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I'd feel a lot better about this if Longhorn was released BEFORE Windows 2000 went into extended support. You're going to have a lot of customers currently on Windows 2000 who are going to be very reticent to invest in XP with Longhorn around the corner.

People using Windows 2000 should be in the advanced planning/early rollout stages of their upgrade to get off of Windows 2000 by now, anyway. Therefore, I see this news as irrelevant.

James

James I find that comment to very ironic given the story you just posted on your blog ;)

This is a bad decision.

You are making a mistake if you think that by having IE7 in common use and not being available on Win2K you will accelerate upgrades to Longhorn.

Sticking to a 'lifecycle policy' is admirable generally, but you must have flexibility otherwise you will get hurt. You are needlessly giving away valuable market share. There are simply too many alternatives now which work on Windows 2000.

Obviously XP and Longhorn must have developer priority now, but why not backport to 2000 after it is launched?

I find it quite ironic (moronic?) that Microsoft cannot produce a secure browser for its own OS, whereas other secure browsers can be installed on this platform.

Score +1 for non-integrated browsers?

(Seeing as though IE7 won't be available on 2000, will you be encouraging your 2000 customers to upgrade anyway... to Firefox/Opera?)

Internet Explorer 7 will not run on Windows 2000: "...IE7 relies on [..] functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back..."

James Summerlin: Yeah, we're in the planning stages of a rollout to Ubuntu desktops. Not that everyone doesn't already use Firefox, but hey.

This news might convince a lot of corporate entities to uninstall IE, if you know what I mean.

More of a suggestion for the Windows team, really... do they have a blog?

Make a POSIX-compliant version of Windows (Windows 2010, say.) That way the poor IE team won't have to cut off all their customers who aren't running just the right version of the OS.

In fact, IE would even run on Linux / UNIX / OS X... without any extra development effort on the part of the IE team!

Why not backport some fixes for the most heinous IE6 bugs to Windows 2000? It shouldn't be excessively difficult to patch IE on these operating systems to treat application/xhtml+xml as text/html and ignore XML prologs that cause the browser to enter quirks-mode for documents with valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 DOCTYPES, for instance.

I've never been very comfortable with this "life cycle" concept. It looks more like Microsoft's attempt to force customers into hemorrhaging more piles cash within the next 5 years for an expensive and mostly pointless operating system upgrade. Given the large number of users still happy with Windows 2000, why else would they upgrade?

Maurits:

I assume you are referring to my post on "Putting Virtual PC to Work."

If you will read the post again, I was playing a joke on my wife that nearly got me killed. I wasn't speaking of downgrading at all and I have always been in favor of moving forward. I fail to see the irony you speak of.

My Windows 2000 works very well and I'm not going to buy another OS. Around 2007-2008 I will move to Linux. Ubuntu looks very promising.

"I've never been very comfortable with this 'life cycle' concept."

Sure, if you look at it from the standpoint of a customer that has no interest in upgrading or changing their setup, I agree. The problem is, how much money should Microsoft spend to support customers who will not be spending one additional dime to support Microsoft? Sure, they bought the product for $200 five years ago. And if their setup is truly potted in epoxy and unchanging, they have ANOTHER five years before they lose support, meaning they spent just $20 annually for their OS.

And there's nothing that says a customer has to stop using Win2K in 2010, just that patches won't be available. They can continue to use it, just as people are using Win95 and NT today. But I sure hope it's just for internal apps, and behind a good firewall.

Everyone,

I completely and utterly fail to see why any of you want the full feature set of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP (or just IE7) backported to Windows 2000. As I said earlier, everyone on Win2k should be in the advanced planning/early rollout of XP/Win2k3 by now.

No one says you have to wait for Longhorn unless you know there is going to be some super killer feature you need that Longhorn has. I have my own network along with almost all my customers on Windows XP/Windows Server 2003. Longhorn will probably be out for at least two years before I talk to any of them about upgrading again.

Upgrading is something that is supposed to be planned and planned properly. Many of you are under the illusions spun by the open source crowd. Get your head out of the clouds and look at how upgrading can save you money in the long run and how you can do it cost effectively so you get a proper return on investment.

It shocks me to no end the number of businesses I am aware of who have no future outlook (read: upgrade plan/path) for their organization.

But you fail to see that Windows 2000, unlike Windows 98, is a perfectly useful operating system. There's very little wrong with it.

I don't want all of SP2 backported to Windows 2000. But if Internet Explorer were an application and not part of the operating system, I could install Internet Explorer 5 or 6 or 7 at will, just like I can install Office XP or 2003 on Windows 2000. And if Office 2005/6/7 will not run on Windows 2000, I can still install WordPerfect or OpenOffice.

But Internet Explorer is the most used web browser, and that alone is not a problem. But even if some of the nastier rendering bugs are fixed in IE7, where does that leave Windows 2000 users?

Wanting a new web browser or a fancy GUI is not a good reason to upgrade to a new operating system.

And as a developer, I will probably have Windows 2000 machines around for some time to come (both physical and virtual) for testing purposes. I'm not about to stop developing for Windows 2000. I can see dropping support for 98/ME, and even NT4, but not 2000. Windows XP does not really add enough (it's 5.1 vs 5.0) to warrant upgrading every machine, even though I prefer using it and install it on my personal machines.

