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Comment by zackkatz | Hacker News Reader

Just yesterday I hit an IE 11 issue that forced a JavaScript hack to resolve.

Goodbye, IE 10. Hopefully IE 11 will soon follow.

> Goodbye, IE 10. Hopefully IE 11 will soon follow.

IE 11 is still part of Windows 10 and it's in fact the only browser shipping in the long-term support version of Windows 10

Expect IE11 to be around for the duration that Windows 10 is around which, unfortunately, is going to be forever (as Windows 10 is said to be the last version of Windows ever released) or at least for the foreseeable future

I think Edge will continue to exist as a product, it will just have a Chromium backend.

Also there’s no guarantee that IE 11 will last forever just because it’s on Windows 10. There can always be a major update in future with it removed if MS really want to kill it..

Edge is getting a Chromium back-end with talk of Windows 7 and 8 support. So, perhaps that's a strategy to kill IE11 too (fingers crossed).

> as Windows 10 is said to be the last version of Windows ever released

Is that because "continuous rolling updates" for Windows 10 or because Microsoft will eventually replace the Windows kernel with some other kernel, such as Linux (just a conspiracy theory of mine)?

Microsoft, like most companies, don't use the internal implementation as part of the name brand. It was called "Windows" long before it got the current kernel. ("Edge" is switching engines, too, but not names.) I see no reason they'd change the Windows name even if they decided to switch out the kernel.

IE11 is the only browser still supporting ActiveX and Java Applets (and other Oracle tech), so many corporate/enterprise users specifically set up their environments so that IE11 is the default user experience.

While consumers have mostly moved on, it will be a long slow crawl away from IE11 for everyone else. Microsoft set this path when they decided not to support this legacy tech' on Edge (and Chrome/Firefox dropped support).

> Microsoft set this path when they decided not to support this legacy tech' on Edge

Good. ActiveX and Java Applets are terrible.

Java Applets were awesome. ActiveX is handy for enterprise glue. Flash is nice too.

There was a huge gap before JS frameworks cought up to Java Applets and Flash after they in practice were dropped.

This huge gap has been pretty much bridged, removing the huge security concerns as well. It's time for those things to die. Whipping up an old browser should be the only way to use those things so that noone is even tempted to write things like that.

IE11 is currently scheduled for end of life in 2025. So just six years to go and no more IE (hopefully)!

Unfortunately, my company has decided that as long as MS is providing any level of support for IE, we have to support it. So we will be supporting IE11 until 2025 :-(

Why so goddamn long? Microsoft should kill it now for the benefit of humanity.

Because tech churn only exists on HN. In the real world there are countless systems relying on tech that is considered ancient by HN standards (but in reality often isn't).

If there's a factory controller running some management software that requires Windows and IE, it's not unlikely that it will be cheaper to buy Microsoft, kill off all of its products, and only keep Windows and IE supported indefinitely than retrofitting/upgrading/updating those controllers.

BTW. Speaking of "goddamn long".

If you traveled anywhere by air, it's likely your booking ultimately went through Amadeus [1] which commands 42% of the world's GDS market [2]

They decommissioned their last mainframe in 2017[3]. Yes, mainframe. Because it's oh so easy to "kill something now for the benefit of humanity". But first you have to prove that killing some tech actually will benefit humanity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_CRS

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

[3] https://www.thecompanydime.com/mainframe/

The difference here is that those mainframes aren't used by people to interface with the internet as a whole.

People shouldn't be building things in web technologies if they aren't willing to keep up with them, which isn't that hard. Unless your web app is poorly designed (i.e. reliant on browser-specific bugs or proprietary features), then an evergreen browser shouldn't be a major concern. If your crap is so mission critical that this is still a concern, then web technologies are entirely the wrong stack to be working in.

Chrome is evergreen, right? Oh, wait, it regularly drops or destroys features that people rely on (often with no warning).

And IE10/11 are not that old. When people were developing for them they were current. Just because you've never developed software that needs to be supported for ore than two months, doesn't mean no one does.

> If your crap is so mission critical

If it's mission critical, it's not crap. Crap is stuff that is "not hard to keep up with the web technologies that change every two months".

IE is the standard system browser, which means it's going to be supported through the end of the lifecycle for every version of Windows it shipped on. Since they decided not to make Edge available for Windows prior to 10, that also means there's no upgrade path.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifec... has these dates currently:

Windows 8.1: January 10, 2023

Windows 7: January 14, 2020

Windows 10 Enterprise 2015: October 14, 2025

Now, if they did backport the Edge-chromium to the earliest versions they'd have the option of pushing that as a browser option but they'd still need a compatibility shim for the many, many Windows apps which use an embedded browser instance to display something.

I stand by the belief that if Microsoft wanted to make IE a core part of the operating system, then it should get support for new web standards for as long as the OS gets security updates.

A 10-year out of date browser just isn't useful, even if it is "secure". And by being the default, they are ensuring that many users are stuck with it. IE prevents me from using a lot of JavaScript and CSS features that have been around for years, all because 40% of my users work for companies or government entities that don't let them install Chrome or Firefox. "Web standards compliance" updates that get rolled out with security updates would solve this problem.

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