Internet Explorer 6 loading the Ars homepage: A swing and a miss.Recently, we recommended Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome as the best business browsers. But for many companies, they both have a major problem: they're not Internet Explorer 6. Intranet applications that choke on newer browsers, but which work in Internet Explorer 6 or sometimes 7, are an unfortunate feature of many working environments, and regularly force companies to stick with software that's long past its prime but nonetheless mission critical.
The good news is that you no longer have to avoid other browsers just to placate these legacy browser-exclusive sites any more. Browser makers and third-party developers have devised a number of tools engineered to let you use Internet Explorer 6, in some cases without having to actually use Internet Explorer 6.
Going old school: Windows XP Mode with IE6Windows XP Mode, available as a free download for all users of Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise, is a Windows XP virtual machine that allows you to run code in a native XP environment when Windows 7's built-in compatibility tools fail you. It remains much the same as it was when we looked at it two years ago, aside from dropping a requirement for hardware virtualization. It installs Internet Explorer 6 by default, just as with a standard Windows XP install, but can also run Internet Explorer 7 (or 8, but that runs natively on Windows 7 anyway). Administrators can use the version they need for compatibility with their internal sites and tools, while updating the host Windows 7 computer to Internet Explorer 9 for general usage.
XP Mode offers foolproof Internet Explorer compatibility and excellent integration with Windows 7. But since you're implementing a full Windows XP environment on each client, you're effectively doubling your workload—you've got to manage, patch, and lock down both the host Windows 7 operating system and the guest Windows XP system. This is a considerable amount of overhead compared to some of the other options on the table here, both computationally and in terms of support, so you'll want to consider that carefully before proceeding. Still, if you've got a Web app that absolutely, positively requires Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7 and will accept no substitutes, this is one of the safer ways to use the older browsers without running an outdated hosted operating system.
Internet Explorer 6 running using Windows XP Mode. The setup process for MED-V is different, but the end result
looks the same.Virtually old school: Microsoft Enterprise Desktop VirtualizationMicrosoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, or MED-V, is similar to Windows XP Mode in that it allows you to run older versions of Internet Explorer through virtualization, but unlike XP Mode it can be managed and deployed centrally. It still involves deploying a separate OS that you'll have to protect and manage, but it will ease the pain of deploying said OS and offers a couple other integration features to boot.
MED-V is part of the larger Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), a package of tools designed to ease the deployment and management of Windows and applications. The MDOP is available only to businesses with Software Assurance volume licenses, an additional cost to consider.
The process for setting up and deploying a MED-V VM (or "workspace") is a bit complicated, but we'll try to boil it down: first, you'll have to install a copy of Virtual PC 2007. Then you'll need to create a virtual machine using a volume-licensed copy of Windows XP SP3 (which is one of the reasons a volume license agreement with Microsoft is required to make this work). Next, you'll need to install all available updates and apps into the VM (possibly including the Internet Explorer Blocker Toolkits), and run Sysprep to prepare Windows for deployment to multiple systems just as you would for any Windows image. The MED-V Workspace Packager is then run on the host machine to pack up the VM for deployment, which is handled through the System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or other deployment software (it can also be deployed manually or as part of a Windows 7 image). That's the abridged version; more detailed instructions are located
here.
MED-V workspaces offer many of the same Windows integration features that make XP Mode appealing, including access to the host file system, printers, and USB devices, along with an extra perk: system administrators can also specify URLs that, when opened in the host's browser, will redirect to the VM's version instead, providing seamless support for users.
Like Windows XP Mode, MED-V lets you continue running legacy browsers while upgrading your PC's newer versions of Windows. But it shares some of the disadvantages of XP Mode as well; it requires more time and planning than a simple MSI or browser plug-in, and requires your business to have a Software Assurance volume license agreement with Microsoft. You'll want to weigh the time and money involved in implementing this solution against the time and money that would be spent upgrading your incompatible Web apps.
While MED-V and Windows XP mode are officially sanctioned Microsoft solutions, it should also be mentioned that third parties like VMWare also offer products for both single-user and managed, multi-user virtual desktops, some of which also support OS X.
