I know that I previously posted articles regarding a comeback of Bloated Goats, but it seems IBM killed it off totally.
Should be interesting to see what comes of this. Selling something off at a loss tells something already.
Won’t be sorry to see that go. On a similar note, Computerworld published an article yesterday that reported Microsoft is giving up on its own “EdgeHTML” rendering engine and will switch to the Blink engine that’s in Google Chrome. So, just like Opera, Edge will become another Chrome clone.
There’s not many rendering/layout engines left any more. You’ve got Gecko inside Firefox, WebKit inside Safari, Servo’s being worked on by Mozilla and Samsung, and a couple on the Unix side of things.
I’m slightly worried. HCL just bought the helpdesk company I work for about a year ago.
Now that is interesting.
We all know IBM is on their way out. Maybe HCL want to be the new IBM?
Good riddance.
Webkit and Blink are both descended from KHTML and Gecko isn’t easily embedded in other applications, so we’re rapidly approaching a near-monoculture.
Monocultures are not a good thing.
1 Like
Monocle-cultures, however, are distinguished.
I feel like for browsers it’s more that the massive outlier (IE!) is being killed off, and we’re getting a bunch of variants that have common roots, but very different details… New JavaScript engines and other features.
Killing IE makes so many things easier, as it’s often been the odd one out for compliance with CSS features and similar.
Yet you will still get devices that insists on using braindead IE 
these will NOT work with other browsers, and here I refer to iLO modules, Cisco routers etc… Seems you’ll need to have an winXP or win7 VM just for these.
What Cisco gear are you running that needs IE? I don’t even use it for UCS modules (our old ones require Flash), and I think CallManager finally moved past needing it.
Cisco VoIP router. Can’t say offhand which exact model.
Only IE works on that model, firefox, edge and chrome borks.
In the field of “things that only work with IE”, some of the wi-fi connections organizations make available for visitors to use have you go to a page where you acknowledge the terms of use. For the two places I’ve used it the most, when the web browser pops up, it can’t connect to the page. I have to open up IE to do the acknowledgement and then the other browser starts working.
1 Like
Ours is Cisco based and works with most browsers, although there is an annoying bug that causes a transparent-background pop up on the approver’a interface.
It was more than a decade ago when I encountered something almost as silly.
This was in a time when IE was the king, and almost every web page was coded to run IE, and everyone else had to match.
Our NEC voice mail system installed a web-based page for admins on our Windows server.
It would NOT display in IE. It would only display in Firefox (only option for an alternate browser at the time, really).
I laughed, and celebrated, since I have disliked (hated? reviled?) IE since I learned there were other options.
1 Like
It still irks me when you have to use braindead IE with some products, for example Vmware ESXi.
When trying to configure it with firefox, things screw up. Only using IE gives the best results.
Blah.
I’ve seen the opposite when configuring Tenable SecurityCenter, or running up a new Nessus Scanner.
IE / Edge gives a vague, useless “something broke” message and refuses to work. Chrome works perfectly.
1 Like
Lol the joys of IT