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This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

thenextweb.com

41–50 of 177 posts

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#41

Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.

If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.

If they are corporate users, I would be about now announcing that as Micirosft are EOL'img these IE versions only IE 11 and upwards will be supported. I'd probably give a grace period of 3 months officially, and depending on which can clients are affected I'd possibly give them 4-5 months to upgrade.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#42

Very funny, End of Life for a popular product just means more trouble for 3rd-party-devs since they need to continue supporting the product as long as a significant chunk of their users don't feel like upgrading, but with support for the required SDKs cut off. Case in point: WindowsXP's End of Life was 2 years ago, but between 25% and 35% of (mostly casual) gamers still run it worldwide (this is heavily skewed by XP…

I am in this situation. A good chunk of my users are stuck on xp so I am stuck on supporting xp too. There is no way around this for me as the reason my users are stuck on xp is because of hardware. Arg!

They can still install Firefox.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#43
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they could do that now, but that doesn't help the IE 6, 7, 8 problems, does that?

Yes it does. They could ship a statically-linked copy of Edge to Windows Vista (and even XP) users via Windows Update. The old IE DLLs would have to stay there to be used by the system, but the actual web browser could be a newer one.

That's a terrible idea from a security standpoint.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in this situation. A good chunk of my users are stuck on xp so I am stuck on supporting xp too. There is no way around this for me as the reason my users are stuck on xp is because of hardware. Arg!

They can still install Firefox.

Firefox probably won't help with non-browser software, if that's what the parent comment was referring to. I also have to develop an app for a client for XP because of some proprietary hardware that still doesn't have a Windows 7/8/10 driver.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#45
post #40
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that, but no one is forcing them to program it that way. They could do the equivalent of static linking and include the necessary components in the browser instead of the OS. That's more or less what the Utilu IE Collection does I think.

It's the other way round: programs include the browser as a COM component. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752040%28VS.85%29... So on the older operating systems, programs that shipped with the OS will be embedding the browser as a COM component, usually for help purposes. If they're rendering local HTML (or generated HTML!) then they require that to keep working. So that particular interface has to be mai…

On the other hand, how do you embed a browser component in a forward-compatible way?

Use a consistent API and just upgrade the rendering engine, while maintaining quirks mode. It's not as much of a problem anymore because HTML5 specifies consistent parsing and rendering behavior for new and old documents.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#46
post #7
post #2

I feel like users in China will be more likely to install a "don't nag me about upgrading" counter-patch than actually upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer.

If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice. I work for a major European corporation and I am also stuck on XP. We don't exactly have the best in class IT dept (despite claims by a senior IT guy that we have more developpers than google and facebook together... we don't really have much to show for it).

we have more developpers than google and facebook together

That's probably why you can't get anything done (Mythical Man-Month passim)

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#47

Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.

If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.…

And then when your clients don't renew, your revenue is significantly affected, you have to lay off staff, you have a realization that this works in an ideal world, but we don't live in one.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in this situation. A good chunk of my users are stuck on xp so I am stuck on supporting xp too. There is no way around this for me as the reason my users are stuck on xp is because of hardware. Arg!

They can still install Firefox.

The problem is hardware. The amount of equipment out there running on XP with no ability to upgrade is a nightmare.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#49

Given that IE may be the only widely-used browser that restrains web developers from going completely gung-ho with the fancy new stuff and creating even more sites that are just plain user-hostile and annoying (e.g. see the rise of superfluous SPAs and/or massive amounts of JS required to load simple static content, replacing sites that worked fine without), I fear that this will make casual browsing a worse experien…

It's at least as much the case that devs load up their apps with tons of third-party junk CSS and JS to smooth over the differences between old, broken versions of IE and modern browsers. If we could count on people using reasonably modern browsers we could code to the standards and dispense with a lot of these clunky wrappers and workarounds.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can still install Firefox.

Firefox probably won't help with non-browser software, if that's what the parent comment was referring to. I also have to develop an app for a client for XP because of some proprietary hardware that still doesn't have a Windows 7/8/10 driver.

Yes this is my problem. The hardware manufacturer does not want to support upgrades (they want to sell new hardware) and so I am stuck supporting XP.

In my situation there is not even hardware the customer can upgrade to as the original hardware supplier has left the market. We are all stuck with XP until something catastrophic happens.

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