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Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

microsoft.com

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Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#31

Post by kristopolous »

debaserab2 wrote: post #25
isomorphic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome... I understand the sentiment, but to be clear: Ideally we do not want any one vendor with a majority browser share. Otherwise someone will get complacent and we'll have a repeat of the dark times (IE6). Having multiple browser vendors is good for the web.

Yeah... but I kinda wouldn't mind if they were all using the same open source rendering engine under the hood.

As a counter, you can pervert the dual sourcing argument here and come up with something similar.

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#32

Post by thanksgiving »

hartror wrote: post #28

We still have customers with IE6. Risk adverse institutions like airports really don't want to upgrade things.

I'd say they are not very risk averse if they are still using IE6. In fact, I'd say they are living on the edge. I hope the CTO has a really nice golden parachute because they will need it when (and not if) the proverbial poop hits the proverbial fan.

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#33

Post by orblivion »

hartror wrote: post #28

We still have customers with IE6. Risk adverse institutions like airports really don't want to upgrade things.

Maybe there should be a much more stripped down thing like the web with a much smaller attack surface or need for new features, so updates will only be occasional security updates.

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#35

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

debaserab2 wrote: post #25
isomorphic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome... I understand the sentiment, but to be clear: Ideally we do not want any one vendor with a majority browser share. Otherwise someone will get complacent and we'll have a repeat of the dark times (IE6). Having multiple browser vendors is good for the web.

Yeah... but I kinda wouldn't mind if they were all using the same open source rendering engine under the hood.

... But that's exactly what they're saying we DON'T want. A lot of browsers re-used IE 6's rendering engine because it had a monopoly. That only made the situation worse.

A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters, and if anyone has a monopoly that is "bad" because competition helps innovation.

Each rendering engine winds up, for good and bad, with a small group of people deciding what features do and do not get put in. If they simply decide that feature Y doesn't get put in, and that rendering engine has a monopoly then feature Y is a non-entity as far as the web is concerned.

For example, if Google controlled the web's primary rendering engine do you think Do Not Track would be in it? NO! It took all of their major competition to add it before they did, starting with IE.

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#36

Post by thanksgiving »

pilif wrote: post #22

Of course this doesn't change anything for the 70% of our users who are still on XP and Vista. At best we get IE9, at worst IE8

You should start nudging people to use alternative browsers. I'd suggest Mozilla Firefox. You do not need administrative privileges to use Mozilla Firefox and with the extended support releases, there is no reason why anything other than legacy internal services (running on internal network) should use Internet Explorer at all.

Assuming your application does not need IE specific features, what are some reasons that prevent you from nudging users this direction?

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#37

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #26

This is good news for those who aren't using older versions of Windows (older than Windows 7). For everyone else (which is still a lot of people), this is very bad news.

Actually it is not a lot.

Windows XP already lost support for their latest release of IE years ago, so this doesn't impact them.

This may impact Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 but both are out of mainstream support, and Vista's numbers are extremely low overall. Supposedly 1.74-1.77%.

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#38

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

hartror wrote: post #28

We still have customers with IE6. Risk adverse institutions like airports really don't want to upgrade things.

In China?

If you look at the numbers and include China they're quite bleak. If you exclude China it doesn't seem quite so bad.

But China has a massive Windows XP piracy problem that isn't going away.

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#39

Post by paulirish »

tempestn wrote: post #29

Wow, I'm all for EOL'ing old versions of IE, but I'm surprised at the complete lack of notice (on a corporate scale). Was this known to be in the works for a while? My thinking is just that most larger companies will have zero chance of hitting a January deadline, and once the deadline passes, there's really no urgency to upgrade by any particular time. I would think a ~12 month deadline might be more effective in ge…

This was announced in August 2014: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-dat...

Re: Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

#40

Post by sengork »

Some of the lower tier (but very common) LAN network hardware requires old versions of IE to function during firmware upgrades and configuration changes with no CLI equivalent options.

In most cases the hardware vendors never address the browser compatibility issue (due to focus on new products) and only provide a warning sign upon login. Likewise the hardware isn't easy to replace in some environments.

This use case is completely absent from the web browsing traffic usage patterns on the internet which predominate in browser usage statistics.

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