Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016 • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by debaserab2 » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:12 AM UTC

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #35

debaserab2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What popular browser vendors used the IE6 rendering engine besides IE6? I have many memories of dealing with various Firefox/Chrome differences, but I never once dealt with a popular browser vendor outside of IE that used the IE6 rendering engine.

I don't necessarily agree with your assertion that a browser's rendering engine is the only part that matters. Internet explorer ships with windows by default. Mozilla (firefox) has policies that focus on privacy. Chrome focuses on speed, and, well, serving Google.

These are all things that differentiate the products in the market and aren't necessarily rendering engine related. Yes - if one entity maintained absolute control of the rendering engine, then the needs of each vendor would not be served - but then it wouldn't be open source, either.

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

#62

Post by i386081 » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:15 AM UTC

sengork wrote: post #40

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…

That reminds me of the webinterface of my old router. If you looked at the badly written javascript source, you would see why it refused to work on anything other than internet explorer. They were even explicitly checking for it in the useragent!

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

#63

Post by ZeroGravitas » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:26 AM UTC

dudus wrote: post #19

melling wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem to have much market share: https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... IE8 still has over 10%

Acording to this other source it's only 2%. These estimates are so different it's hard to trust on any of it. http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially... Browser trend will probably be more influenced by region and public. If your public is stay home dads in China you should definitvely be looking into iE8, if your public is tech workers in the Bay Area you shouldn't even care about iE11.

There's a difference in methodology that explains some of the divergence:

Netmarketshare counts each user only once per day (per site?). If you assume users if Chrome/Firefox etc are more active on the web than IE8 users then it fits.

Which number is more important when deciding what to support on your site is a complicated question. Probably your own user demographic has a greater impact though.

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

#64

Post by pilif » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:30 AM UTC

thanksgiving wrote: post #36

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 p…

>what are some reasons that prevent you from nudging users this direction

our customers want to sell to these IE8 users. The response to telling them to upgrade is "we'll use a different vendor then - one which does support IE8"

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

#65

Post by mtgx » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:31 AM UTC

taspeotis wrote: post #10

stephenr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh I blame Microsoft's confusing description: > What is end of support? Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical supports and security updates. Internet Explorer 11 is the last version of Internet Explorer, and will continue to receive security updates, compatibility fixes, and technical support on Windows 7, Win…

Vista left mainstream support three years ago [1]. [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/lifecycle

Mainstream supports means no more features, but it's still getting patches, I imagine.

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

#66

Post by noja » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:32 AM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #53

watson wrote: post #46

Am I the only one who finds all the happy faces Microsoft have injected into the page a bit weird? It feels like they are trying to sell me some bad news but make me feel happy at the same time. Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off

Manipulation (aka advertising/PR/marketing) techniques 101. Showing pictures of happy faces makes the audience (not you in particular, but the average reader) have more positive feelings about the announcement. There's no other plausible reason for using a row of random smiley faces as a page separator in an announcement like this.

It makes me distance myself from the brand and distrust it.

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

#67

Post by iwwr » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:42 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #47

watson wrote: post #46

Am I the only one who finds all the happy faces Microsoft have injected into the page a bit weird? It feels like they are trying to sell me some bad news but make me feel happy at the same time. Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off

Hey, they're probably happy as heck to be free of the enterprise support burden.

Not so fast, it just means enterprise support prices have gone up for those organisations resisting change and still requiring security. For example, the entire country of South Korea.

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

#68

Post by cpeterso » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:47 AM UTC

thanksgiving wrote: post #36

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 p…

Firefox still supports Windows XP Service Pack 2. Mozilla has no immediate plans to retire XP SP2 support. In fact, Mozilla is adapting the mozilla.org website's SSL/TLS support so IE users on XP can still access the Firefox download page. :)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works...

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

#69

Post by kbenson » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:50 AM UTC

lucaspiller wrote: post #56

kbenson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases we are talking about organizations using software that requires not just an obsolete internet explorer version, but an ancient one. There have been many years to assess and fix this problem, and just because companies stuck their heads in the sand and expected it would always be someone else's problem. I have little pity for the companies, but I feel deeply for the IT employees that will have to deal wi…

> Buying or developing technologies that rely on weird proprietary quirks of free versions of software isn't very sane. There's not even a business model in place you can rely on to continue to want to support you since it's free. It's all very well saying this now, but I wouldn't be surprised if at the time these technologies were seen as JavaScript is now. I remember Adobe Air was when it came out...

Javascript has a standard (or more accurately, current javascript is the implementation of a version of the standard). It's a much safer bet that either there will be backwards compatible implementations later or that you will have other options. To my knowlesde, IE's feature set was always "what's supported by the current release".

It's sort of like having a codebase which you can't change which makes use of a bunch of weird proprietary C extensions from some old compiler, and the compiler itself not only has the capability to introduce bugs and security flaws, but has a track-record of doing so. You know it's a ticking time bomb now, and you should have seen it in the beginning (although so many didn't :/ )

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

#70

Post by TheLogothete » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:51 AM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #53

watson wrote: post #46

Am I the only one who finds all the happy faces Microsoft have injected into the page a bit weird? It feels like they are trying to sell me some bad news but make me feel happy at the same time. Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off

Manipulation (aka advertising/PR/marketing) techniques 101. Showing pictures of happy faces makes the audience (not you in particular, but the average reader) have more positive feelings about the announcement. There's no other plausible reason for using a row of random smiley faces as a page separator in an announcement like this.

Advertising/PR and marketing are not the same thing.