Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 Reach End-of-Life Next Week (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, January 12, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 will officially reach their end of life. A new patch going live soon will add a notification that nags users to upgrade. "What's even bigger about the end of life for these versions is that this means Internet Explorer 11 is the last version of Microsoft's old browser that's left supported, as the company continues to transition customers to Edge on Windows 10."
Edge sucks (no ad-block)
This would mean that IE9 will remain supported on Vista. According to Windows lifecycle fact sheet, Vista's support doesn't end until April 2017, and IE9 is the most current version of Internet Explorer available for Vista.
What is actually happening is:
"Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. Please visit the Internet Explorer Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ here http://support.microsoft.com/g... for list of supported operating systems and browser combinations."
So if you are running Vista SP2, which supports only up to IE9, you are still OK, it is still supported, as shown at the Internet Explorer Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ link above. Running Server 2012 (Not R2), then IE10 is still supported. Yes the article is valid for the operating systems they are referring to, but it doesn't paint a complete picture of what is going on for all of Microsoft's operating systems. Older IEs are supported for some operating systems, just not the two mentioned in the article.
Linux is not a suitable desktop replacement,
Linux is a perfectly good desktop system. The main issues you'll run into are driver issues and lack of application support, especially in laptops. Ease of use is not a problem.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In which ways do you find that the Edge UI is better than Firefox's? In Edge, you can't drag-and-drop files, so you need to resort to Windows 3.1-era browse dialog boxes if you need to choose a file. You can't download files properly either: downloads will stop when you close the browser window, there's absolutely no way of knowing how fast you are downloading, and when the downloads finish, they silently open BEHIND the browser window. The UI has the same nature as that of the Lynx browser, that is text lines, but it has much fewer features and it's perhaps even less intuitive: the text-only links that make up the UI are actually hidden behind cryptic hieroglyphs and when you need a feature, assuming it's one of the few features that Edge actually supports, you have to hunt for it by clicking those pictograms to find out that they reveal hidden surfaces, sliding tabs and other incoherent, undiscoverable UI elements. I really can't understand what's to like in that browser, nor how a browser so limited and buggy could ever be released as part of a paid product. Even searching for text can cause Edge to crash on my machine. And even when it doesn't crash, the text search thingy remains stuck open even if you change tab or close the current one. It's as if the developers hadn't tested even the basic use cases of a browser (searching for text, downloading a file) before releasing it as a supposedly finished application.