantly for OEMs—cheaper to pump out an Android update.
Once Google releases an Android update, getting it running on a specific device usually involves three major steps. First, SoC vendors like Qualcomm or Samsung’s Exynos division take the update and modify the release for that specific piece of hardware. Then OEMs like Samsung and LG theme the OS, rebranding Android with new icons, colors, and layouts, often changing core parts of the OS to add extra features and functionality. Finally, carriers test the new release, certify it for their networks, and send it out to users. (If you buy an unlocked device, you can skip the “carrier” step and get your update directly from the OEM.) Each step creates not only a delay, but also the opportunity for a company to end update support, leaving users with an abandoned piece of hardware.
Project Treble will help with that first step: relying on SoC vendors to get the release running on specific SoC hardware. Project Treble introduces a “Vendor Interface”—a standardized interface that sits between the OS and the hardware. As long as the SoC vendor plugs into the Vendor Interface and the OS plugs into the Vendor Interface, an upgrade to a new version of Android should “just work.” OEMs and carriers will still need to be involved in customizing the OS the rolling it out to users, but now the parties involved in an update can “parallelize” the work needed to get an update running—SoC code is no longer the “first” step that everyone else needs to wait on.
Google has a new set of tests, called the Vendor Test Suite (VTS), which ensures the Vendor Interface on a device is properly implemented and future proof. This is a hardware-focused analog to the Compatibility Test Suite (CTS), which ensures the Android app APIs are properly implemented on a device.
HAL versioning and deprecation
On the Android Developer’s Backstage Podcast (which is more-or-less Google’s “official” Android podcast) Iliyan Malchev, the head of Project Treble, dished out a good amount of detail about his pet project, saying “We haven’t been very formal about defining the boundary between the top [AOSP] and the bottom [Silicon Vendor] pieces of the OS.” With Treble, Malchev said that Google is “defining a set of interfaces, formally, in a structured and versioned manner, and committing to maintaining them.”
Treble isn’t just a single interface. HALs are broken down into “major subsystems” like the camera, audio, location, Wi-Fi, telephony, and other components. Malchev revealed there are “about 60” of these HALs in Oreo, with more to come in future releases. To allow for each subsystem to grow and evolve over time, each one gets a major and minor version number, and each release of Android will support a range of versions for each subsystem. For device types Google doesn’t officially support, there’s a “Vendor NDK” that allows vendors to make their own custom modular HALs.
The versioned subsystems mean that future device support will be partially dependant on Google and what subsystem versions it chooses to support or deprecate with each Android release. If your phone SoC only supports “Camera HAL version 1.3” and “Android 9.0” requires Camera HAL v1.4 and up, you’ll need to have your camera HAL upgraded before Android 9.0 will fully work on your device.
To help make HAL deprecation decisions like this, Google will have some sort of database containing all the HAL information for all the Treble Android devices out there. As Malchev put it on the podcast, “We will have a way to know, for every given device, exactly which HAL interface it implements at which version, and we’re going to have a way to look at the universe and see ‘Ok, what will happen if we drop support for this old version of this interface? How many devices will not be eligible to get a new upgrade?’ We’ll be able to make a data-driven decision for this sort of thing, and that’s great because previously we didn’t have that kind of data.”
Working with SoC vendors
Treble is about making lives easier for the thousands of Android OEMs out there, but nearly all the work was done with the SoC vendor community. “There are ten [silicon vendors] in the world or so.” Malchev said on the ADB Podcast, “Companies like Qualcomm, Mediatek, LSI, Spreadtrum, Intel. It is these companies that manufacture systems on a chip that underpin the actual Android devices. The fanout from these few companies to the thousands upon thousands of phones and tablets out there is massive… By working directly with these companies, we essentially solve the problem to a very, very large degree at the source, prior to that fanout.”
SoC vendors represent a much more focused group than working with OEMs. “We cannot possibly got to the hundreds upon hundreds of OEMs and say, ‘Hey, we’re doing this, can you change those things?'” Malchev explained. “We instead go to the silicon vendors of the world and work with them, so that, as the fanout happens, everyone benefits from the work we do.”
