A great idea but it exposes a lot of rough edges in Azure:
1. The Microsoft Remote Desktop Mac app is a UI trainwreck – not just wasted space and odd keyboard shortcuts but things like the Azure login process disabling password managers and the one-time auth code via SMS service never arriving.
2. Azure's federated Live.com logins are broken, cycling between the login page and the console hitting you with a “You have logged out elsewhere”
3. In US East, US West, Southeast Asia and East Asia, connections hang (20+ minutes) at “Please wait for the User Profile Service”
I'm really looking forward to trying this service when Azure is more stable and, hopefully, they add older versions of IE.
Hi acdha,
1. You can go to http://feedback.azure.com/forums/247748-azure-remoteapp and share your feedback with the Remote App team. They really want to make it as useful as possible and it is still on Preview so now is the moment to influence the team
3. Yes, we are working on it and should be fixed soon.
Regarding the older versions of IE, unfortunately we are running on top of Server 2012 so we are locked to IE11+. At this moment you can use the dev tools and change the compat mode and we are thinking about adding Enterprise Mode to the service so you can test on "IE8".
>The Microsoft Remote Desktop Mac app is a UI trainwreck
agreed. That's why I'm always using CoRD (http://cord.sourceforge.net) for any kind of RDP use on the mac (I don't know whether it would work with this remote IE thing, but for sysadmining here and then, CoRD > Remote Desktop any day)
Azure VM instances that run in a VPN have major network issues that are caused by the MS infrastructure.
Depending on the latency you won't get the 'feel' for many websites, important nowadays with CSS transitions and WebGL.
MSIE is circling the train in terms of marketshare. The VMs MS provided for testing were a godsend, but forcing devs to give up their work flow would likely result in them just dropping MSIE support.
This sounds a lot like the issues I had a little over a year ago. Most of the issues didn't seem to be related to Azure itself, but instead to the logging in and account management experience. It's a shame, login should be a solved issue at this point, but very few people get it right.
I don't want yet another email address to use a service, Flickr having required a Yahoo.com email address is a prime example, as is Azure.
I'm not sure I'm getting the feel for this at all. It's almost as if it's targeted at reducing friction for people to test with internet explorer, but you need a Microsoft account to use it, you are limited to VNC speeds, and you need to expose a webserver to the internet with your test service on it. There's not many situations I can think of that this would be useful, especially if it's something finicky like scrolling performance that needs debugging.
On the other hand, Microsoft offers a bunch of freely downloadable virtual machines with every version of Internet Explorer you could care to test in[1]. Why would anybody in the world want to use this particular product for testing over the alternative?
Because the alternative (the downloadable VMs) is a gigantic, unbelievable pain in the ass.
1) You have to download a complete system image of a machine running the specific versions of Windows and IE you're interested in testing against. Each of these images can require downloading up to 4 DVDs worth of data just to get it bootstrapped, which can take forever even on a fast pipe.
2) Want to test against a different version of Windows, or IE, or both? Now you get to download 4 more DVDs, all over again! (Yep, if you started testing, say, IE9 on Windows 7, and now you want to test against IE10, you have to download a whole new virtual machine from scratch.)
3) For reasons known only to Microsoft, they don't distribute the VM images as unified packages; instead, they're a bunch of DVD-size RAR files that have to be assembled into a complete VM image after downloading. One of those RARs get corrupted en route? Back to downloading!
4) RAR files? In 2014? For serious? Yes, RAR files, for serious.
5) Now you've made it through the epic download, assembled your VM image, and are ready to get started. Hey, guess what! Microsoft is so paranoid about the chance that you're an Evil Pirate™ rather than a legitimate developer that they put a special surprise in the VM, just for you: when it reaches the end of the calendar quarter, the VM self-destructs. Yes, you read that right -- after all that, this VM that you marched through Hell to put together becomes useless after three months at most. So at that point, you get to do all the stuff listed above again.
(Yes, I know there are hacks you can make in the registry to extend this time for an extra quarter or two. It's still insulting.)
The whole process is such a pain that people have written tools like ievms (https://github.com/xdissent/ievms) just to automate the endless, tedious downloading-unpacking-installing-self-destructing-downloading-etc. cycle. And vendors like BrowserStack (http://www.browserstack.com/) make good money charging people to do the same thing they could conceivably do with the VMs, just because using the VMs hurts so much people will happily pay to avoid it.
And the kicker: all of this nonsense, of course, is only necessary because you can't install two versions of IE side-by-side. And the only reason you can't install two versions of IE side-by-side is because Microsoft, back when it was Pure Evil, decided to make it that way to force people to upgrade Windows when they wanted to upgrade IE.
Microsoft management are considerably more enlightened these days than they were back then. But this huge, ugly, painful, completely unnecessary wart on the Windows development experience that they forced upon the world back then still persists, either because someone in Redmond thinks it's a good idea, or just out of sheer laziness.