"Wanting a new web browser or a fancy GUI is not a good reason to upgrade to a new operating system."

Apple does it every 12-18 months (as well, Safari 1.0 required an OS upgrade to move to 1.1 or higher). Of course they get criticized for that, too...

When looking at browser traffic stats, Win2K makes up a tiny sliver of users, comparable to Win98. I hope no one is shocked that IE7 isn't being ported to Win98 as well.

The demarcation is perfectly sensible. XP marked the unification of the Windows client codebase, and practically everyone using a Windows client has migrated to XP. Spending precious development resources catering to a small fraction of users (almost none of whom probably care about getting a browser upgrade) would be a waste.

James -
The irony lies in the juxtaposition of this statement from your post

"People using Windows 2000 should be in the advanced planning/early rollout stages of their upgrade to get off of Windows 2000 by now"

with this statement from your blog

"The place she works at is just now moving off of Windows NT 4.0"

... you see?

Upgrades cost money. There's got to be a justification stronger than "because we can."

I've been telling people to move away from Windows 98 for years, and I was an early adopter of Windows 2000 (beta 3, if I recall). I never went back. I tried Windows ME for a bit, and decided it was a mistake for it to be released at all.

But Windows 95/98/ME is an operating system that is not even being written anymore. Windows NT, is, and there isn't too much difference between 5.0 Professional and 5.1 Professional as far as many businesses are concerned. In fact, the first thing I do after installing XP is disable a lot of the new features and make it more like 2000.

Today's Dilbert is accidentally apropos to the upgrade issue :)
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2005052441528.gif

> It shouldn't be excessively difficult to patch IE on these operating systems to treat application/xhtml+xml as text/html

Please no! We've got enough trouble dealing with buggy Internet Explorer lax behaviour, we don't need more of it!

Supporting XHTML is much more than simply treating it as HTML. If Internet Explorer does this, in five years time we'll all be complaining that we are stuck with buggy Internet Explorer screwing up our XHTML.

XHTML has differences in parsing, differences in CSS, differences in the DOM. Sticking a stupid hack like that into Internet Explorer will only cause problems. If you want to use XHTML, use content negotiation to cope with the (many) user-agents that don't yet support it.

"Another is that some of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000."

Bullshit. Why most other browsers are crossplatform? You mean you are weak programists or you just want to force people to buy XP?

Knock yourself out guys, but know this - Firefox doesn't care what OS it installs itself on.

Back in the mid nineties, Microsoft didn't have all this bureaucracy about Extended Jeffries tube lifecycle support conduits, or whatever that Star Trekkish legal mumbo jumbo is about. It supported as many Windows and Mac platforms as it could, and won the browser war because it wanted to. it developed sophisticated support for cutting edge web standards like XML, XSL and CSS because it knew Netscape could not keep up.

Now? Not a hope. Laggard IE's day is done if you can't see the mindshare market past the support policy legalese.

Cool, ~20% extra free marketshare for Opera/Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox!

Maurits,

The reason why the place my wife works at is just now moving off of NT 4.0 is because their IT staff sucks. We are talking about people who never even looked at Windows 2000 when it first came out. Hell, I was playing with Windows 2000 when it was in beta and couldn't wait to get it going back in 1999. The IT staff where my wife works, on the other hand, sit back in their offices all day playing solitaire not even bothering to keep up with the latest technologies. In fact, I am willing to bet some serious money now that almost all of the NT 4.0 machines that are being upgraded were only on service pack 4.

I know because I used to work there. How do you think I met my wife?

James

James, what proportion of IT staff on the planet do you think suck? I would guess it is extremely high if you believe that not upgrading to XP is an indicator. And what proportion of non-sucking IT staff do you believe are willfully keeping themselves ignorant of alternatives to the monopoly?

Understand this: any incentive to upgrade is also an incentive to migrate.

test

An important point, as I see it, is that Microsoft are committed to provided extended support to Windows 2000 through 2010. I consider that acknowledgement by Microsoft that businesses and consumers will be using Windows 2000 until at least that time, however, come 2010 they will still be using IE 6 SP1 which will surely be obsolete by that time.

IE7 is going to use features that arent in Win2000. Even if IE7 were 'not integrated' it still wouldnt work on Win2000. I you want to use IE7 stop whinging and install a supported OS, otherwise pick another browser, or version of IE.
Sheesh.

It is *criminal* to build a @@#$$@! web browser that *needs* a specific flavor of operating system to run upon.

Microsoft lost their right to utter the words "design" "abstraction" "clean separation" when they embedded IE into Windows so deep that it can't be taken out, nor can IE-For-Win2K take automatic advantage of IE-For-XP. Damn it.

What kind of silliness is this - to build a insecure web browser that is so tightly screwed into the nitty gritties of an Operating system that neither can it benefit from the updates made to itself on another flavor of the same OS and nor can it be taken out of the OS.
Really - who benefited by this lack of design time separation, abstraction, standards and cleanliness?

