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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

#71

Post by _ak »

isomorphic wrote: post #17
douche wrote: post #14

Thank goodness. IE 11 has enough warts and weirdness; having to deal with all the brokenness in IE 8 was driving my front-end colleagues to alcoholism... I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome...

> 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.

While diversity is certainly good, the major difference here is that Google has an intrisic reason to constantly improve and innovate in Chrome, while Microsoft back then clearly didn't: the whole IE development was driven by trying to get rid of the competition (in particular Netscape), and when that was done, development stopped for a long time.

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

#72

Post by kbenson »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #42

Apologies for the rant, but this is the second article today that I've seen about a company discontinuing support for outdated software. (The other being a gnu rant about Windows not supporting XP.) And there was a third a couple days ago about an open source community announcing pending EOL of an old version. What bugs me is so many negative comments along the lines of "What about all those poor helpless trillion do…

> 3rd Party Agency Manager: "We'll order new laptops for them and have them delivered, just tell us how many and where to send them. It will be much cheaper for you and save us all a lot of time."

This person was a genius, or was bitten by this far too many times.

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

#73

Post by zenir »

jsmeaton wrote: post #57
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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…

> A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters Active X would like to disagree with you. We're currently dealing with a massive (revenue/company) product that only runs under IE still uses Active X. I don't think a common rendering engine is at all a bad thing. Maybe two to keep them honest. But blink + webkit + trident (?) + Gecko (?) seem like wasted engineering talent.

South Korea has(or had, they may have changed it in the last few months) a law that enforces the usage of ActiveX for everything which needs security (e. g. online banking, online shopping)

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

#74

Post by flomo »

Flenser wrote: post #15
douche wrote: post #14

Thank goodness. IE 11 has enough warts and weirdness; having to deal with all the brokenness in IE 8 was driving my front-end colleagues to alcoholism... I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome...

IE11 has an IE7 compatibility mode so line-of-business apps are going to be targeting IE7 for a long time to come. One of my employer's clients is only now willing to pay to upgrade from IE5.5 rendering on IE8 to IE7 on 11.

I was involved in a similar discussion and the logic was hilarious. "Browser standards change too often." (!?) "So we're only to support an old buggy implementation of the specs that is sorta emulated in one modern browser." They sounded like they were afraid of having their security blanket ripped away.

If you still have some IE5 stuff, my guess is that you have to bring it up to the HTML5 table layout zone. And then you need to back polyfill a bunch of stuff to deal with the "IE7 mode" requirement.

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

#75

Post by namikaze »

isomorphic wrote: post #17
douche wrote: post #14

Thank goodness. IE 11 has enough warts and weirdness; having to deal with all the brokenness in IE 8 was driving my front-end colleagues to alcoholism... I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome...

> 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.

In this case Apple does not agree. They force everybody to use their rendering engine on iOS. To be clear, I do not condone this practice.

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

#76

Post by zitterbewegung »

iwwr wrote: post #67
derefr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they are happy that they will get more from their Support partners

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

#77

Post by yuhong »

jsmeaton wrote: post #57
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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…

> A browser's rendering engine is the ONLY part that matters Active X would like to disagree with you. We're currently dealing with a massive (revenue/company) product that only runs under IE still uses Active X. I don't think a common rendering engine is at all a bad thing. Maybe two to keep them honest. But blink + webkit + trident (?) + Gecko (?) seem like wasted engineering talent.

Blink and WebKit don't have much overlap.

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

#78

Post by gulpahum »

hartror wrote: post #28

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

I believe those are closed systems not connected to the internet. It still would be better to upgrade them (for easier access to spare parts, knowledge, etc).

Otherwise they end up like this French airport which was shut down just few weeks ago because their Windows 3.1 failed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559687

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

#79

Post by fpgeek »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #42

Apologies for the rant, but this is the second article today that I've seen about a company discontinuing support for outdated software. (The other being a gnu rant about Windows not supporting XP.) And there was a third a couple days ago about an open source community announcing pending EOL of an old version. What bugs me is so many negative comments along the lines of "What about all those poor helpless trillion do…

Why do I feel like the next line probably is:

Client: "Oh, no. We can't do that. That would violate policies ABC, XYZ and 123. Team FOO would never sign off and ...".

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