I usually just use an Amazon EC2 instance for Windows browser testing. I've got an essentially bare Win machine image (just the common browsers). I fire it up and then use Remote Desktop to connect to it. Works pretty well (other than, as you say, being limited to Remote Desktop/VNC-like speeds).
Well, it saves time compared to having to download the VMs and keep them up to date. Nevertheless I'll keep downloading the VMs and do without a MS account and let them in into my exposed server. If the VMs call home I can disable their networking in VirtualBox.
It's interesting to see how well they've managed to lock this down. You're able to view a list of usernames with access to the machine (or domain?) that your account is on. http://imgur.com/t1IP02T
All I see is "IE Technical Preview" and when I try to connect "Please wait for user profile service" Anyone else getting that?
This highlights why I prefer to just have these as local virtual machines. When I'm working on a project and I need to do an IE pass, I don't want to rely on this server being available. Even things like BrowserStack, which are definitely nice, have been super laggy right when I happen to need them. Not to mention that you can't really gauge performance over a connection like this.
I do like the Modern IE iso's they are providing now though. Paired with Parallels, it's one click to download and initialize a new Windows/IE combo, and it lasts for (30?) days
This seems to work really well (for me at least) and I like the idea. However, for actually testing the product we're building it's currently not usable, since they've disabled cookies completely. Our product requires a login, so I guess we'll have to stick with the VMs for now.
1) Clicked the link and downloaded/installed the app from the Mac App Store.
2) signed in with my work Microsoft account.
3) No Internet Explorer listed under remote apps.
4) Signed out and tried to sign in with my personal Microsoft account.
5) Mistyped the absurdly difficult Captcha 5 times and decided to stop wasting time trying to play with this.
EDIT: Just now received an email inviting me to try remoteIE with my work MS account. I just need to log back in and refresh to see invitations.
EDIT2: Tried logging back in and hitting refresh and it's still not there. I forgot to mention that it prompts me with a message that remoteapp is not available and that I may sign up for a free trial. If you decline the free trial you are immediately logged out! Still no IE.
Give it a try again. We've done some changes on the server side so you should see IE and log into IE much faster. Just make sure to use the same email as the one you received the notification.
It's sad to see that they have resort to such methods to keep their browser alive. Developers are beginning to skip IE testing because of this inconvenience.
I wish Microsoft would finally untie their Browser from the OS and provide standalone packages.
Agreed. My first thought when I saw this is that I hope people don't use it. I know that many people developing sites for a living can't afford to ignore IE, but I really think that IE incompatibility is MS's problem that they've foisted on everyone else. I wish more people would design sites to standards and when they get complaints about "bad design", kindly point IE users to MS tech support.
But that will never happen. The sad fact is that you have to cater to your audience, and almost all people will just click back and look for another site if your site doesn't render perfectly in their browser of choice (or in the case of IE, the only browser they've ever known, even though they didn't choose it). So much time and effort wasted due to MS's anti-competive practices and incompetence.
I can't help noticing the RemoteIE VM uses a later build of Threshold Server than is publicly available (public build is 9841.fbl_release, this uses 9860.winmain).
I guess there's no chance MS will release the ISO of said build though, especially because this build includes the usual private-build watermarks first introduced in Windows 8.
Not being able to access localhost makes this much less useful than it could be. Does anyone know of any good tools to temporarily tunnel localhost onto a public URL?
Browser Stack isn't usable in Europe, at least, due to latency. As in 'type characters and wait for them to appear on screen' or 'Eclipse' slow. modern.ie originally used it, I hope moving to their own system speeds up responsiveness.
[+] [-] acdha|11 years ago|reply
1. The Microsoft Remote Desktop Mac app is a UI trainwreck – not just wasted space and odd keyboard shortcuts but things like the Azure login process disabling password managers and the one-time auth code via SMS service never arriving.
2. Azure's federated Live.com logins are broken, cycling between the login page and the console hitting you with a “You have logged out elsewhere”
3. In US East, US West, Southeast Asia and East Asia, connections hang (20+ minutes) at “Please wait for the User Profile Service”
I'm really looking forward to trying this service when Azure is more stable and, hopefully, they add older versions of IE.
[+] [-] molant|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilif|11 years ago|reply
agreed. That's why I'm always using CoRD (http://cord.sourceforge.net) for any kind of RDP use on the mac (I don't know whether it would work with this remote IE thing, but for sysadmining here and then, CoRD > Remote Desktop any day)
[+] [-] pippy|11 years ago|reply
Azure VM instances that run in a VPN have major network issues that are caused by the MS infrastructure.
Depending on the latency you won't get the 'feel' for many websites, important nowadays with CSS transitions and WebGL.
MSIE is circling the train in terms of marketshare. The VMs MS provided for testing were a godsend, but forcing devs to give up their work flow would likely result in them just dropping MSIE support.
