The legacy version of the Microsoft Edge, which is set to be discontinued in March, will be removed from Windows 10 with the release of Patch Tuesday updates in April.
As we reported recently, Windows 10 currently comes with three different web browsers – Legacy Edge (hidden), Chromium Edge (default), and Internet Explorer (enabled). In an attempt to reduce clutter and improve security, Microsoft is removing the older browsers from the OS.
I mean, on the one hand it seems like this is a reasonably move – there’s a new version of Edge, so an update will remove the old one. On the other hand, though, these are really two entirely different applications that happen to share a name, and it seems grotesque and user-hostile to just remove an entire application without even giving users the option to keep it.
Sure, this concerns an outdated browser nobody uses, and that makes it easy to handwave this away, but what if this happens to an application you actually like and use?
This is not the bad old days of Microsoft pretending that you cannot use a browser from somebody else. This is them managing the definition of the operating system and what applications come with it. I really miss the old calculator. I am pretty sure they have taken away the old task manager. The are going to retire the old control panel at some point. Is this any different? Those applications are not as big but really they are just bundled utilities in the same sense. I mean they bundled Program Manager forever for people that could not live without it when they moved to Explorer. Even Explorer is not what it used to be though. I want all the wonky stuff they pushed with Windows 98!
https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-windows-7-in-windows-10/
That’s just funny.
For what it’s worth, the “old” calculator is included in server versions of Windows.
The “old” task manager is included in WinPE – the environment you boot to in order to install Windows. Every Windows 10 DVD has a copy.
Personally what I miss is the original Winhelp engine. It’s insecure and technically inferior to HTML Help, but there’s still a lot of documentation that used this format, which is officially inaccessible. Just like the others, it’s easy to copy around a binary that works.
If anyone had actually used the version of Edge written as a failed UWP app (as all of them inherently are), I would hardly call it hostile moving users over to one that people would actually use.
I am also expecting windows update to also change the default browser selection (again) and put back their browser icon in the taskbar (again).
Microsoft’s software really is the “wetgever van Juinen” of the software world.
I’m sorry but this is a VERY GOOD THING as they are removing a dead, no longer supported app on the OS and giving a supported alternative is you want one but you are still free to use any current browser.
Now if only Google would give us the damn option of removing the piles of dead worthless potential security risks to my 2 year old phone which they have abandoned (I swear go look at Google Graveyard, there is like half a dozen phone apps they have killed with NO WAY TO UNINSTALL any of them from the damn phone) I would be happy so kudos MSFT for cleaning up after yourself, maybe others will take inspiration and clean up their own dead apps!
What Pixel phone do you own? What apps are you talking about?
Don’t give me that “It has to be a Pixel to count” BS, that would be like saying “MSFT can do anything they want to Windows 10 and you can’t complain unless you are on a Surface”. Google made Android, Google FORCED companies to carry apps they have now abandoned, and Google owns the Playstore…there is absolutely positively NO REASON they couldn’t release a bit of code on the Playstore that detects when you have one of their abandoned apps when you go to update an app and say “We no longer support that, would you like us to remove it?”
I sincerely hope someone attacks one of those apps with malware so we can get a nice big fat billion dollar class action lawsuit against Google that will FINALLY make them take responsibility for their own damn product, I mean can you imagine the stink if MSFT announced tomorrow ” We are giving Windows away for free to the OEMs but you won’t get any security updates unless you buy a Surface and even then we might support it 3 years before making you buy a new one?”. Android is built on Linux, Linux has had updating an OS solved for nearly 30 years, Google has zero excuse on not being able to securely remove dead apps and being able to provide universal security updates.
Actually, I liked old edge browser. While not as standard compliant as FF or Chrome, it was pretty light on resources.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. While Thom’s reasoning is solid, leaving out there a browser that’s destined to become abandoned and upatched for years to come is too big a security risk to be even considered. Yes, almost nobody uses the old Edge, but if that “almost” translates to 1% of Windows 10 installs, it translates, in turn, to over 10 million PCs waiting to be breached and/or spread malware of some sort.
m.ridoni,
All software is eventually unsupported & abandoned, but does this mean it should completely cease to exist? Between remote activation, remote server dependencies, and self-deleting software, the future for computer historians may be bleak when looking back at our time. It’s already the case for a lot of games and some productivity software like adobe cloud, etc.
Better to remove completely Windows and switch to Linux…
And yet they are leaving IE there still? (I mean come on at least remove it from the home versions where it might actually be (ab)used).