It's be expected that when you integrate your browser with your OS, that it eventually won't work on older versions of the OS... Along with the other issues that the integration brings. Could a version that doesn't rely on OS be built? Probably.,... But it'd likely be bloated... And it wouldn't help MS cash flow...

"
Supporting XHTML is much more than simply treating it as HTML. If Internet Explorer does this, in five years time we'll all be complaining that we are stuck with buggy Internet Explorer screwing up our XHTML.

XHTML has differences in parsing, differences in CSS, differences in the DOM. Sticking a stupid hack like that into Internet Explorer will only cause problems. If you want to use XHTML, use content negotiation to cope with the (many) user-agents that don't yet support it."

Just one thing to say about htis, really... Like web designers are already complaining about how IE6 has crappy CSS2 compliance at the moment?

Not like IE hasn't had a history of bad compliance...

... And smoething I just noticed in the original posting... IE for mac still has development...? Wow.

Techically, Windows *is* POSIX compliant. As of NT.

looks like Mozzila has better support for Microsoft's customers than Microsoft does :P

"we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000"

That's indeed great news. I use Firefox, and this will undoubtedly encourage others to do the same.

Just keep on shooting yourself in the foot, Microsoft!

And by the time Latehorn is released, I'll have migrated all my systems to Linux and freeBSD.

And you want to know what the funny thing is? I'm a Microsoft shareholder!

@Crow

Windows said it would become POSIX compilant in order to make the suits in government happy, but obviouly they didn't actually do it.

If you're still using Windows 2000, the IEBlog reveals you won't be getting a version of Internet Explorer 7. Win2K is nearing the end of its support life. Plus: It should be no surprise that we do not plan on...

The Great Drive to End Windows 2000 Usage begins

March, 26, 2003 -- Microsoft announced an important security problem which affected NT, 2000 and XP. According to the bulletim, the company wouldn't support NT because of its "architectural limitations":

"Microsoft has provided patches with this bulletin to correct this vulnerability for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Although Windows NT 4.0 is affected by this vulnerability, Microsoft is unable to provide a patch for this vulnerability for Windows NT 4.0. The architectural limitations of Windows NT 4.0 do not support the changes that would be required to remove this vulnerability..."

http://www.gnubis.com.br/bin/view/VESLAC/RPCFlaw

Two years later, Microsoft is about to release IE7 but claims that it would be "non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000".

Two yers from now, the security fixes will be too difficult to port XP, and the cycle will never end...

Meanwhile, in the Free Software world, Linux kernel 2.0, which was released in 1996, is still mantained. (The latest patch was released in 2004)

Is that important? According to users, yes:

"I think one always gets one's environment tuned to fit himself. (At least I do.) I still have some 2.0 machines running, and they're running fine. They ran fine since Adam, and will still run fine as long as 2.0 is maintained. I can run them without too much administration effort (this is cool, since they're about 100 miles away...) When I have them administrated, I always get this comfortable feeling, because the most of it is done by large scripts which check input and compute the output by themselves. If I dropped e.g. the old firewalling style, I'd have to change ~60% of my scripts to the new firewalling style. I think this is a good reason not to upgrade to a so-called 'recent' kernel on those boxes".

http://www.gnubis.com.br/bin/view/VESLAC/Kernel20

Nelson

--
Get Firefox
www.getfirefox.com

IM: "IE7 is going to use features that arent in Win2000. Even if IE7 were 'not integrated' it still wouldnt work on Win2000. I you want to use IE7 stop whinging and install a supported OS, otherwise pick another browser, or version of IE.
Sheesh."

Wow, you completely missed my point, since I wasn't even talking as a user, but as a web developer.

No matter what, I'm stuck working around IE6's problems because a big enough group of people will not be able to upgrade to IE7, and won't bother to install another browser because they already have one.

The only way this would work is if enough websites moved on and stopped supporting IE6, forcing people to switch to Mozilla or Netscape. But I dare say 20% will still be using IE6, even when IE7 has been out for a while, and that's still big enough to worry about.

I don't whine about IE6 missing features because *I* use it. I complain because I develop for *all* browsers, and out of the ones currently in wide use, IE deviates from the others the most.

Sadly, making my site work well in Lynx and Netscape 4 (sans CSS) is actually easier.

I don't know because I don't have the code or any understanding of the overall architecture, but in general supporting Windows XP and Windows 2000 is anything but impossible. It's not like IE7 is using Avalon.

I suspect the ideas is to limit the amount of target platforms that need to be tested and maintained (which can be good for overall quality), all the creating yet another reason to upgrade to a newer operating system. Which is fine, because a company is free to make its own decisions about how to design and market its software and how much time and effort to spend supporting old systems. Whether this decision pays off in the long run, however, remains to be seen. I'm not ready to give up on Windows 2000 yet, and I'm surprised to see Microsoft do it so soon.

James,

What you think "should be" and what are are two different things. Many large Enterprises are just finishing their migration to 2000. I know as I've been invovled in several. Why should they now be in the final stages of migrating to XP? Fact is, they shouldn't unless there is a specific feature they need in the newer stuff and frankly that is rare. I'm talking your big customers such as the big financials and massive internationals.