Malchev said that getting SoC vendors on board with Project Treble “took as much time as the engineering work” The work started in late 2015, and today, as part of Treble, Google has a dedicated SoC vendor outreach team. Malchev said that Google now has “teams in Taiwan, Seoul, San Diego dedicated to working with our major partners, with the silicon vendors in their own time zone and in their own back yard.” Malchev did not specify which silicon vendors Google had embedded teams with, but a quick comparison of SoC company headquarters against that list suggests that Google is in Taiwan for MediaTek, Seoul for Samsung, San Diego for Qualcomm.
A ROM revolution
Enlarge/ Android 8.0 with Project Treble cleanly splits the partitions up by company. Typically Google is the Android platform vendor, Qualcomm is the SoC Vendor, and a company like Samsung is the OEM/ODM.
While Treble is focused on official Android OEMs and making their lives easier when it comes to updates, as a side effect, Project Treble should be revolutionary for aftermarket Android ROM projects like Lineage OS (formerly CyanogenMod) and individual developers on places like the XDA Developers Forum. These groups take code from Google’s open source Android repository and make Android-based OSes themselves, usually offering upgrades to abandoned devices or conversions from skinned Android to a more stock look.
In the past, the bane of third-party ROM developers has been that AOSP has never been a complete, bootable software package for real life hardware. You’ve never been able to compile AOSP, slap it on a device, and have it work—you need all sorts of “binary blobs” from chip vendors to make things work. Usually, the ROM developers end up compiling AOSP and combining it with the official software, resulting in a janky mix of new AOSP code and old proprietary bits. Because Android never had a standardized interface between the hardware and software, updates would break all sorts of things, leading to issues with the camera, networking, and other components, or general performance problems.
Treble promises to change everything. Malchev says that Treble standardizes Android hardware support to such a degree that generic Android builds compiled from AOSP can boot and run on every Treble device. In fact, these “raw AOSP” builds are what will be used for some of the CTS testing Google requires all Android OEMs to pass in order to license the Google apps—it’s not just that they should work, they are required to work.
Treble’s modularity is enforced in Android’s partition layout too. AOSP code lives in the “System,” “Recovery,” and “Boot” partitions. The SoC vendor (usually Qualcomm) gets the “Vendor” and “Radio” partitions. The ODM/OEM (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc) gets the “Bootloader,” “ODM,” and “OEM” partitions for their code. These partitions have all existed before as options, but now things like a dedicated Vendor partition are mandatory for 8.0. Google’s documentationspells out the implications of this, saying “it should be possible to upgrade a device system.img from Android 8.0 to Android P while other images (such as vendor.img, odm.img, etc.) remain at Android 8.0. This modularity enables timely Android platform upgrades (such as monthly security updates) without requiring SoC/ODM partners to update SoC- and device-specific code.” It the ROM world, it means you should be able to flash a new system partition built from AOSP, while leaving everything else alone, and have a working system.
We’ll have to see how things exactly work in practice, but I’m expecting the ROM community to explode in popularity once Treble devices become more widespread. Custom ROMs shouldn’t need to be painstakingly hand-crafted for individual devices anymore—a single build should be able to cover multiple Treble devices from multiple manufacturers. Imagine the next time a major new version of Android is released—on Day One of the AOSP code drop, a single build (or a small handful of builds) could cover every Treble device with an unlocked bootloader, with a “download Android 9.0 here” link on XDA or some other technical website.
Users should also have more control over their devices, like being able to buy a skinned Android phone and immediately apply a fully-functional AOSP build, stripping away bloat and most of the annoying “customizations” that OEMs make. You can sort of do this today, but, again, the lack of a standard interface and needing to include binary blobs from the SoC vendor makes this a very iffy proposition. The standardization of Treble should ensure that everything will work.
Being able to compile AOSP, slap it on a device, and have it work will be a boon to home tinkerers, and on the official retail build side of things, could help to prolong the life of Android devices. If security is your goal, though, there’s still a need for involvement for the SoC vendors. There will inevitably be bugs and security flaws in the vendor code, and since that code doesn’t live in AOSP, vendor support will be required to fix those.