Remotely old school: Remote Desktop ServicesWindows' Remote Desktop Services, previously known as Terminal Services, is a Windows Server role that allows users to connect to a remote computer and run. Where virtualization requires enough RAM, CPU power, and drive space on each client computer to run an entire second operating system, Remote Desktop Services offloads almost all of this resource usage to the server. You'll need to make sure that your server is powerful enough to handle all of the users who will be using it, but your clients can use just about anything with a network connection and a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client (Microsoft only provides RDP clients for Windows and OS X, but third party clients exist for Linux, iOS, Android, and others).
If you've ever used Remote Desktop Connection or Windows Remote Assistance to connect to another computer, you've already used the basic technology—just fire up the Remote Desktop client, type in your server's name or IP address, type in your credentials, and you're using Windows on another computer, complete with Internet Explorer and any applications the server administrator has installed. Internet Explorer on servers is locked down much tighter by default than IE on desktops—you or your administrator may need to make tweak some settings to get your Web apps working properly.
The main issue with Remote Desktop Services, as you'll see if you read any of our OnLive Desktop coverage, is licensing: in addition to a Windows Server license for the OS, you'll also need a Windows Server Client Access License and a Remote Desktop Services Client Access License (RDS CAL). You can choose to purchase your RDS CALs per computer, useful for a multi-user workstation or computer lab, or per user, useful for an environment where users switch computers during the day or work from home. As with the virtualized solutions, you'll need to weigh the costs of providing this service against the cost of replacing or upgrading the Internet Explorer-dependent site or app.
Old IE in new IE: Browsium IonBrowsium Ion is the successor to
UniBrows, a software package that made the Internet Explorer 6 engine available to newer versions of Internet Explorer. UniBrows used Internet Explorer 6 code licensed from Microsoft to run IE6-compatible tabs within Internet Explorer 8 or Internet Explorer 9, giving users backwards compatibility without incurring the overhead of virtualization. Ion, for its part, promises Internet Explorer 6 and 7 compatibility without actually using any of those browsers' aging code.
Instead, the Ion browser add-on uses its "Adaptive IE Quirks" profile to simulate old browser engines, offering the ability to render pages in Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, or 9 modes. The software can also run older versions of ActiveX controls (including the Java plugin) alongside current ones, if necessary. Browsium offers a
test site that was built to IE6 specifications, and even includes some old Java applets to simulate the kind of page that Ion was meant to fix.
Ion has two components. The first is the Ion Configuration Manager, which can be used both to test new profiles as you create them and to export new .ADM or .ADMX files to control and enforce your settings via group policies. The second is a client installer, available as an MSI, which must be rolled out to every computer that needs to use Ion (including the system or systems running the Configuration Manager).
The Browsium Ion Configuration ManagerUsing the Ion Configuration Manager, you can create different compatibility profiles that will force specific sites to load as they would in older Internet Explorer versions. From the user's perspective, this is done seamlessly—you can load your creaky old Intranet site in a tab, do what you need to do, and then navigate to Facebook in the same tab without having to switch. The administrative console give you the control to change pretty much anything, from whether Data Execution Prevention is enabled to what Java version a particular site uses. If your site uses older ActiveX controls or JavaScript, you may need to do some tweaking to get your pages loading correctly—the older UniBrows product required less configuration, but Ion's approach frees Browsium both from Internet Explorer 6 code that stops being supported in 2014, as well as from the licensing costs associated with using that code.
Browsium Ion's cost is variable, based on the number of licenses you buy and the amount of support you need. Assuming you've paid for the middle of the three support tiers, Browsium quoted me a price of about $15 per seat per year for 1,000 seats, with the price per seat decreasing for larger organizations (about $7 per seat per year for 5,000 seats) and increasing for smaller ones (about $25 per seat per year for 500 seats or $65 per seat per year for 100 seats). Product upgrades are provided for free for as long as your license is current, and while there are no discounts for maintenance licenses the company is "always willing to negotiate," particularly for educational or non-profit institutions.
According to Browsium Director of Systems Engineering Christopher Vaughn, "[Browsium was] told by one large (>1000 seat) customer that our cost to them was 95% cheaper than the alternatives they were looking at (which are typically a mix of application upgrades, rewrites and virtualization)." As with the Microsoft solutions, you'll need to weigh the cost of Ion against the cost of upgrading to see which makes more sense for your organization.
