Retiring Internet Explorer

Prelude

In late 2004, I was the Program Manager for Microsoft’s clipart website, delivering a million pieces of clipart to Microsoft Office customers every day. It was great fun. But there was a problem– our “Clip of the Day” feature, meant to spotlight a new and topical piece of clipart every day, wasn’t changing as expected.

After much investigation (could the browser itself really be wrong?!?), I wrote to the IE team to complain about what looked like bugs in its caching implementation. In a terse reply, I was informed that the handful of people then left on the browser team were only working on critical security fixes, and my caching problems weren’t nearly important enough to even look at.

That night, unable to sleep, I tossed and turned and fumed at the seeming arrogance of the job link in the respondent’s email signature… “Want to change the world? Join the new IE team today!”

Gradually, though, I calmed down and reasoned it through… While the product wasn’t exactly beloved, everyone I knew with a computer used Internet Explorer. Arrogant or not, it was probably accurate that there was nothing I could do with my career at that time that would have as big an impact as joining the IE team. And, I smugly realized that if I joined the team, I’d get access to the IE source code, and could go root out those caching bugs myself.

I reached out to the IE lead for an informational interview the following day, and passed an interview loop shortly thereafter.

After joining the team, I printed out the source code for the network stack and sat down with a red pen. There were no fewer than six different bugs causing my “Clip of the Day gets stuck” issue. When my devs fixed the last of them, I mentioned this and my story to my GPM (boss’ boss).

“Does this mean you’re a retention risk?” Tony asked.

“Maybe after we fix the rest of these…” I retorted, pointing at the pile of paper with almost a hundred red circles.

No one in the world loved IE as much as I did, warts and all. Investigating, documenting, and fixing problems in Internet Explorer was a nearly all-consuming passion throughout my twenties. Internet Explorer pioneered a broad range of (mostly overlooked) innovations, and in rediscovering them, I felt like one of the characters on Lost — a castaway in a codebase whose brilliant designers were long gone. IE9 was a fantastic, best-of-its-time browser, and I’ll forever be proud of it. But as IE9 wound down and the Windows 8 adventure began, it was already clear that its lead would not last against the Chrome juggernaut.

I shipped IE7, IE8, IE9, and IE10, leaving Microsoft in late 2012, shortly after IE10 was finished, to build Fiddler for Telerik.

In 2015, I changed my default browser to Chrome. In 2016, I joined the Chrome Security team. I left Google in the summer of 2018 and rejoined the Microsoft Edge team, and that summer and fall I spent 50% of my time rediscovering bugs that I’d first found in IE and blogged about a decade before.

Fortunately, Edge’s faster development pace meant that we actually got to fix some of the bugs this time, but Chrome’s advantages in nearly every dimension left Edge very much in an underdog status. Fortunately, the other half of my time was spent working on our (then) secret project to replatform the next version of our Edge browser atop the open-source Chromium project.

We’ve now shipped our best browser ever — the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge. I hope you’ll try it out.

It’s with love that I beg you… please let Internet Explorer retire to the great bitbucket in the sky. It’s time. It’s been time for a long time.

Burndown List

Last night, as I read the details of yet another 0-day security bug in Internet Explorer, I posted the following throwaway tweet, which netted a surprising number of interactions:

I expected the usual slew of “Yeah, IE is terrible,” and “IE was always terrible,” and “Somebody tell my {boss,school,parents}” responses, but I didn’t really expect serious replies. I got some, however, and they’re interesting.

Shared Credentials

https://twitter.com/c0ld_fire/status/1219038213081378816

Internet Explorer shares a common networking stack (WinINET) and Cookie Jar (for Intranet/Trusted sites) with many native code applications on Windows, including Windows Explorer. Tim identifies a scenario where Windows Explorer relies on an auth cookie being found in the WinINET cookie jar, put there by Internet Explorer. We’ve seen similar scenarios in some Microsoft Office flows.

Depending on a cookie set by Internet Explorer might’ve been somewhat reasonable in 2003, but Vista/IE7’s introduction of Protected Mode (and cookie jar partitioning) in 2006 made this a fragile architecture. The fact that anything depends upon it in 2020 is appalling.

Thoughts: I need to bang on some doors. This is depressing.

Certificate Issuance

From Sectigos Website:

Note: Please use Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 or Mozilla Firefox to collect your certificate. Code Signing certificates cannot be generated using Apple Safari, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge.

