IE6 Retiring

After 8 long years the browser that everybody loves to hate is being automatically retired by Microsoft. Although there is a way to avoid the upgrade if your business has the problems later in this post.

To be fair to it, IE6 helped make the web what it is today. Its quirks mode rendering enabled anybody to code a web page with little regard to well-formed HTML or standards. This caused many a developer to hate it because it renders things differently to other browsers and often caused a lot of extra work because it takes so long to get it working in both.

Most of the anger directed at IE6 has to do with the differences with the W3 Consortium’s standards. However, when it was released these standards were not concrete and it was unclear if they would even be adopted ubiquitously.

Many companies have ignored Firefox and stuck with IE6 because of the huge costs involved in deploying and testing all their internal applications on their networks.

RSinteract is Internet Explorer only and will continue to support IE6 and IE7 for the foreseeable future because of this very reason. The web is changing and more and more people are becoming aware of other browsers such as Google Chrome. Perhaps in future we will move towards cross browser support but for now we are very much tied to Internet Explorer.

Unable to load client print control

UPDATE: Further information on alternative fixes has come to my attention via StackOverflow.

This new error has popped up since Microsoft released the update KB956391.

The update is for a vulnerability in the GDI+ DLL which allowed a malicious user to execute code on the client machine (good old! – ed). The fix uses ActiveX Killbits which is a setting that Internet Explorer checks for each ActiveX control. If the Killbits are set, IE refuses to load the control.

The update set the Killbits for the version of the RS Client Print ActiveX control which is used by the version 8.0.0.0 of the ReportViewer which is referenced by RSinteract (and Report Manager). Thus the printing will not work in either.

To fix Report Manager you need to apply the ReportViewer SP1 patch and the Security Update for SQL Server SP2 (KB954606). Once this is working again you can fix RSinteract.

To fix RSinteract you need to apply another Security Update for SQL Server SP2 (KB954607).

Let us know if this fix doesn’t work for you.