ie6 download failing

[Reece Dunn]

On 23 September 2010 23:01, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
> Looks like Microsoft has been letting the ie6 download servers rot.
> Over the last few weeks, 'winetricks ie6' has been hanging occasionally,
> and today, it's failing right off the bat with
>
> wget http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6sp1/download/rtw/x86/ie6sites.dat
> ...
> Resolving www.microsoft.com... 65.55.12.249
> Connecting to www.microsoft.com|65.55.12.249|:80... connected.
> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 500 Internal Server Error
>
> Personally, I think it's great that ie6 is getting the shaft, but it does make
> life with wine a bit more difficult.  I hope this error is transient.

If this is a permanent thing it is both good and bad news.

Good news in that it is a step closer to a better, safer web
experience (although people will still be able to get IE6 on the
default XP and 2003 installs, but then again probably not with the
latest service packs applied). I can understand why Microsoft would
want to do this.

Bad news in that IE6 is the version of IE that works the best with
Wine and is critical (at the moment) for applications that use the
WebBrowser component to render content.

In particular, the Big Fish Games client uses a web interface and uses
the WebBrowser control to render that content. With the Wine
implementation it displays nothing (just a white area with a scroll
bar); with IE7 it displays something similar and a lot of script
errors and with IE6 it works. I have an installed version of this, so
for this application I am ok, but for others that are freshly
installing it they are going to have problems, which only tend to
revolve around the client and not the games themselves.

The most flaky part of Wine I have seen so far is the
shdocvw/mshtml/jscript/WebBrowserControl/IE support. This is not
because wine is bad, it is just that there are chunks of functionality
in that area that Wine has not implemented/fully implemented and
applications are relying on that behaviour. I have also seen the
behaviour of these applications completely change due to the slightest
change in these areas (even though those changes may be correct).

So, there are 2 ways to resolve this:
  1/  get the Wine+Gecko implementation of the various APIs to the
point where they can run more of the applications using the WebControl
hosting (which I can imagine is a significant chunk of work); or
  2/  resolve the issues with installing IE7 (and likely IE8) so that
it works with WebControl hosting applications.

Longer term I can see Microsoft dropping IE7. They will also drop IE8,
but that won't be for a while yet (at least until they finally stop
XP).

Then there is IE9 which is in beta at the moment, but does not install
on Wine at the moment: it needs several Vista and later DLLs and will
need better DX10/11 support as well as Direct2D and DirectWrite
support.

Interestingly, since Mozilla support the Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs
their browser can be a test platform for the implementation and having
an understanding of how the bits and pieces fit together.

- Reece