Though yeah things get removed. My mother still insists on requireing the win 7 games. Every big update win 10 deleted’s them again so I have given her an installer to put them back (which also removed the version check which is the only reason they no longer run (or someother check, who knows I did not look into it much!(I guess they would probably run under wine on windows, is that still a thing?))).
IE is trickier to remove since it was available as a COM control for a long time. Consequently, removing it entirely would break a lot of legacy apps that rely on it as an embedded rendering engine.
Oh, please Thom, there is no rationale for maintaining a codebase used for nothing else other than old Edge, a browser which barely saw the light of day. Kill it off so it doesn’t get abused by exploit writers.
“it seems grotesque and user-hostile to just remove an entire application without even giving users the option to keep it.”
Whilst there might be some edge (pun intended) cases that removing a system component might cause other breakages, in general, being an unsupported application that can become a security risk is precisely why they should remove it.
It would be much, much worse for them to leave it installed and for it to then become an exploit.
Of course Thom wants to open the FUD wars by going biasedly fully-ideological yet again.
Web browser, first of all, is a system app, and secondly, has been historically one to the widest gates to Windows-related global computer virus pandemics. Mostly because users are too dumb or lazy to switch.
So even in the case that some poor idiot was actually using legacy Edge in 2021, that is actually the reason for destroying this app. If it was just a piece of abandonware that nobody even knew was still around, the pressure for purging it out of existence would probably be lesser.
Computers aren’t humans after all, so forcing “medical operations” on them isn’t a violation of our rights in the same way that forcing us to wear facemasks out on the street would be.
sj87,
Except that microsoft shouldn’t own or control your computer. Even if experts agree that replacing it better, that should not override owner consent. Do we really want to get accustomed to microsoft (and others) installing and uninstalling software without owner consent just because it’s for our own good? I think that view is morally troubling and it sets a bad precedent for user rights in the long run.
I don’t know where the “medical operations” quote came from, but there too you morally should have consent. Doctors knowing better than the patient doesn’t give them the authority to perform procedures against someone’s will. Obviously a computer isn’t a life form, but still it would be a mistake to deprive owners of consent just because we think we know better.
There’s nothing to be accustomed to when a piece of software that you never touched is being removed. The slippery slope argument doesn’t stand here.
Also, all apps evolve and change anyway. Microsoft didn’t kill Edge, it killed a legacy version that for contractual obligations was retained as standalone instead of silently upgraded to Chromium-based Edge long time ago.
And, as I argued previously, those people who were clinging on to legacy Edge are also people who should have zero say about what software they get to run anyway. That portion of the customerbase is even more cancerous than Microsoft’s policies with regards to manipulating what software customers are allowed to use.
It wasn’t a quote.
I beg to differ, you only say it’s not a slippery slope because you don’t care in this instance, but if they did the exact same thing to software you did care about it would be a different story.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard this saying, but I think it applies here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_…
I don’t particularly care about the original edge browser either, but I can recognize that it is a very slippery slope once we start allowing companies to have this power.
Does this philosophy apply to any hardware one can own?
I guess I just have to accept this is your opinion, but I strongly disagree. It’s a stepping stone away from the logic autocratic regimes use to justify stomping out democracy; they believe they can make better choices for others and therefor that others should not be entitled to the freedom of choice.
I find it weird the way you quoted it, but no matter
I didn’t quote anything.
This case isn’t really any different from Ubuntu upgrading from Firefox 52 (the last version to feature the previous UI) to later Firefoxes. The application transforms into another but users will also move on. Microsoft just had to keep the legacy Edge around for other reasons. Besides it wasn’t even possible to uninstall that SOB until this move.
sj87,
Fine.
The problem with windows updates today (as opposed to older versions of windows) is that you can’t opt of specific updates, even those that perform unwanted changes to your computer. I find it disturbing that microsoft’s doesn’t believe owners should have a right to veto windows update installs & uninstalls on their own machines. These updates are “mandatory”, as mentioned by the article.
Also to my knowledge mozilla never used it’s updates to uninstall another browser. As Thom already pointed out “these are really two entirely different applications that happen to share a name”.
And once again it’s not that I care about the edge browser. But as we begin accepting tech companies using their master keys on our machines to exercise control over us without the need for consent, it drags us into territory where owners actually have fewer rights than corporations on our own hardware. We are loosing control and rights that past generations took for granted. I think this is very dangerous in a “dark ages” sense, because the public’s access to software and information is becoming more restricted by what the monopolistic companies want to allow us to do. Obviously we’re not 100% locked by our technology yet, but every step in that direction makes me uncomfortable.
I’ll have to take your word on that. I would agree users should always have the right to install and uninstall software at their own discretion.