[+] [-] jerrysievert|11 years ago|reply
I don't want yet another email address to use a service, Flickr having required a Yahoo.com email address is a prime example, as is Azure.
[+] [-] 13|11 years ago|reply
On the other hand, Microsoft offers a bunch of freely downloadable virtual machines with every version of Internet Explorer you could care to test in[1]. Why would anybody in the world want to use this particular product for testing over the alternative?
[1]: https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads
[+] [-] smacktoward|11 years ago|reply
1) You have to download a complete system image of a machine running the specific versions of Windows and IE you're interested in testing against. Each of these images can require downloading up to 4 DVDs worth of data just to get it bootstrapped, which can take forever even on a fast pipe.
2) Want to test against a different version of Windows, or IE, or both? Now you get to download 4 more DVDs, all over again! (Yep, if you started testing, say, IE9 on Windows 7, and now you want to test against IE10, you have to download a whole new virtual machine from scratch.)
3) For reasons known only to Microsoft, they don't distribute the VM images as unified packages; instead, they're a bunch of DVD-size RAR files that have to be assembled into a complete VM image after downloading. One of those RARs get corrupted en route? Back to downloading!
4) RAR files? In 2014? For serious? Yes, RAR files, for serious.
5) Now you've made it through the epic download, assembled your VM image, and are ready to get started. Hey, guess what! Microsoft is so paranoid about the chance that you're an Evil Pirate™ rather than a legitimate developer that they put a special surprise in the VM, just for you: when it reaches the end of the calendar quarter, the VM self-destructs. Yes, you read that right -- after all that, this VM that you marched through Hell to put together becomes useless after three months at most. So at that point, you get to do all the stuff listed above again.
(Yes, I know there are hacks you can make in the registry to extend this time for an extra quarter or two. It's still insulting.)
The whole process is such a pain that people have written tools like ievms (https://github.com/xdissent/ievms) just to automate the endless, tedious downloading-unpacking-installing-self-destructing-downloading-etc. cycle. And vendors like BrowserStack (http://www.browserstack.com/) make good money charging people to do the same thing they could conceivably do with the VMs, just because using the VMs hurts so much people will happily pay to avoid it.
And the kicker: all of this nonsense, of course, is only necessary because you can't install two versions of IE side-by-side. And the only reason you can't install two versions of IE side-by-side is because Microsoft, back when it was Pure Evil, decided to make it that way to force people to upgrade Windows when they wanted to upgrade IE.
Microsoft management are considerably more enlightened these days than they were back then. But this huge, ugly, painful, completely unnecessary wart on the Windows development experience that they forced upon the world back then still persists, either because someone in Redmond thinks it's a good idea, or just out of sheer laziness.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quonn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankchn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] guyht|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredmcateer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JosephRedfern|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuck9|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willtheperson|11 years ago|reply
This highlights why I prefer to just have these as local virtual machines. When I'm working on a project and I need to do an IE pass, I don't want to rely on this server being available. Even things like BrowserStack, which are definitely nice, have been super laggy right when I happen to need them. Not to mention that you can't really gauge performance over a connection like this.
I do like the Modern IE iso's they are providing now though. Paired with Parallels, it's one click to download and initialize a new Windows/IE combo, and it lasts for (30?) days
[+] [-] JosephRedfern|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimlottc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecaron|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eddieroger|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hesselink|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molant|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|11 years ago|reply
2) signed in with my work Microsoft account.
3) No Internet Explorer listed under remote apps.
4) Signed out and tried to sign in with my personal Microsoft account.
5) Mistyped the absurdly difficult Captcha 5 times and decided to stop wasting time trying to play with this.
EDIT: Just now received an email inviting me to try remoteIE with my work MS account. I just need to log back in and refresh to see invitations.
EDIT2: Tried logging back in and hitting refresh and it's still not there. I forgot to mention that it prompts me with a message that remoteapp is not available and that I may sign up for a free trial. If you decline the free trial you are immediately logged out! Still no IE.
[+] [-] molant|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverwind|11 years ago|reply
I wish Microsoft would finally untie their Browser from the OS and provide standalone packages.
[+] [-] npsimons|11 years ago|reply
But that will never happen. The sad fact is that you have to cater to your audience, and almost all people will just click back and look for another site if your site doesn't render perfectly in their browser of choice (or in the case of IE, the only browser they've ever known, even though they didn't choose it). So much time and effort wasted due to MS's anti-competive practices and incompetence.
[+] [-] nailer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slipstream-|11 years ago|reply
I guess there's no chance MS will release the ISO of said build though, especially because this build includes the usual private-build watermarks first introduced in Windows 8.
[+] [-] yuhong|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Joeri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arathunku|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacefight|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lectrick|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donkeyd|11 years ago|reply