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Microsoft To Drop Support For Older Versions of Internet Explorer

Posted by samzenpus on from the kicking-and-screaming dept.

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."

23 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Only 17 months to go... by CaptQuark · · Score: 2

    Are they really suggesting that IE 11 will still be the most recent version in 17 months.... ?

    1. Re:Only 17 months to go... by kolbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem I have is that IE11+ is such a PITA and it is difficult to get working with various Enterprise Java applications without disabling Protected Mode and completely unsecuring it or setting custom registry keys/policies. EMC Unisphere, various Cisco apps like UCSM and Fabric Manager... Even several recent Oracle tools just gag on IE11+ without spending hours configuring it to work every time you launch it.

      Well, all the more reason to dump it altogether.

    2. Re:Only 17 months to go... by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not even some of Microsofts own services (Outlook web mail for example) works well with IE11 - they work with Opera or Firefox though, so something is broken in IE11.

      Many major companies also rely heavily on older versions of IE and outright prohibits other than the approved version through scripts instead of making sure that they are conformant with web standards using HTML and CSS validators. Of course - if there's Javascript involved then it's necessary to test with more than one browser since there's no good Javascript validator around ensuring portable code.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    3. Re:Only 17 months to go... by cbhacking · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Since there's already a pre-release version of IE12, probably not! They've increased the release rate a good bit the last few years; Win7 shipped with IE8. Still nowhere near as fast as Firefox and Chrome bump their "major" version numbers these days, of course, but that's no surprise.

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
    4. Re:Only 17 months to go... by _merlin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      From my experience so far, IE11 with default settings renders far more like Firefox/Safari than any prior version of IE. A lot of the brokenness probably comes down to web apps detecting IE, then serving content designed for old, broken IE. When new, standards-compliant IE becomes more widespread, people can just remove the code for supporting bad old IE altogether.

    5. Re:Only 17 months to go... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      From my experience so far, IE11 with default settings renders far more like Firefox/Safari than any prior version of IE. A lot of the brokenness probably comes down to web apps detecting IE, then serving content designed for old, broken IE. When new, standards-compliant IE becomes more widespread, people can just remove the code for supporting bad old IE altogether.

      Or they could fix the broken version detection code, so that it only does that with actually "broken" versions of IE.

      You're describing the fundamental problem with browser detection -- when you write it, you don't know how it will work with future browser versions.

      If you deploy browser detection code, you *must* take responsibility for contantly re-testing it against every new browser that gets released. That's not easy to do in practice, and nobody actually manages to do it (or remembers to do it, or even realises that the need to do it), and thus we still have sites that break whenever a new version of IE comes out, or whatever other browser that falls foul of their detection code.

      And that is why browser detection is bad practice. It puts an additional burden on you for ongoing support.

    6. Re:Only 17 months to go... by satuon · · Score: 2

      If that's so, then why not switch to Firefox or Chrome? Wasn't the whole reason to use IE that some sites will not render properly/refuse to work otherwise?

    7. Re:Only 17 months to go... by _merlin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Competition's never a bad thing. I'll take three viable web browsers over two. No-one wants to go back to the days of sites targeting specific browsers. "Best experienced with Netscape" - screw that.

    8. Re:Only 17 months to go... by dannydawg5 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The latest version of IE does not send "MSIE" in the user agent. Microsoft did this intentionally to encourage feature detection instead of browser detection. Most detection code relies on "MSIE" being present.

      If you must, it is still easy to catch IE though. "Trident" is still present.

    9. Re:Only 17 months to go... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      IE11 does not support CSS conditionals *at all*. That is what people have used for many years to include additional CSS containing hacks for older IE with inferior CSS support.

      This breaks my head. In IE9 and IE10, for example, there are render modes you can use to test content in older versions of the browsers. It wasn't completely perfect but it was 99%, and good enough for me not to have to run VMs with older IEs to do all of my IE testing. IE11 though - it still has support to view content in an older rendering mode, but without the CSS conditional support, it's close to worthless for any site that uses those conditionals to apply CSS fixes, which is most all of them.

      Progress.

  2. they might as well by FudRucker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:they might as well by LordLimecat · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wow, using a 15 day old build of firefox to assert that IE is terribly insecure (because it has an unpatched vuln).

      Of course, you couldnt have made this post 15 days ago, because the score would have been "1 unpatched for IE11, 11 unpatched for mozilla"

      IE isnt the greatest security-wise, but Id probably trust it over Firefox these days.

    2. Re:they might as well by Art3x · · Score: 4, Informative

      "Unsupported" is the magic word to get huge companies like mine to at last move on. I can't tell you how happy that will make me, an intranet programmer, if my company's official browser is IE 11 or something.

      Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6, which our official browser until just a few years ago. I fought with IE 6 for years and it felt like it would it never quite go away. I know that there are some poor souls in the world still using IE 6, but since it's no longer our company's official browser, I don't have to think about it. The thing that made my company finally upgrade was because a vendor forced them to, saying that their web app would no longer work in IE 6.

      While IE 7 and 8 brought real improvements in CSS support, JavaScript is quirky until at least 9. Microsoft's unpredictable implementation of JavaScript is part of the reason JavaScript has a shady reputation. If Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari were the only browsers I had to write against, it would have been a different life.

  3. Corp IT that can't seem to follow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Corp IT that can't seem to follow. by mjwx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      As a sysadmin, running the current version -1 is the safe bet for most businesses. The problem is that few businesses have an upgrade path, policy or methodology so you end up being current version -2 or -3 because no-one is willing to sign off on an upgrade.

      Its not that we dont want to upgrade, its that management dont want any disruption to anything. So they refuse to allow upgrades until eventually the manufacturer forces the issue (and sometimes not even then). As for running out of date versions of Java (or anything else) it's always due to one legacy application that relies on that version and that version only. Its always a critical application that was written by some rock star developer a few years ago and since that developer left a few years ago no-one know how it works or how to upgrade it to function with a more current version of Java. Whenever I hear a developer say "oh, I can write a little application to do that" for an important process or requirement I want to beat them to death with a rusty pipe.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  4. Support??? by pitchpipe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft supports Internet Explorer?! I wouldn't admit to it if I was them.

    --
    Look where all this talking got us, baby.
  5. So are they going to fix the issues wtih IE ? by Malfuros+the+Wizard · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. Re:This is sad by ron_ivi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sad? I'd say it's happy.

    So many big companies locked themselves in to "microsoft IE-6 only solutions" - and open source advocates have long cautioned them against depending too much on a vendor that might yank support whenever management changes or quarterly profits dictate yanking support to encourage upgrades.

    This will teach them a lesson they'll hopefully never forget; and look for cross platform solutions in the future.

  7. Re:Wait, what, huh? by istartedi · · Score: 2

    bugs per kg of code

    That code is heavy, man /hippie.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  8. Please also stop supporting newer versions. by Jesus_666 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)
  9. Mail on a machine where you lack root by tepples · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Re:How is this going to play with ASP NET by Mondor · · Score: 2

    Sorry, I had no problems with ASP.NET (both WebForms and MVC) and MSIE 11. Could it be something in your code?

  11. IE11=IE6 all over again by Maxwell · · Score: 2

    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!