Browsium offers solution to Internet Explorer compatibility challenge

Hiding in the middle of the golden opportunity that is desktop virtualization lies a dirty little secret.

Desktop virtualization is widely touted as being an ideal solution to the problem off migrating enterprise desktops from Windows XP to 2011 being “The year of desktop virtualization”.  Unfortunately for many enterprise organizations no matter how attractive desktop virtualization is as a means of deploying Windows 7 , there’s no getting away from the fact that for many enterprise IT organizations Windows XP remains hanging albatross-like around their necks.

Actually it’s not Windows XP that we can’t get away from, it’s everybody’s favorite 10 year-old web browser Internet Explorer 6. Unfortunately, for too many organizations, Internet Explorer 6 is still a firm requirement, being the only browser that some enterprise web apps will work with. Although Internet Explorer 6 usage continues to fall, it still holds about 9% of the overall browser market with adoption levels remaining highest in large enterprises.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

George Santayana

Back in the days of the Y2K bug, the CIO held all the aces when it came to demanding budget  from the business;  ”Give me the budget to fix this problem or your business-critical applications will fail.”  and so CIOs were given a blank check to make the problem go away. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as though enough IT managers read Santayana’s The Life of Reason, and built too many Web apps with a hard dependency on a now obsolete browser specification. Given that IE 6 was released only 20 months after January 1st 2000, It would appear that some application development managers had very short memories and built applications that placed too much reliance on the IE 6 rendering engine. Either than, or they didn’t adequately plan to remediate these applications when it became clear that support for the IE 6 rendering engine would not be carried-over into IE 7 and beyond. Which left CIOs with a problem on their hands.

Unfortunately, this time around the CIO has a much weaker hand. As a call to arms “Give me the budget to fix this problem or you can’t  have Windows 7,”  lacks the impact of its predecessor. The fact is that many enterprise applications still require IE 6 is the CIO’s problem, not the CEO’s,  and the solution will have to be delivered at a much lower cost.

Initially at least, application virtualization appeared to hold a lot of promise as a way of encapsulating IE 6 and making it available for use within Windows 7.  As solutions go, this was very attractive; with multiple vendors competing to provide application virtualization products, price competition should have minimize the cost of this Band-Aid. Unfortunately, this approach did not prove to be viable. Gartner’s Neil MacDonald first drew attention to the problem, when he alerted readers of his blog to the fact that Microsoft has written to some of its customers offering the following ‘guidance’:

Microsoft does not support the use of Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) or similar third-party application virtualization products to virtualize IE6 as an “application” enabling multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a single operating system.  These unsupported approaches may potentially stop working when customers patch or update the underlying operating system, introducing technical incompatibilities and business continuity issues. In addition, the terms under which Windows and IE6 are licensed do not permit IE6 “application” virtualization.  Microsoft supports and licenses IE6 only for use as part of the Windows operating system, not as a standalone application.

Kenji Obata, CEO of Spoon (one of the new wave of innovative application virtualization vendors),  also reported that he had  received a “nastygram from Microsoft’s attorney” on his return from TechEd Europe 2010. The letter specifically stated that distributing IE from the Spoon website is in violation of Microsoft’s intellectual property rights, leaving Spoon little option but to remove its virtualized versions of IE from its website.

Following  these initial skirmishes, Microsoft released a knowledge base article explicitly stating that:

Running multiple versions of Windows Internet Explorer, or portions of Windows Internet Explorer, on a single instance of Windows is an unlicensed and unsupported solution. Microsoft strongly discourages the use of any solution or service (hosted or on-premises) that repackages the executable components of Internet Explorer, or portions of those components, into a separate installation. Any attempts to repackage Windows to execute multiple versions of Internet Explorer from such packages on a single instance of Windows will result in an unsupported configuration by Microsoft Customer Support Services.

This statement includes solutions that attempt to incorporate “application”-level virtualization for running multiple repackaged versions of Windows Internet Explorer on a single operating system instance.

It’s hard to understand why Microsoft chose to take this aggressive position; offering encouragement to defer migration to Windows 7 is clearly not in Microsoft’s best interest. Microsoft did provide a white paper Solutions for Virtualizing Internet Explorer offering its customers recommendations as to how to deliver IE 6 on Windows 7. Unfortunately,  Microsoft’s recommendations involved considerable investment in additional Microsoft licenses for Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) or Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) which were not well received by CIOs with limited budgets.

Mike Laverick writing for SearchVirtualDesktop.com offered a somewhat provocative solution to this problem in his article “To hell with Microsoft’s rule against IE virtualization“, suggesting that Microsoft’s licensing restrictions should simply be ignored.  Whilst this might work for Mike, it is not that good a strategy for the CIO of a Fortune 500 company. Fortunately, such drastic measures will soon no longer be required. Redmond based startup Browsium, is readying a lifeline for enterprise IT organizations that want to move to Windows 7 but are unable to escape their dependency on Internet Explorer 6.

Browsium’s Unibrows neatly sidesteps the challenge of attempting to virtualize IE 6 by taking the key rendering engine DLLs from IE 6, and incorporating them into an Internet Explorer add-on that runs within IE 8. Web sites requiring IE 6 support can be pre-defined through an administrative console that deploys rules via Group Policy so whenever a user attempts to launch a connection to one of these sites, IE 8 cedes control to the IE 6 rendering engine which takes control of the active browser tab to provide the required IE 6 specific functionality.  The makes the entire process completely transparent to individual users, their personal settings remain unchanged and the process works regardless of how a web site is accessed.

UniBrows also provides a Profiles feature that enables IT administrators to designate specific versions of ActiveX controls, custom registry values, and file system settings for specific sites. So, for example, a legacy intranet site can continue to use an old version of Flash for compatibility, while sites opened in adjacent tabs use the most current and secure version. These Profiles work with both the IE6 and IE8 rendering engines (support for IE9 is on the way), improving the security and compatibility of all platforms. UniBrows also works with Windows XP and Vista, so organizations wanting to hold on to XP just a little longer can update their standard browser to IE 8 while retaining access to IE compatibility using UniBrows where needed.

Given that Browsium’s solution is not to virtualize IE 6, but to use legally licensed IE 6 specific DLLs, it is hard to see Microsoft being able to suppress this approach. As Browsium’s FAQ puts it “Running IE6 inside of IE8 is no different than IE8’s own Compatibility Mode which invokes the IE7 rendering engine code inside of the IE8 application.”  The fact that Browsium’s President, and CTO both held key positions in Microsoft as program managers for Internet Explorer 7 and 8, also imbues a certain confidence in Unibrows offering a viable solution.

UniBrows’ relative simplicity, low overhead and enterprise ready management services mean that it compares favorably against the complexity of Microsoft’s recommended solutions. Pricing should also compare favorably against Microsoft’s recommendations and any other application virtualization solution that might have once been considered an alternative.

Until UniBrows is released, it’s hard to offer any firm recommendations, but if the final product lives up to the promise of the beta, then consider this a problem solved.