The heart of the "upgrade cycle" for businesses (end users) should be focused around stability, security, and required featureset. If WinNT4 or WinNT5 are working just fine for them there is *no* reason to upgrade to anything else. Regardless of OS, upgrading just to "stay current" is busywork. It is IT staff trying to justify their existence.

There are many companies out there still doing support for NT4, and this is likely to become the case for 2k as well. Granted, a significant portion of the NT4 companies are providing migration to Linux systems where they can (same cost to client, less overhead = more profit; if they have their model set up for it), but ther are still a large portion that are sticking to NT4.

If a company is running just fine right now on NT4 or NT5, they have no functional need to change it. A change in OS, even among Windows Variants often involves changes in application software and system hardware. This introduces a new set of issues, concerns, and problems to work around. A web browser change should not require a change to everything. For these companies, many will be likely to move to Firefox/Mozilla as opposed to uprooting their entire *working* system. Quite franlly I'm OK with that. I don't begrude Microsoft one whit for not supporting old software. However, the never-ending "upgrade cycle" is crap; always has been always will be- regardless of OS or application.

Personally I see the general assertion "you should be upgrading to XP by now" as no different than "you should be migrating/upgrading/whatever to Linux by now" assertion. Absent a compelling specific reason no you should not be. IT can generate more value for the company it serves by not making needless "upgrades" and focusing on making IT service more transparent or leveraging the stability of their environment to develop and deploy more domain specific capabilities. They don't need to make themselves look "like good IT people" by being in a never-ending upgrade cycle; that is a tremendous waste of time, money, effort, and potential.

My experience with companies such as Merril Lynch, HP, Price Waterhouse, Toshiba, and several other Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 sized enterprises is that it is not the case that those who are only now moving off of NT4 (or early versions of Redhat or Slackware) for example are "bad" IT staff. Quite the contrary, they've been some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people with the most stable systems. Their "customers" also tend to fall into the category of least unhappy.

With regards to NT Service Packs, surely you are aware that in many cases, Microsoft recommended *against* various service packs unless a specific fix you had to have was there; mostly due to other breaks and changes in behaviour that broke third party apps. Yes, not all NT4 shops run "the last" SP, nor should they. It is the wise administrator/IT staff that knows when to apply and not to apply service packs -- and that is true regardless of operating system or application. Truth told the latest is not always the greatest.


Crow:
Spoken like someone who merely read the press releases, not someone who has needed the alleged POSIX compliancy. ;) MS added a *subsystem* to deal with *some* POSIX requirements. It is not a POSIX compliant OS. Then again, Linux is not fully compliant. But at least they don't claim to be. Specifically germane to the OP on PSOIX and IE7, in NT (4 at least) the POSIX subsystem does not have network access. Kinda difficult to write a POSIX based web (network) browser that doesn't have network access, dontchya think? ;) Also of note, NT's threads are not POSIX compliant either.

To me the interesting aspect of the IE7 not for 2k announcement is not being spoken of. What "features" could there possibly be that need backported to the OS? People are asking for security. The fact that other browsers do't have the issues IE does on Windows is testament to the fact that given W2K's current state it can be done. Next is (proper) standards support. This is not something that requires OS changes, at least not in a good design. Again, the fact that other browsers accomplish this task w/o XP's "special features" is testament that it certainly *can* be done and done by people w/o OS code access or inside information. Tabbed browsing? Again, this is something that MS has done in other applications even predating W2k. Clearly tabbed browsing is not something that needs an OS backport.

Which leaves .... ??

You guys at Microsoft are still working on IE? Crazy. Good luck with that, man. I remember using IE4, it was pretty lightweight and slick for its day. I figured you all just outsourced it to some company with v5, when I switched to Opera. Didn't even know 6 was out, huh.

As a Windows developer, I can see both sides of the argument regarding Windows 2000 support. But I think that we deserve a bit more of an explanation.

There was an IE Blog posting on Feb. 22 called "IE Comments Recap," and it had a list of 5 things that were going to be used as a "roadmap" for future postings. One item on this list is "What makes IE7 on Win2K so hard anyway?" Since then, IE7 on Win2K has been mentioned a couple of times, but we still haven't gotten any explanation.

I'm still hoping that you guys write about this--what is it that isn't available on Windows 2000? One thing I speculated on was that it was side-by-side assemblies (WinSxS), that IE7 would in fact run side-by-side with IE6 components. But really, besides the XP SP2 enhancements, there shouldn't be anything huge that makes IE7 on Win2000 so hard.

I have to say, that the IE bashing that goes on is really getting obnoctious. Without IE, most of the folks in the computer business would be building software for dozens of platforms, and going insane doing so. Sure, IE has had its security issues, and all of us have had spyware or adware at one point eat our IE embedded pc, but at the end of the day, we all know that as computer experts, that if you simply do what you should with your pc, you won't have problems with viruses, or malware. If you are surfing crack sites looking for serialz and crackz, using your friends 'free porn credentials', and or downloading tons of freeware without reading reviews, your simply asking for trouble.

I remember back in the late 90's having to create many versions of webpages so that they would look good on the many browsers, that was just tons of fun. While Microsoft has done some nasty things to smaller companies trying to compete with them (back in the day), at the end of the day, having a monster OS is good for the tens of thousands of small companies worldwide trying to create usable software and add-on products or simply creating websites that work consistently on most browsers.