All of this ROM stuff depends on buying a phone with an unlocked bootloader, which lets users tinker with the software. Usually this just means buying an “unlocked” phone directly from an OEM, rather than a carrier.
Isolating the media stack
Enlarge/ For camera, audio, and DRM, HALs now separate the “Stagefright” media framework from the kernel.
Another benefit of Project Treble: security! The separation of vendor code from the OS means the vendor code can run in a separate process. This also helps harden the media stack in Oreo. The media framework is a particularly important area after 2015’s “Stagefright” vulnerability, which exploited Android’s media player engine (which is actually called “Stagefright”) to remotely execute code.
On a Treble-enabled phone, the audio, camera, and DRM parts of the media stack have also been isolated in separate processes and sandboxes. Each part gets a new hardware abstraction layer (HAL) between the framework and kernel, too, so it should now be harder for a framework exploit in these areas to access the kernel.
Android’s biggest re-architecture, ever
Project Treble will make Android work more like the PC market, where a single version of an OS can run on multiple devices. It’s been obvious that Android needed to make a change like this for some time, but Treble was a massive project and counts for a lot of what makes Android 8.0 a full “1.0” update.
As Burke puts it, Treble “used up a huge amount of the engineering budget [for Android 8.0]. It was a lot of work and super deep surgery across every single interface of Android.” At the I/O Android Fireside Chat, Burke called Treble “probably the biggest re-architecture of Android since it started.” On the ADB Podcast, Romain Guy, Android’s Graphics lead and an Android engineer for the last 10 years, said “I don’t think there’s ever been something remotely even close to the complexity of Treble in terms of infrastructure change to the platform.” Malchev revealed Treble involved “upwards of 300 developers within Android engineering itself contributing to this, across 30 teams.”
As far as device support for Treble, the feature is a requirement for any new device that ships with Android 8.0. For upgrading devices, Treble is optional. So far the one and only upgrading device we know about is the Google Pixel, but Malchev said that “We are working with some companies to upgrade their flagship devices to O while Trebilizing them fully.”
RON AMADEORon is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work.EMAILron.amadeo@arstechnica.com//TWITTER@RonAmadeo
Did you hear about the kindergartner who “accidentally” ordered an expensive dollhouse with a voice command? We’ll show you how to lock down your smart speaker so that never happens to you.
There’s no denying that Google Home and Amazon Echo (or the less-expensive Echo Dot, if you’re not using it for music) have changed the way we interact with our homes. Turning on the lights has never been easier, nor has it been simpler to field the latest traffic report or order delivery for dinner. The future is here, and we’re reveling in it!
But the proliferation of these devices around our homes leaves room for error. Google’s and Amazon’s connected speakers must always listen for us to utter their magic “wake” words—OK Google or Alexa respectively—in order to perform their tasks. If you don’t configure them properly, you might see random purchases show up at your door.
It happened in San Diego when a little girl asked Alexa to deliver her a “dollhouse and some cookies.” She knew the right words to say, and in a few days’ time, she had her goodies. (If you want to have some fun, watch this news clip near your Alexa-powered device and watch it light up.)
If you’re worried about family members, roommates, or pranksters making unwanted purchases on your account, you can either disable this feature altogether, or set up your Google Home or Amazon Echo so that it buys things only after you’ve specifically authorized the purchase. Here’s how.
Florence IonGoogle Home doesn’t have the retail power of Amazon behind it, but you can order merchandise from such major sources as Costco, Target, and Toys ‘R Us.
Google Home isn’t tied to one of the world’s largest online retailers, so you might think there’s less of a risk of unintended purchases. But it does provide voice-payment capabilities for Google Express, which allows you to purchase products from participating retailers such as Costco, Target, and Toys ‘R Us.
GoogleIf you decide you don’t want to do voice payments with Google Home, just flip the blue switch.
The payments setting is disabled by default in the Google Home app. If you’d enabled it previously and have since changed your mind, it’s easy to turn off. Just log into the Home app on your Android or iOS device, tap the hamburger menu, and choose “More settings.” Tap “Payments” on the next screen. Delete everything you see there. It’s the easiest way to ensure no one in your household can run rampant with your payment information on file. Alternatively, you can simply tick the “Pay through your Assistant” option so that it’s off and unselected.
