Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off

I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome...

This is a (primarily UK) product most of whose users are on internal bank networks. It's come down from about 40% 2 years ago, so it's heading in the right direction - but I'm not sure I see it going away any time soon.

There's huge organizational inertia inside these banks around IT systems - if we want to serve them, we need to support IE8 for the foreseeable future.

In practical terms it's still IE9 and IE11 for a while (so far as I can tell)?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I...

I'm sure there is still a load of Windows Vista SP2 machines around...

"Does this mean Microsoft is changing the support lifecycle policy for Internet Explorer?"

"The latest version of Internet Explorer will continue to follow the component policy, which means that it follows the support lifecycle and is supported for as long as the Windows operating system on which it is installed. Focusing support on the latest version of Internet Explorer for a supported Windows operating system is in line with industry standards."

A simple yes or no will do.

What bugs me is so many negative comments along the lines of "What about all those poor helpless trillion dollar megacorporations that are stuck on an old version because they use proprietary custom software? Microsoft is evil because they don't guarantee to support and repair everything that they've ever made for free until the heat death of the universe!"

Those companies and organizations are stuck not because of Microsoft, but because they mismanaged their own proprietary software or web applications. For more than a decade, they never even bothered to plan for maintenance, although they routinely plan, budget, and schedule depreciation and maintenance for everything else in the business - things that move much slower than software and far far slower than web development. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but that's their fault, not Microsoft's.

My Windows machine is still on Windows 7 now, and not ready to upgrade to 10 yet due to compatibility issues. But I have 4 more years to get things working in a virtual environment, or find replacements. Software that I run dates back to the 70s, so some didn't work by default in 7, but in the end there was only 1 program that I couldn't replace or get working with an upgrade or VM. I reverse engineered the data to migrate it (it used an obsolete floating point format from before floating point ops were standard in PCs). If I can do that, a company or large organization can do it.

For web software, the pace of the state of the art is even faster. Most anything over a few years old probably needs a rewrite and data migration if it hasn't been maintained properly (and possibly even if it has). Especially anything that used old plugins.

But the focus on browser versions is weird. I strongly dislike the practice of web developers/designers speaking of 'supporting' IE6/IE8 or whatever. That's a Microsoft product, Microsoft supports it or not, you and I don't. We support the websites that we build, which we build to current industry standards (such as they are). If you try to access it using a nonstandard client like IE6, Arachne running on DOS, Hyperlink on a C64, or a line mode browser on a teletype, then your experience will be different. The server side will work fine, but your client may not do what it's not capable of.

You can't expect to stick a blu-ray disc on a record player or shove a flash drive full of MP3s into an 8-track tape deck and have the end-user experience be the same. It just doesn't work that way. Sure we can try to build custom client-side workarounds, but is that worth the cost (especially given that new browsers are free)?

Overheard at a meeting once:

Client: "Our stats say that'll be fine for our customers, but our executive team mostly has older versions of IE, so this won't work for them. We don't want it to look bad to the CEO."

3rd Party Agency Manager: "We'll order new laptops for them and have them delivered, just tell us how many and where to send them. It will be much cheaper for you and save us all a lot of time."

They will be vulnerable to attacks because of this and they will refuse to pay money to upgrade from XP or Vista to go to Windows 10. It will be because their business software only works with older Windows versions. They can't afford someone to migrate to Windows 10 or they lost the source code after programmers retired or got fired and took it with them on their personal laptops because they lacked a source control system.

It is a big mess out there. Colleges are even worse as is the federal government who use outdated Windows Updates by three years and expired antivirus products.

In most cases the hardware vendors never address the browser compatibility issue (due to focus on new products) and only provide a warning sign upon login. Likewise the hardware isn't easy to replace in some environments.

This use case is completely absent from the web browsing traffic usage patterns on the internet which predominate in browser usage statistics.

My thinking is just that most larger companies will have zero chance of hitting a January deadline, and once the deadline passes, there's really no urgency to upgrade by any particular time. I would think a ~12 month deadline might be more effective in getting people to upgrade (as well as resulting in fewer compromised browsers).

As Vista is still supported, the IE9 lives on.

To IE 9. :(