As always it’s a case of “It depends”. The second I read the topic I spotted it was a dialectic being forced by a questionable starting position.
At one end you have secure systems and at the other end insecure systems with varying degrees of user or centralised control and useability and ease of use and relevance. A proper answer would be discussing this followed by an inch thick manual. Most people will generally fall into one quarter or another of the secure-insecure/user-centralised SWOT test. It’s all very dull. No thrills of raging ego in white knuckle arguments and all the other rollercoaster emotional drama.
There’s probably a policy on the Five Eyes server where this kind of thing is shared. Bye bye insecure codebase nobody uses or cares about. Hello ping the update server on your Raspebbery PI.
Back when I coded I had a portability layer which covered every version of most operating systems and compilers (including both PCs and game consoles). I also had pretty much every compiler and help system installed. Microsoft Visual Studio and SDK was pretty good with side by side installing but you have to note this was for people who passed an “idiot test” of being professional coders and it was single use. As we know sloppy coding practices could get through older compilers while new compilers introduced more secure libraries and warnings – still not perfect but this dealt with a number of coders and codebases where people had not been paying attention. While I don’t code now at the time my codebase would compile and run all the way back to Windows 95 and NT4.0 with all the flags and caveats to enable code substitution for different older versions. This is why I am puzzled when developers drop support for legacy OS or complain it’s hard to maintain. It’s quite simple and easy if you abstracted from the beginning and are organised. I also used to test graphics applications across multiple hardware and drivers as they all vary in conformity. ATI now AMD drivers have always been better quality than NVidia who still let dodgy graphics code through. Developers who only work and compile against NVidia drivers are the biggest reason why games failed on ATI/AMD at retail when the bug was actually in the NVidia orientated code. another issue is scaleability. Many developers can be in the position of having worse performing development platforms than end users and vice versa. Without a range of hardware including, say, for arguments sake at the extreme a P200 class machine with legacy graphics cards you will never have the incentive to code properly for scaleability nor be able to test it properly. Again, you code from whatever your chosen starting position is. As time goes by unless you watch your step your applications track whatever is the latest OS and development tools and hardware and start complaining about “bitrot” and slow applications when the issue is lazy code chasing an illusuary end user scenario. and the previously five years now two years (which the tried to force to six months) upgrade cycle.
Will some people be able to justify multiple side by side installations of an arbitrary application? Yes in the same way some can justify and safely use an unsigned driver. But for the general default case no.
As someone who has not really used Windows 10 so far (very occasionally only) and with a corporate laptop still on Windows 7, it seems that if I actually get to use Windows 10, it will already have been through many overhauls.
From an outsider perspective Windows 10 is just still in development. If they have indeed removed things like the classic theme (which I use on Windows 7) and the Control Panel I think it would be quite tough to switch.
Z_God,
To this day I still dislike the removal of classic. The window style is so depth-less and featureless that sometimes have real difficulty seeing the borders between windows that share the same background color (Like multiple command windows for example). I see no way to customize this and I’ve even asked others for help but it just seems to be hard coded this way at least without 3rd party extensions. Better than windows 8.0 at least, but I still prefer the windows 7 GUI. I feel the same way about “the ribbon” too. IMHO the dynamically changing interface adds complexity and isn’t always up to par with the old menu interfaces.
That issue you’re describing regarding borderless windows, I already have that quite often with MS Teams. When I have multiple windows open, I tend click on the wrong window. This happens to me multiple times on a daily basis. As MS Teams draws its own stuff over the Windows stuff, I suppose that resembles Windows 10.
Silly thing, sometimes there is a bit of glitching and Windows manages to draw its widgets and MS Teams doesn’t redraw its own on top and you observe the regular title bar for a moment in MS Teams.
Z_God,
Yes, some of applications end up hard coding windows 10 themes and applying them everywhere, making them look rather out of place sometimes when they don’t use/match system themes.
MS Teams is a useful tool but the implementation has been quite glitchy in my experience. There were a few days I could use it at all due to javascript errors. I don’t really know if this came down to the version of IE installed on your system, but any time I would try to log in an old-school javascript error box would popup. Another time all of us experienced bugs transferring files.
Of course since the service was completely outsourced, nobody in-house could fix anything. People always think of the pros of cloud/outsourcing when they buy into it, but there are real cons too since you’re usually several layers abstracted from anyone who can fix things and you can loose hours and days waiting for regressions to get fixed and premium corporate support can be extremely costly.
It seems that they will still support EdgeHTML though, for embedded rendering. So why even bother deleting (instead of hiding) the Legacy Edge?