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Comment by smcin | Hacker News Reader

No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation.

A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.

And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."

https://indiandefencereview.com/these-people-never-moved-on-...

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> A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.

That's hardly Microsoft's fault, isn't it?

They literally promoted the shitty web tech that companies built their shit on which obligated them to stick with an old OS or rewrite entirely.

I simply stated as a fact that IE has not been dead and buried for ages. The official 2022 shutdown is recent.

Regardless of who we each might consider to be responsible (and in what proportion), that fact is a fact. Agreed?

(and I've seen lots of end-of-life cycles in software and hardware, and gone through them as both user, customer and vendor)

Yeah, if you've done support in large MS corporate environments with MEM etc then you've come across crappy business apps that have crappy requirements stuck in the past.

On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.

On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.

The problem was the Microsoft zealotry of technical people they invent non existent problems often repeated like a cargocult by MS consultants/partners. They loved IE as a default browser. This has nothing todo with the apps being hard to fix, because that turned out to be an actual easy technical problem and I did 10 internal apps.

The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.

> Have to Use Windows XP

They're lucky, I have to use Win11.

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