— thomas woelfer 🇪🇺 (@t_woelfer) January 19, 2020

.@digicert can you please fix your CSR generation so we can use Chrome/Edgium?@kylealden I am forced to use IE for this 😥 pic.twitter.com/L9h7emiIoN

— Claire Novotny (@clairernovotny) January 14, 2020

Developers who apply digital signatures to their apps and server operators who expose their sites over HTTPS do so using a digital certificate. In ideal cases, getting a certificate is automatic and doesn’t involve a browser at all, but some Certificate Authorities require browser-based flows. Those flows often demand that the user use either Internet Explorer or Firefox because the former supports ActiveX Controls for certificate issuance, while Firefox, until recently, supported the Keygen element.

WebCrypto, now supported in all modern browsers, serves as a modern replacement for these deprecated approaches, and some certificate issuers are starting to build issuance flows atop it.

Thoughts: We all need to send some angry emails. Companies in the Trust space should not be built atop insecure technologies.

Banking, especially in Asia

IE is required for many government and banking websites in Asia.

— Jeff (@JeffBoeker) January 19, 2020

A fascinating set of circumstances led to Internet Explorer’s dominance in Asian markets. First, early browsers had poor support for Unicode and East Asian character sets, forcing website developers to build their own text rendering atop native code plugins (ActiveX). South Korea mandated use of a locally-developed cipher (SEED) for banking transactions[1], and this cipher was not implemented by browser developers… ActiveX again to the rescue. Finally, since all users were using IE, and were accustomed to installing ActiveX controls, malware started running rampant, so banks and other financial institutions started bundling “security solutions” (aka rootkits) into their ActiveX controls. Every user’s browser was a battlefield with warring native code trying to get the upper hand. A series of beleaguered Microsoft engineers (including Ed Praitis, who helped inspire me to make my first significant code commits to the browser) spent long weeks trying to keep all of this mess working as we rearchitected the browser, built Protected Mode and later Enhanced Protected Mode, and otherwise modernized a codebase nearing its second decade.

Thoughts: IE marketshare in Asia may be higher than other places, but it can’t be nearly as high as it once was. Haven’t these sites all pivoted to mobile apps yet?

Reader Survey: Do you have any especially interesting scenarios where you’re forced to use Internet Explorer? Sound off in the comments below!

Q&A

Q: I get that IE is terrible, but I’m an enterprise admin and I own 400 websites running lousy websites written by a vendor in a hurry back in 2004. These sites will not be updated, and my employees need to keep using them. What can I do?

A: The new Chromium-based Edge has an IE Mode; you can configure your users so that Edge will use an Internet Explorer tab when loading those sites, directly within Edge itself. Consumers with unmanaged PCs can enable IEMode while users on Enterprise-managed PCs must have an IE Mode site list configured (or set two debug policies).

As of March 2021, Windows Group Policy is now available to prevent the use of Internet Explorer, allowing access only via Edge IE Mode.

Q: Uh, isn’t IE Mode a security risk?

A: Any use of an ancient web engine poses some risk, but IE Mode dramatically reduces the risk, by ensuring that only sites selected by the IT Administrator load in IE mode. Everything else seamlessly transitions back to the modern, performant and secure Chromium Edge engine.

Q: How do I debug? The Chromium F12 Developer Tools don’t work for IE Mode tabs?

A: Yes. You can either debug in full IE, or run C:\windows\system32\f12\IEChooser.exe, select the tab running in IEMode, and get an IE F12 Dev Tools window for that tab. This tool also works for WebOCs!

Q: What about Web Browser Controls (WebOCs) inside my native code applications?

A: In many cases, WebOCs inside a native application are used to render trusted content delivered from the application itself, or from a server controlled by the application’s vendor. In such cases, and presuming that all content is loaded over HTTPS, the security risk of the use of a WebOC is significantly lower. Rendering untrusted HTML in a WebOC is strongly discouraged, as WebOCs are even less secure than Internet Explorer itself. For compatibility reasons, numerous security features are disabled-by-default in WebOCs, and the WebOC does not run content in any type of process sandbox.

Looking forward, the new Chromium-based WebView2 control should be preferred over WebOCs for scenarios that require the rendering of HTML content within an application.

Q: Does this post mean anything has changed with regard to Internet Explorer’s support lifecycle, etc?

A: No. Internet Explorer will remain a supported product until its support lifecycle runs out. I’m simply begging you to not use it except to download a better browser.

Footnotes

[1] The SEED cipher wasn’t just a case of the South Korean government suffering from not-invented-here, but instead a response to the fact that the US Government at the time forbid export of strong crypto.