Also, bashing Microsoft for selling upgrades to an OS that is easy to use, pleasant to look at, with thousands and thousands of software products available, both from MSFT and 3rd party, is called BUSINESS. Why does everyone get so upset by that. Windows 2000 was um, five years ago, and if your still using it, great, what a deal and what a great product. I too used 2000 until just a few months ago, and have to admit I felt pretty good about buying xp pro, the fact that a new version is coming is fine as well, i will probably not get it until a few years from now, meaning per day cost is less than a stick of gum. Come on people, stop being so cheap, and instead of bashing MSFT for creating the tool and toy you use most of your awake life, do something productive like bash me for writing this :)

I've created an online petition to suggest microsoft to reconsider adding tabbed browsing functionality (and enabling it by default) into IE7.

The url is here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/msie7tab/petition.html

If you care about the quality products that microsoft has been creating so far, not giving into the useless hype of opensource douchebags, please sign the petition. Windows should be controlled by a window manager (explorer.exe), not by each individual app!

People are still using Windows and IE? Wow...

I'm sitting here typing this on Ubuntu Linux and Firefox. And guess what...

... They're both FREE!

Michael: Sure, IE has had its security issues, and all of us have had spyware or adware at one point eat our IE embedded pc, but at the end of the day, we all know that as computer experts, that if you simply do what you should with your pc, you won't have problems with viruses, or malware. If you are surfing crack sites looking for serialz and crackz, using your friends 'free porn credentials', and or downloading tons of freeware without reading reviews, your simply asking for trouble.

So you used to look from serialz or crackz, or free pr0n? That's my observation.

Microsoft acaba de anunciar oficialmente (en esta página) que el navegador Internet Explorer 7 cuando sea que esté listo no va a funcionar en Windows 2000.

Esto le ha caído duro a todos aquellos usuarios (y en especial a grandes empresas) que están per

The problem appears to be that Windows XP is, in the eyes of many professional users, just a bloated rehash of Windows 2000 with some extra eye candy. Corporations, goverments and universities often do not need WinXP. Besides, WinXP is now nearly four years old, just slightly less old than Win2000. Unlike Apple or Linux, who are aggressively improving their OSes, Microsoft has done very little for its users. Longhorn is still far off, and features are dropping left and right.
I fully expect most Win2000 users to stay with their platform and to fix the IE7 issue by rolling out Firefox.

Laut einer Meldung von IEBlog wird es wohl keinen Internet Explorer 7 fr Windows 2000 geben. Einer der Grnde ist, dass Windows 2000 von der sogenannten 'Mainstream Support Phase' in die 'Extended Support Phase' rutscht in welcher es keine neuen Feature

This is the problem, you expect users to upgrade but when you release a new OS it isnt exactly earth shatteringly amazing enough for end users/businesses to upgrade.

As many people stated, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 *is* a perfectly good and working OS and has been for years.

If there is nothing wrong with their current system and have no interest in latest OS, people will stick with their working system.

It's alot cheaper.

Laut einer Meldung von IEBlog wird es wohl keinen Internet Explorer 7 fr Windows 2000 geben. Einer der Grnde ist, dass Windows 2000 von der sogenannten 'Mainstream Support Phase' in die 'Extended Support Phase' rutscht in welcher es keine neuen Feature

PatriotB: I'd love if it was Side-by-Side causing the back-port problems. But even then, there's other solutions. I would love to see what APIs used in XP are being used. If it's just the security stuff in XP, then I think the browser is getting way too close to the OS. What's next, IE code running in the Kernel?

But if Side-by-Side is the issue, then why not give the ActiveX components in IE new CLSIDs and just break binary compatability. Any apps that embed IE6 would continue to work, and a better design could be used for IE7. This would give you Side-by-Side (for major versions, not minor updates) for all OSes. With Side-by-Side, they'll still have to release security fixes for each version in use, so I don't think it's an optimal solution.

Perhaps IE should be ported to Managed C++, and COM dropped. That way, .NET's Fusion loader could take care of versioning problems.

Laut einer Meldung von IEBlog wird es wohl keinen Internet Explorer 7 fr Windows 2000 geben. Einer der Grnde ist, dass Windows 2000 von der sogenannten 'Mainstream Support Phase' in die 'Extended Support Phase' rutscht in welcher es keine neuen Feature

This is an interesting debate. I run a couple of Windows 2000 Pro machines in addition to others on our network and would be more concerned about this move by Microsoft if the features that are to be included in IE7 were not available via any other means. As there are a number of good quality, light, free browsers to choose from, my belief is that the way to move forward is just to make the switch. The big losers in all this is likely to be Microsoft with gains being made by open source developers because as a result, IE stands to lose more market share.

Just my two bits!

um... timecop, why don't you want tabbed browsing in IE? What's wrong with tabbed browsing?

I find it to be much more efficient than having each page opened in its own window, you also don't have to have a million windows listed in the taskbar. I don't think I could live without tabbed browsing at this point?

From my perspective, a browser without tabbed browsing is inferior.

Of course I don't care what they do with IE 7. I've never used IE as my main browser.