Old school IE in Chrome and Mozilla: IE TabIE Tab exists in two iterations, one for Mozilla Firefox and one for Google Chrome. In both cases, the core functionality is the same: it's an extension that allows you to open a tab within the browser that uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine rather than the engine native to the browser. The downside is that you're still stuck having the old browser installed on your system, since it uses whatever version of Internet Explorer you happen to have installed. If you have sites that need Internet Explorer 6, that means keeping IE6 installed on your machines alongside any new browsers. So, it's not so much replacing the old browser as wallpapering over it.
On the plus side, IE Tab's options window allows you to type in URLs that you would like to render in Internet Explorer by default, so you can keep users out of the IE6 danger zone except when absolutely necessary. In Firefox, you can also switch engines at any time by right-clicking a tab and clicking "Switch Rendering Engine" to reload the page. The Chrome version of the add-in adds an Internet Explorer button to the right of your address bar that will bring up a special address bar you can use to open sites with IE's engine.
Google Chrome failing the Acid3 test with the help of IETabThe Firefox and Chrome versions of the add-on are both a bit different, but in general the rendering behavior is the same—in the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox on a Windows XP system running IE6, the browsing experience using IE Tab is pretty much the same as using IE6, for better or worse.
This solution is both free and easy, but it does tie you to the Internet Explorer version (and underlying operating system) that you need to use for compatibility. If you need Internet Explorer 6 compatibility, you'll still be tied to Windows XP, and there's no virtual machine or sandbox between your users' computers and exploits targeting those old browsers.
IE with two brains: Chrome FrameChrome Frame is the opposite of IE Tab, in that it can display sites using Chrome's rendering engine rather than Internet Explorer's. Using Chrome Frame, businesses running calcified versions of Internet Explorer can still render all of the sites that have dropped support for old IE versions in the last year or two. You can try Chrome Frame out by navigating to the
Chrome Frame site in Internet Explorer 6 or newer, but administrators also have access to
an MSI that can be deployed and managed with most of the same
group policies that control the standard version of Chrome. Chrome Frame is slightly different from Chrome—among other things, it uses Internet Explorer's network stack instead of Chrome's and drops support for a couple of Chrome's HTML5 features—but otherwise it's the same browser.
The downside of Chrome Frame is that it usually requires site developers to
add a line of code to their sites to activate it—you can tell if a site is using Chrome Frame by right-clicking and seeing if "About Chrome Frame" appears in the context menu. Otherwise, forcing sites to render with Chrome Frame can be accomplished by editing registry settings on individual computers or by using group policies—you can either specify particular sites you'd like to render with Chrome Frame, or force all sites to render with Chrome Frame by default. You can also force pages to render in Chrome Frame by adding a "gcf:" prefix in front of your URLs, after enabling this feature with a Registry hack.
Internet Explorer 8 passing the Acid3 test with the help of Chrome FrameChrome Frame's support from major Web developers is a bit spotty at best—using Alexa's top sites list as a starting point, I found that most of the Google Apps (including Gmail and Google Docs), Facebook, and Yahoo supported Chrome Frame, but Twitter, eBay, Amazon, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Google's Search pages didn't use it. Because of these oddities, Chrome Frame works best only if you absolutely can't install a browser other than Internet Explorer on your computers. Otherwise, most people will be better served by installing a second browser on their users' systems and informing them to use Internet Explorer when a page doesn't render properly.
A short-term fixWith the exception of Browsium Ion, all of these fixes are stop-gap solutions. Windows XP and Internet Explorer will cease to be supported in less than two years, and this means that they will no longer receive security updates.
IE Tab and Chrome Frame, which run on Windows XP directly, even when using their modern rendering engines, are most vulnerable here: any malware that can attack the browser will be able to compromise the operating system too. Windows XP Mode and MED-V, which only use Windows XP for browsing legacy sites (typically hosted on corporate networks and hence unlikely to host malware), are safer, but will still require the use of an unpatched, unsupported operating system come 2014.
Only Browsium Ion offers the ability to use legacy sites without a legacy browser, but this comes at some cost: it lacks the perfect compatibility that the alternative options offer.
Which of these products is the best option for your company will depend on your exact circumstances. All offer a way to mix and match modern browsing with legacy browsing, with different trade-offs in terms of price, ease-of-use, manageability, and performance.
Not one of them, however, should be regarded as a long-term fix. The applications that force companies to use Internet Explorer 6 need to be fixed or replaced. They're transitional technologies, and while they may very well make that transition easier, it still needs to happen.
source:arstechnica
