Gopher

[Wazoo]

Yeah, I know .. who uses it? .... Imagine my surprise at this bit of 'forced' IE7 usage, trying to fire it up, not able to get anywhere, then finally find this little note ...

In Internet Explorer 7, Gopher support was removed on the WinINET level

Man, for as bloated as this Microsoft stuff is, that had to save tons of code, huh? All that text-based crop ...

Anyway, not of much import, it just that I don't remember tis being reported anywhere .... FireFox still 'remembers' how to use it ....

[Farelf]

... I don't remember tis being reported anywhere .... FireFox still 'remembers' how to use it ....

Nor I - but Google brings up quite a bit of commentary. The Wikipedia entry Gopher (protocol) seems to thoroughly cover the topic, note the section Gopher support in Web browsers which includes

Gopher support was disabled in Internet Explorer versions 5.* and 6 for Windows in June 2002 by a patch meant to fix a security vulnerability in the browser's Gopher protocol handler; however, it can be re-enabled by editing the Windows registry.⁹ In Internet Explorer 7, Gopher support was removed on the WinINET level.¹⁰ Internet Explorer for Mac (only on PowerPC architecture and in End-of-life) still supports Gopher.

...

⁹Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-047. Microsoft (2003-02-28). Retrieved on 2007-03-23.

¹⁰Release Notes for Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft (2006). Retrieved on 2007-03-23.

... and more.

Hmm... fixing a security vulnerability by disabling the service. Yep, that'll work every time. I suppose we can look forward to more of the same. Backward compatability for Word in Office 2003 from the current release would seem to be a similar "solution" (apparently).