How to enable purchases on Google Home
If you want to start—or restart—making payments with voice commands, open the Google Home app, tap the menu button, and then tap on Payments. Here you can set up a delivery address and a primary payment method. Google will automatically pull in any payment data previously associated with your account (and prompt you to update any expired or out-of-date cards). The app will ll also ask if you want to grant access to any Google Home devices you have set up in your home.
Once you’ve set that up, you can order things through Google Home by saying phrases such as “OK Google, order paper towels.” Google Home will list options for relevant items and their accompanying prices. Then, you can accept the order to place it officially.
You can even ask, “OK Google, how do I shop?” for a helpful walkthrough of the process. For other services, such as Domino’s pizza delivery, the payment information is set up separately through that company’s Easy Order, which fires up the oven right after you place your order. (This works with the Echo as well.)
Florence IonYou can enable and disable ordering on Google Home via the Home app.
Disabling purchasing on the Amazon Echo, Dot, Tap, and Show
Amazon’s smart speakers are quickly becoming smart-home workhorses, but they could also be considered Trojan horses aimed at capturing more and more of your shopping dollars.Here’s how to disable—and then re-enable—purchasing power with an Amazon Echo, Dot, Tap, or Show.
If you’ve previously enabled payments any of your Amazon Echos and want to now disable it, just launch the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet. If you have more than one device in the Echo family, you’ll need scroll past all of them—and past the blue “Set up a new device” button—until you reach the “Voice Purchasing” button. Click on the radio button to disable this feature. You’re done.
Florence IonThe process for enabling and disabling voice purchases is the same whether you have an Echo Dot (shown here), the original Echo, and Echo Tap, or the new Echo Show.
How to enable purchases via the Amazon Echo
Under Settings, scroll down to “Voice Purchasing.” Tap to enable “Purchase by voice.” It’s a good idea to set up a confirmation code at this point. It willl ensure no one can order things without your permission unless they know the code. Below that, you can select to manage your 1-Click payment settings, which selects which of your bank cards to use when the purchasing happens.
When you’re ready to buy something, you can ask Alexa to order anything from Amazon—physical as well as digital goods. If you’re listening to a song, for example, you can ask Amazon to purchase the MP3 with your payment information on file. Or if you’re in need of toilet paper, you can ask Alexa to send it over with two-day shipping.
If you’re stuck, or maybe a little shy, ask Alexa how to shop and it’ll walk you through what it can do.
Florence IonAmazon gives you the option of adding a confirmation code that must be spoken for an order to be placed.
When in doubt, mute it
If all else fails and your neighboring dwellers are still managing to make errant purchases, you can either unplug the device or mute it. The latter is particularly effective if you have children coming over who find it amusing to summon virtual assistants.
Then again, who doesn’t? It’s why we use our voices to buy things, after all, simply because we can.
Florence reports on all the latest Android and smart home gear for PCWorld, Greenbot and TechHive. Follow her on Twitter at @ohthatflo.
SOON will be a thing of the past. Starting today, Microsoft will stop supporting Internet Explorer versions 7, 8, 9 and 10 on most operating systems, its biggest step yet toward phasing out one of the most contentious pieces of software ever written.
Microsoft has been distancing itself from the Internet Explorer brand since March, when it launched the Microsoft Edge browser, but it isn’t quite dead. Edge runs only on Windows 10, so Redmond will continue backing a few versions of Internet Explorer on older operating systems it still supports. But it’s still a big departure. Historically, Microsoft has kept several versions of Internet Explorer current each supported version of Windows. Starting today, it will support only the latest version of IE that an operating system can run. It will not create new security patches for the older versions, leaving anyone who doesn’t upgrade vulnerable to new hacks or attacks.
Thankfully, the time has come to move on.
