Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
"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.
Microsoft supports Internet Explorer?! I wouldn't admit to it if I was them.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.