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Microsoft To Drop Support For Older Versions of Internet Explorer
An anonymous reader writes After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, 9, or 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support. From the blog post: "Microsoft recommends enabling automatic updates to ensure an up-to-date computing experience—including the latest version of Internet Explorer—and most consumers use automatic updates today. Commercial customers are encouraged to test and accept updates quickly, especially security updates. Regular updates provide significant benefits, such as decreased security risk and increased reliability, and Windows Update can automatically install updates for Internet Explorer and Windows."
Are they really suggesting that IE 11 will still be the most recent version in 17 months.... ?
since they have not been able to secure Internet Explorer at all for years when they did claim to maintain and have support for it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Firefox will have some competition for version numbering again!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I for one welcome this. I work in a company that up till a few months ago was still on IE8. They upgraded to IE10 instead of going directly to IE11 which is totally insane in my mind and the reasoning by the folks doing the deployment was to use stable and tested.
This same company still uses to this day a version of Java that is both old and recommended by Oracle to update immediately because it has critical vulnerabilities which is even more insane to me when you factor in that they work with so much customer data breaches and the potential for lawsuits just seems extremely high.
So it's your favorite browser?
Except you can't uninstall it. "Because Internet Explorer is a Windows feature, you can't uninstall it, but you can turn it off. Here's how:"
Gee, Thanks Microsoft!
Sounds like a great reason to not use Internet Explorer.
In the past 7 years I've only had to use it a relatively few times - For instance Illinois gubment can't be bothered to make their apps non IE friendly.
but hey, to each their own.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Up to this point, many companies have waited till 'we see if its broken or working' before they adopt the latest. Now they will be pressed to use the latest, and chance broken software (and dysfunctional business processes). I'm sure many of them are thrilled about that.
On one hand, most businesses are locked into using Windows, and on the other hand, Microsoft are phasing out everything every now and then in order to force you to pay them to upgrade. On top of that businesses usually have draconian versions of stuff that won't run without equally draconian versions of Windows/Office/IE. I wonder how do people get into that spiral
Microsoft supports Internet Explorer?! I wouldn't admit to it if I was them.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
IE is supported? When did this happen?
Last I heard, they reluctantly release updates when other parts of the OS beat them on bugs per kg of code. (They stopped measuring lines when someone googled the term.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is a reason why nobody should "automatically" update Windows. It's an identical reason toy why you shouldn't let Linux or MacOS X update automatically.
If the administrative account isn't used to confirm installing updates, then it will be compromised.
Here's one example:
After installing X product that shall remain nameless, suddenly Windows sees a need to push 20 updates or so. Ok whatevers. So those updates are installed, but now when I try to install Visual Studio and the SDK's they all fail. Now why is that? Maybe if I had installed Visual Studio and the SDK's first this wouldn't have happened. But nooo... Windows Update wants all the updates to be installed at that time. Some of the updates even fail, resulting in multiple reboots before they all install.
Linux is nearly as bad, if not worse. Because of huge obnoxious chains of dependency in response to OSS developers fond of reinventing the wheel to circumvent licenses they don't ideologically agree with, I have to put up with things like OpenSSL being replaced by LibreSSL, or MySQL being replaced with MariaDB for no damn reason.
MacOS X has the least obnoxious behavior, but the update window is much shorter. It does things right by confirming to install updates, but has to restart the OS for everything including iTunes, which shouldn't need an update if it's all user-space.
The problem with the Microsoft Platform, is that MSIE is "integrated" into Windows in a way that will always be more dangerous than simply using Firefox or Chrome.This goes back to Windows 98SE and MSIE 4. The entire monopoly problem. Had the law people not interfered we might have been looking at a world of websites that only work with ActiveX apps (believe me, certain CRM software did this even as late as 2004, and I'm talking about you Siebel)
Microsoft's screw up was integrating it. The only good that came out of that lawsuit was that Microsoft couldn't co-opt the XHTML or CSS standards with propietary extensions, and it likely drove off a lot more people from MSIE when other browsers ... oh wait I'm getting ahead of myself. There were no other browsers.
Netscape's last version was 4. Mozilla restarted from scratch, Opera was still a pay browser, and nobody else put anything else worth a damn. It took APPLE to take KHTML and make Webkit to create a third browser. Everyone thank Apple for that, because if they didn't, Google Chrome would not exist, and no smartphone would exist either.
should upgrade to an operating system.