But I'm just saying that tabbed browsing is a very useful feature to have, and in my case I believe it to be a necessary feature in any browser I use.

It looks like it's time to wipe the windows partition on my server/tester/junk box and make slackware the primary OS.

As a travelling consultant [ 60+ corporate sites in last 12 months ] . Most clients are government or large corporate.

Desktops that I see on the ground are 10% 98/NT4,80% W2K,5% XP, 5% Other [ Linux,Mac , whatever ]

Not a few companies are doing an NT4->2K migration and implementing it at the moment.

I can think of 1 that is doing an XP migration, but they won't be there till end of year.


I can't see the point in not backporting it to W2K .. all I can think is that it's just another MSFT-shoots-itself-in-foot.

Just my 0.05c

Given the comment rate of your blog, I believe this to be on-topic.

Seriously, the 2010 timeframe for Win2K has given my organization a good breathing period for planning, and the lack of IE7 on Win2K reduces our support burden as well.

Looking forward to the beta!

Ping Back来自：www.donews.net

I administer about 20 Win2k workstations and a Win2k DC. We like to spend most of our time doing scientific research and consider OS maintenance to be an annoying, if necessary, thing to waste time on.

We appear to have three options:

1) Upgrade our workstations to WinXP and hope that XP does not cause issues with our 2k server.

2) Upgrade our workstations to WinXP AND our DC to Win2003.

3) Figure 2k is just fine and make everyone use Firefox.

Guess which one is cheapest and lets us focus on our core business?

All this talk about "having to think about an upgrade strategy" puzzles me. Why? What's the compelling reason for a company to upgrade? So I can get pictures off a digital camera easier? Wireless networking? Who cares? Nobody in the business world, I'm afraid. Pushing out a new OS takes a lot of time, effort and money and businesses won't want to go through that unless there's an obvious payoff.

just wanted to know if comments are posted with or without control mechanisms... thanx.

They just force you to be safe and buy LongHorn they always do things that way ;)

Microsoft doesn't plan to support IE7 on Win2K, which is ironic considering the same blog entry says that Microsoft is extending supporting for Win2K beyond June 30, 2005. There are two important events that will happen to the support policy...

No Internet Explorer 7 support in Windows 2000. This only effects Internet Explorer support, but rather strange considering support for Windows 2000 has been extended past the June 30. Lockergnome IEBlog...

Thanks MS, more people on web standards compliant browsers like Firefox is great news.

To the idiot who said most Windows users have already upgraded to XP.... WRONG! According to Netcraft, Windows 2000 is the most widely-used operating system for desktops in the world. I work at Ford, and we are 100% Windows 2000 on the desktop, and mostly Linux and Sun in the cold room. So DON'T tell me that XP is nearly as widely used as 2000. That is a downright lie and I am offended by it... it's the same reason I use Fedora at home, not Winblows.

"Also, bashing Microsoft for selling upgrades to an OS that is easy to use, pleasant to look at, with thousands and thousands of software products available, both from MSFT and 3rd party, is called BUSINESS"

if you have a big automobile company, say M$-CAR that also manufacture your tires, and to get a new kind of tires, that, let's say... don't put your car on fire, you HAVE to "upgrade" to a new car or "good luck".
How would you feel ?

I'm not bashing the upgrade thing, I'm bashing the way it's being done. Upgrading to XP/LateHorn should happen by it's own merits, not in a forced manner.

But in the end, I'm proud for M$. Since win3.0/3.1 they've being betting in dumb'fing the normal user - aka mind re-writting. Considering that this user by now is a proud IT professional, M$ strategy will work.

just a shame...

both IE 5.01 SP3 and IE 6 SP1 on Windows 2000 SP3 will expire. Good

lack of support for windows 2000 is quite a disappointment. it's a browser, unfortunately, embedded in the OS - having to upgrade the OS just to get a secure browser isnt doable.
mitigating risk by moving to another browser may be an option.
planning deployment to say XP is again a lot of work especially if a deployment was done a couple of years ago - all for what - especially since Windows 2000 will be supported for another couple of years? As previous posters have pointed out - Windows 2000 works just fine for a lot of things. Upgrades should be customer driven, not supplier driven.

If IE7 requires some of XPSP2's functionalities (as Microsoft calls them) or as I like to say bugs, then this means that Longhorn will either:

a) Require these "functionalities", therefore, be buggier than it could have been;

b) Have a re-done version of IE7, which means, an even buggier and more unsecure browser than on SP2;

Or c) (the most likely reason [that doesn't really follow the first part of the sentence]) IE7 doesn't require SP2's functionalities, the only thing that is "required" is more income for Microsoft.

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

General Availability Date 31-Dec-2001

Mainstream Support Retired 31-Dec-2006

Extended Support Retired Not Applicable

from
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifewin

So tons of XP customers are going to be hung out to dry in 18 months too? When SP 4 is released for XP, will it refuse to install on XP Home Edition? How about IE 7 SP1?

Come on - quit complaining everybody. It's 2005 which means Windows "2000" is old news. Quit complaining and get ready for the awesome power of Longhorn! Move along cattle, CLANG! CLANG! Moooooooooo!

