It was a "build VM" running the client edition of Windows. Do you install Ubuntu Desktop on your build VMs and expect Firefox not to be bundled?

IE was superceded by Edge a long time ago. I'm not arguing for a different choice of browser, I'm arguing for them not to ship deprecated browsers.

TBF it costs licensing money, like twice as much. Yes, I know, it could be chalked up as cost of doing business, I’m just saying it’s a different question than just choosing between free linux distros for a VM.

Agreed, I'm not saying that everyone needs to be using Windows Server for every build task, I'm just saying that it's silly to complain about Windows client being engineered for clients by default. If you're knowingly going to take that cost-cutting measure then you ought to accept that the default config will have to be tuned for your use case.

A lot of enterprise software from Oracle still requires Java 6 and a J2SE plug-in, which only run in IE for whatever reason.

> which only run in IE for whatever reason.

Java Applets (and Flash) were built on the NPAPI APIs (as "plug-ins"). Historically NPAPI was supported by every major browser.

NPAPI/Plug-ins are insecure/cannot be sandboxed. After Flash died, browsers quickly dropped NPAPI support (namely Opera 2016, Chrome in 2015, Firefox in 2017, Safari in 2018, etc) and Edge never supported it.

Internet Explorer is the only browser with a large install-base that still supports native plugins and by extension Java Applet. It is essentially Microsoft's "compatibility" browser, a safe haven for the last remaining ActiveX/NPAPI Plug-ins/Flash/Java Applets/etc.

Extensions by contrast are much more secure, as they run completely in a browser's context and can be isolated/sandbox/have permissions, but aren't suitable for running a full speed virtual machine (although Web Assembly could change that) like Java or Flash.

> Internet Explorer is the only browser with a large install-base that still supports NPAPI and by extension Java Applet.

I though plugins on Internet Explorer used ActiveX, not NPAPI. Wikipedia agrees with me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI): "Internet Explorer versions 3 through 5.5 SP2 supported NPAPI [...] Support came via a small ActiveX control (named "plugin.ocx") that acted as a shim [...] Microsoft dropped support in version 5.5 SP2 onwards for security reasons."

Changed one word to resolve.