IE 10 and IE 11 are significantly buggy and seem to have broken compatibility with older sites whereas FireFox and Chrome still work on those sites perfectly well. Of course Microsoft would say fix the site but when you are dealing with sites that provide services to your business stability is king, as a result we have managed to stop IE10/11 being deployed on any of the Win 7/Win XP machines in use. Microsoft dropping support for older browsers means we will stop using IE, we had already started installing Chrome for compatibility reasons, looks like its going to be chrome all the way. If Google and Mozilla can maintain a decent level of backwards compatibility why cannot Microsoft. Ties in with the decision to stick on Win 7 because Win 8/8.1 breaks some of our applications, there is no upgrade option on those applications, they were written eight years ago and they HAVE to keep working. Microsoft needs to realise the business community wants stability, they don't want shiny new UI's and whistles and bells.
Quite recent versions of IIS running .NET4 ASP NET don't recognise IE11 and mess up the controls when they sniff the browser. You have to change the User-Agent string for them to work properly.
This is MS shooting themselves in the foot. ASP NET should not do different things with different browsers period. Now unless some admin changes the IIS NET installation they won't work at all.
how MS ever got along before axing the dead wood. How did Steve Ballmer get the $ to offer to buy a NBA team before-the-axin-time? To whom was MS beholden then? Lean and mean? Or just mean?
...Firefox's recent desire to break the UI regularly with "improvements" that I don't want. IE is worth looking at (esp. since I just spent a few hours thinking I had a bug in my code, but it turned out IE, Chrome, Opera, et al handled it fine - FF didn't). At least MS is providing support for something other than the latest version from yesterday which included major UI changes. This is where FOSS fails in comparison to a company that is paid to support its users and understands that people want to get their task done and are relatively uninterested in worrying about if they are using yesterday's software or last week's software.
Seriously; I'd be happy if Microsoft stopped supporting newer versions of IE as well. It's not that IE is a terrible browser per se, it's that Microsoft's policy of only releasing new versions of IE for versions of Windows they still support means that many people out there are stuck using ancient IE versions. This means that web designers often still need to care for things like IE 8 on Windows XP (which, to make things even better, behaves unlike IE 8 on other Windows versions) because that's what some customers use to see if their shiny new website works.
No, those customers aren't going to replace their still-working XP boxes with brand-new computers running Windows 8.1 Upgrade 1 Patch 1 Service Pack 1, especially not to get a browser update. As long as those computers don't physically break down they're going to keep running Windows XP; after all, replacing a working tool is unneccessary cost and businesses don't like unneccessary costs. So IE 8 compatibility remains important, at least for those customers who still use it to look at their websites.
All of that would change if Microsoft wrote IE to support the same platforms Firefox and Chrome do. Firefox 31 runs on XP SP2, as does Chrome 36. So should IE 11. Then we could finally move on from the days of horrible IE-specific hacks and dozens of kilobytes of compatibility code and actually get some work done. As it is, the only recourse we have is to keep telling people to never run IE under any circumstance except to download a better browser; hopefully at some point we will have drilled "IE is always the wrong choice" into people's head hard enough that they will reflexively use a browser with a sane update policy and IE will be marginalized enough to be irrelevant.
Which would be sad; more competition in the browser market would be good. But not through an obsolescence factory like IE.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I suggest they stop supported version 11 also, that way a lot of problems in the internet will be solved.... Making a website will become much easier, less frustration and we could get payed a little better at the hour, not having to stay awake for nights getting it working on some version of MSIE...
Vista, and hence IE 9, will be in Extended Support until April 11, 2017. Although it doesn't have near the same market penetration as XP.
Also, can we assume by their explicitly listing IE 11 as the supported browser for most platforms after that date, that IE 12 won't be coming before 2016?
in the discussion about Skype being made to stop working with older versions of OS X and comparing it, Skype, to phone usage, when you can get Microsoft or Apple to have its software work for thirty or forty years like one can with a telephone, you let me know.
Microsoft can stop support all it wants but that doesn't mean people aren't gong to stop using these older versions. People, particularly corporations, will tell them they're sick of constantly being forced to "upgrade" when there is nothing wrong physically or security wise with the browser they have, and have every new iteration be worse than the last as far as functionality is concerned.