That could be a huge hassle for organizations that use custom-built applications that run correctly only on older browsers. But it could be a boon to web developers and designers still trying to find ways to make websites good on older browsers. Newer web browser still have their quirks, and sites might look different from one browser to the next. But these differences are small compared to how Internet Explorer mangled web pages in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
By insisting on following its own path with IE rather than follow generally accepted standards, Microsoft dictated web design by years. That probably drove many aspiring web developers careers that didn’t require trying to figure out why the margins between images looked different from one browser to another. Keeping too many old browsers in circulation contributed to that mess. Thankfully, the time has come to move on.
The Bad Old Days
Because Internet Explorer didn’t stick to the guidelines established by World Wide Web Consortium the organization that establishes standards for web technologies, it often would display web pages in ways that made them look entirely different from other browsers, such as Netscape, Opera or, later, Firefox. Desperate designers cobbled together ways of making sites work across multiple browsers, but a complex layout sometimes required numerous workarounds. And Internet Explorer 6 was notorious for security vulnerabilities that Microsoft was sometimes slow to patch.
But if it was so bad, why was it so widely used? Most people blame Microsoft’s practice of pre-installing Internet Explorer with Windows starting in 1997, which contributed to a lengthy antitrust suit. Since many users didn’t know other browsers existed and PC vendors had bulk licensing agreements that prevented them from selling computers with alternates pre-installed, Microsoft effectively muscled out the competition.
‘There was a time when Microsoft made the best web browser in the world.’
DOUGLAS CROCKFORD
But that’s not the whole story. Microsoft still bundles Internet Explorer with Windows, yet by most measures it has fallen behind Google Chrome as the world’s most widely used browser. That’s in part because designers and developers have spent years encouraging users to download alternative browsers. But in the late 1990s, countless sites proudly displayed “best viewed on Internet Explorer” banners.
“People don’t remember this, particularly web developers, but there was a time when Microsoft made the best web browser in the world,” JavaScript expert and frequent Internet Explorer critic Douglas Crockford told InfoQ in 2010. “IE 6 was by far the best and continued to be the best browser in the world for many years after, but the other browser makers have all gotten ahead of them.”
That’s an exaggeration. Netscape 6 and Opera 5, both of which were excellent, arrived before Internet Explorer 6. But it’s true that Internet Explorer was ahead of the curve for a few years. Netscape users had to wait three years between the release of Netscape Navigator 4 in 1997 and Netscape Navigator 6 in 2000 (the company ended up skipping Navigator 5 in order to completely rewrite the software). Meanwhile, though Internet Explorer wasn’t very standards compliant, it was quick to add new features in the late 1990s. Developers who wanted to take advantage of cutting edge design and interactivity features had little choice but to use Internet Explorer and encourage their users to do so as well.
But by the time Mozilla, an organization started by former Netscape employees, released the first version of Firefox in 2004, it was Internet Explorer’s turn to seem hopelessly outdated.
Long Hard Road Out of Hell
When Internet Explorer 7 finally arrived in 2006, it was better than its predecessor, but still not standards compliant, so designers kept jumping through hoops to have pages render correctly. Not until Internet Explorer 8 landed in 2009 did Microsoft offer a browser that passed standards test Acid2, a widely used measure of how well browsers complied with the standards of the day, and the company lagged in adopting other standards, such as the 3D graphics technology WebGL. By the time Microsoft caught up to the rest of the browser market, the damage to Internet Explorer’s reputation had already been done.
But the biggest problem for Microsoft was that Internet Explorer 6 refused to die. Large organizations that spent vast sums building custom applications that worked only on older versions of Internet Explorer refused to upgrade. Many consumers didn’t know any better, or ran pirated copies of Windows and couldn’t download updates. As a result, Microsoft continued supporting Internet Explorer 6 until April 8, 2014, more than a decade after its release.
To keep that from happening again, Microsoft won’t update anything older than Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Server 2012, and Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7, Windows 8, and those versions of Windows Server that can run it. The move likely will expose outdated browsers to more security risks. But in the long run it will drive adoption of newer, better browsers.
With most of the old versions of Internet Explorer dead and buried, Microsoft hopes it can finally move beyond the sorry legacy of its early versions. Edge is a fresh start, with a new name, a new code base and a new boss. Microsoft can’t undo the the damage it did, but it can end the madness.