I should be no suprise that we have been banning the use of IE6 on the 2000-odd systems running win2K and win2k3 since the begining of 2004. We expect to do the same on latehorn. That's if we stick with MS. After reading the Ernie Ball story about how and why they ditched Microsoft across the board the powers that be have been on a MS bashing ride lately.

I for one am very disappointed to hear this news from the IE team...but perhaps not very surprised.

On nearly all of my computers at home I have moved to Windows 2000 where the hardware could handle it. This hasn't been cheap to do (even when I qualified to upgrade) and so I don't look to move on until 2010 or possibly much later if I stick with Windows.

At my place of work I am the network administrator and there too I have insisted that Windows 2000 be the norm as we migrated from 95, 98 and even NT 4.0. Now I am comfortable with where things are at technology wise. Windows 2000 does all I could ask and is plenty modern enough for anything I've thrown at it.

That said, I also don't like XP at all. I feel it's bloated, not as simple to administer and more prone to failures than a Win2k-based computer.

And yet now I hear from someone on the IE team posting to this blog that there will be no Internet Explorer 7 for Windows 2000. I've since gone to Firefox and will probably stay there, but to be relying on an old version of IE without enhanced security features for the places that it is used in the OS and other programs--well, that's just not acceptable to me...and it's another cheap shot by Microsoft to "shaft" users of an otherwise very solid and up to date OS that will serve their needs for years to come.

I would sincerely hope that enough people contact you about this so that you will realize how poor of a stance this really is for all Windows 2000 users in the world today.

On Feb 15,2005 Dean[MSFT] said:
"I’ve also gotten questions about support for Windows 2000. Right now, we’re focused on XP SP2. We’re actively listening to our major Windows 2000 customers about what they want and comparing that to the engineering and logistical complexity of that work. That’s all I can say on that topic."

Hmmmm....Were they really listening, or was it just the MS "uncertainty" principle from the FUD.NET framework? No matter, it surely didn't help IE market share.

Windows 3.1 which was released in 1992 (followed by 3.11 in 1993) had updates of IE up until version 5.01 which was released in 2000!

There was a lot more differences between Windows 3.1 and 95 than there is between Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Windows 3.1 is a 16 bit OS while most systems today are 32 bit.

It's amazing back in the day Windows 3.1 users could get updates for an 8 year old OS while Windows 2000 customers are stuck with a browser that is almost as old as the OS itself.

It shows that money is Microsoft's own concern and I look forward to the day they slip behind in market share.

Sources:
IE 5.01 for Windows 3.1 http://classic.tucows.com/preview/4842.html
Release dates for Windows 3.1/3.11 and IE:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifewin

@Dave

What's even more worrying is that on the product lifecycle page they say that mainstream support for Windows 3.1 ended on 31-Dec-2001 which means 3.1 was in mainstream support for over 9 years! Compare that to Windows 2000 whose mainstream support ends tomorrow.

TristanK on the Windows 2000 Support Lifecycle.

Let me get this straight - I'm supposed to upgrade my Windows 2000 network (which consists of over 250 users) to Windows XP now? Doesn't that mean that in about 2 years (since XP came out in what...2001?) we'll see the end of THAT support cycle? There's no fresh choice that guarantees I won't be in this "predicament" in another few years ...(raise pinky to mouth) exactly as planned, eh?

Microsoft - you now perplex me. You have become a machine that drives itself primarily on re-bleeding your customers. You want me to upgrade Office for extremely MARGINAL perceived changes. You want me to upgrade my servers to 2003 for very little in the way of new functionality, and you want me to upgrade my clients' OS so I can run your new browser. I know you're a developer, but your comments illustrate a complete ignorance when it comes to how IT works in the real world. Out here, we don't view the IT budget as primarily consisting of Microsoft "dues."

You know what? This is one Microsoft-certified IT professional who is heavily investing time in Linux. ...and installing Firefox on corporate workstations.

-->To the idiot

----> I work at Ford...

Can't call people idiots and expect them to buy your products...

Alex - that's not *at all* what's being said.

Windows 2000 is simply moving from Mainstream to Extended support. It will be in Extended support for the next 5 years.

Win2K SP4 will still be supported with security patches (and other updates).

Check http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/ for information on what Extended Support really means.

Sorry, meant to Adam, not Alex.

At least pre XP SP2 users are going to switch to Firefox :)

What *I* personally find absolutely *stultifying* is that the users doing the complaining about a lack of IE 7 on Windows 2000 are not only planning to either migrate way from Microsoft operating systems altogether or not upgrade to Windows XP. In short, you're stalling and want to be rewarded for it? (What's worse, most of you are still running Windows 2000 Service Pack 3!)

Pardon me, please! But as someone that has done helpdesk/technical support *and* beta-tested operating systems in both open and closed-source forms (including MS, IBM, and various Linux distributions), the same thing applies in operating systems as does in other forms of IT: Keep up or get run over. It behooves your co-workers, your company, and *yourself* to always have a test setup with a current version of your operating system (or a beta version if you are running the current version within your company) simply to guard against those dreaded compatibility issues that you are so worried about. It takes nothing more than equipping the test machines with a removable boot drive to do so economically. Heck, the machines themselves don't even have to be the latest and greatest hardware; older machines are perfect candidates for this. So what's the *real* reason you haven't even done that?