If you can't make security updates for a product which is more simple than the current version, you shouldn't be in the business of making software.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
There will be an post along the lines of "IE exploits triple" when this happens.
We are so far behind. Still using IE 8 because our systems were developed for even older versions of the browser.
Webmail means not having to install software if you're borrowing someone else's computer to access your mail. Webmail means being able to access mail on a machine to which a proper MUA hasn't been petted, such as a video game console or something similarly locked down that happens to have a web browser.
Ok, but MSIE 11 can't be installed on Windows Server 2012, only on Windows Server 2012 R2. Unlike the Windows 8.1, the R2 wasn't the free upgrade. So, if MSIE 10 won't be supported, can we still say that Microsoft is supporting the Windows Server 2012?
Sure, all we have to do is rewrite the internet to work with IE11 and we'll be fine. I propose Microsoft should start with Sharepoint, Project server, CRM Dynamics etc that currently don't work well with IE11...
Firefox 3.6 has better overall compatibility than IE11!
Seriously, try enabling Microsoft Update with IE 11 installed...
It just points you to a web page telling you to use Windows Update. If you need Office updates, you have to downgrade to IE 10, enable MS Update, and re-update to IE 11...
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
"Give me a modern responsive look and feel, it must be fast and single-page, and it should work on phones and ipads like the facebooks"... "Oh and half our customers use IE7 and have 512 megs of ram."
I am counting the days until 2016!
I would love to put auto update on but, Microsoft among many other corporations' breaking the trust of people by sneaking in programs that are not updates. Sucks but ya reap what ya sow. I trust no Corporation, not even the FOSS ones .And that is IMO based on past actions
Jack of all trades,master of none
Windows 7 IE 11 sucks balls when it comes to playing flash, html5, silverlight videos which are all choppy and not as smooth as chrome or fireflox. But! Firefox and IE 11 are both the same when it comes to choppy and slow time displaying web pages when flash plugin is enabled, disabling flash fixes the problem. Even with IE 11 video acceleration disabled it's still same issue unless it does not run well with amd phenom ii x6 processors. But I don't remember having this issue under windows 8/8.1 and I'm gonna test this out with the windows 8.1 enterprise 64 bit evaluation.
But when it comes to security there is plenty of customization for it in IE to make it hard as a rock.
I can't use IE10 or IE11 due to the forced KB2670838 update that comes with them. For me, KB2670838 breaks the Resource Monitor in Windows 7 that you can launch after bringing up the Task Manager with ctl-alt-del. I use this quite a bit to monitor memory usage of processes, disk accesses, etc. This has been a known problem for quite some time, ever since IE10 came out. Just google for "KB2670838 resource monitor". If you uninstall KB2670838 in order to get Resource Monitor to work again, it uninstalls IE10 and IE11, since evidently they depend on it for whatever reason (I am not aware of any other software that requires this update to function). I normally wouldn't be too upset over them dropping support for legacy browser versions, but if they can't get off their butts to either fix KB2670838 to not break Resource Monitor, or fix Resource Monitor to not be broken by KB2670838, then I'm going to have to give them crap over this decision. I'll start using IE11 once it stops breaking Resource Monitor.
that essentially what ships ON THE DISK is supported for the duration of support lifespan for the operating system (or office edition), as has been the case since the beginning of time for microsoft products...
examples: its why ie6 lasted through xp's own lifecycle and why fpse hung around at least until the eol of office 2003... and also why some previously bundled features of windows were pulled out of windows itself, so they wouldn't have to be supported that long (photo gallery, mail, etc, now bundled separately).
Mobile version... with separate hacks for android and iPhones! Yay! Native apps! Double yay! Welcome to the 1980s!
Let's face it, web devs are insane. If they weren't, they'd code to standards and tell their bosses "I dunno why it doesn't work with your 10 year old phone (or brand new phone) but the problem is in your device not the server. You shouldn't have bought that phone, I recommend you return it."
But there's always some idiot who says "oh, I can hack around that problem" and there you go, standards down the toilet again. They're insane.
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Menial little sysadmin (user of programs that truly skilled people write for you in developers and all YOU are, is a mere user, an end-user only, just with a better password, nothing more) complaining about developers (without which YOU would be helpless, you little pitiful stooge), who do what losers like YOU never could, period. You and your kind make me, laugh. You complain endlessly, but can't do the job without those you complain about.