Yes back in the days of IE5.x, it was no surprise for MS to port it to the windows 3.xx code base as MS was still fighting with Netscape for dominance. Now they own the browser market they could care less.

If you want an MS OS that is every bit as stable and well behaved as win2k then install server 2003, I've had the trial on a rig for a while now and its much better than xp. Pitty there was no WKS version of it.

I am working on a Browser using the IE engine: some of the new features MS is offering are implemented in my browser, and it works FINE on Win2k, so why don't backport IE7 to Win2k?

> What's worse, most of you are still running Windows 2000 Service Pack 3!

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

-Christopher [MSFT] wrote:
"- I want to reiterate that point that there's still 5 more years of security support for Windows 2000 SP4 users. Anyone running SP4 can continue to expect security updates when necessary"

That's pretty amusing since the biggest security risk in Windows 2000 is IE ;)

Not releasing IE7 for Win2K is a mistake.

Windows XP is perhaps the worst version of Windows ever, and I have no intention of making my machine unclean by installing it.

There should be no gap between 2K and Longhorn, because many people dislike XP as much as I do, and have not upgraded.

Christopher from MSFT...

I feel very strongly that all of you on the IE team are going to realize much later on down the road how big of a mistake this really will end up being. I hope you'll reconsider this stance and backport IE7 to Win2k. It may be a lot of work, but I'm sure it will create some goodwill amongst many of your customers. Isn't doing that worth showing some goodwill to your customers?

It's my feeling that Microsoft could stand to do something that would create goodwill amongst its customers. The simple fact is--whether you guys will acknowledge it or not--that your competition is getting quite good at producing some very capable software for systems where you have decided you will not or cannot offer updated versions. If you won't--then someone else will and may do a better job at it than you did.

Nobody can expect you to support everything forever, but Windows 2000 remains a very viable OS, doing almost anything else that can be asked...at a speed and level of stability that I feel is unmatched by any other version of Windows ever released. To leave all of us loyal Windows 2000 users stuck without at least some of the rendering improvements in IE is really a crime and not the right thing to do.

This is to say nothing that a lot of older versions of Windows were kept updated for a lot longer than Win2k is going to be. Support policy or none, Windows NT 4.0 was given access to new IE versions and other updates to the core OS for what amounted to nearly ten years.

If you're as tuned into "what the users think" as this blog suggests you to be, I hope you'll realize what a big mistake you are making before it is simply too late.

Firefox sucks! IE forever!

I just feel the need to comment on some of the complaints aimed at MS here. People seem to be complaining that Microsoft only provide 10 years of security patches for their OSs and it will encourage people to switch to Linux, etc.

A few years ago I installed the latest version of Mandrake Linux (the most up to date mainstream Linux distro at the time) yet less than 2 years later the auto updater stopped working and Mandrake stopped providing security updates! Also I found myself unable to install any remotely modern applications (for example updating Mozilla required updating XFree and various other libraries, which due to the lack of support meant either updating everything myself or replacing the whole thing).

One of the other alternatives that seems to be suggested above is Mac OSX. Apple have a policy of paid updates every 12 months. They actually seem to stop full support as soon as the new version is out so that you don't have the option of staying on the same version if you want to run anything remotely modern. Each new version of Safari, for example, requires a new version of OSX.

I don't pretend that Microsoft is perfect, far from it but in my experience it's the worst OS around, apart from all the alternatives.

1000101001 10101 101010110 1110101 1010100010 101010 10101 11110 00001 101

I dont know if i will continue under Windows.

Personally, it's the sensible option. Get a new secure browser platform, based on secure XPSP2 OS.

Do you expect Microsoft to compromise all the good work done by MS with XpSP2, and compromise it by backporting stuff in IE7 for Win2k? Of course not..

As for the corporate customers not using XP, why on earth not, it's now very stable, the claim that longhorn is only 18 month away is only true if you plan to deploy it across your organisation on day 1 of release. I'm glad your not my IT manager....

Stop whining, deploy XP now, (but it's late in the day, you should have been doing this 6 month ago), deploy Longhorn in 2-3 years when the hardware is ready, and the software has settled down.

Are these people really running IT departments? If so, how??

-Christopher [MSFT] wrote:
> The modern support policy (with mainstream & extended phases) was created well after Windows 3.1 was released
> (indeed, I don't think our lifecycle policy was really well defined until after 2001), so in all likelihood,
> it's an apples to oranges comparison

It's a shame you never replied to my comment which was the one Nick replied to. I wasn't mentioning the lifecycle policy but was mentioning the timescales.

I believe the only reason that you made IE versions for Win 3.1 was because you wanted to make sure you had all the bases covered, you wanted to support Win3.1 for longer than Netscape did in order to ensure these users didn't have to resort to Netscape. You even used to produce a version for the popular commercial Unix systems Solaris and IRIX but ignored linux at the time (first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win - can't remember who said that but seems to be playing out true at the moment).

This time you're taking a different approach, you're stopping supporting a very popular business OS while your rivals are still releasing products for this and even older releases. The only reason I can see this happening