Windows XP end-of-life migration guide
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
It isn't my fault you have incompetent higher ups that seem to trust MS with their lives but won't even consider Google or Mozilla.
We as devs and server/service admins don't get the luxury of dictating what browsers our customers use, and insulting our own higher-ups will do nothing to change that as it is out of their control too.
As much as everyone at my employer would love to drop support for IE8 and lower, it would save a pile of QA time and front-end developer frustration, we don't want to lose lucrative contracts with large investment banks in order to have that luxury and that would happen at this point in time if we dug our heals in on the matter.
Welcome to the real world. I'm sorry to say, but it isn't always nice.
Your computer won't boot/Windows corrupted? Sorry you just lost all your history & bookmarks if you used IE I could have transfered them to your new computer for you (IE stores them in a folder, Firefox you can but it is a pain, Chrome you are hosed.)
IE is not integrated with Active Directory.
IE settings can be controlled through group policies, and there are policies that can be applied to IE that MS bundles with Windows Server.
Firefox and Chrome can be controlled in a similar manner through group policy by downloading the administrative templates from the respective organizations.
On chrome you are not "hosed". All of the bookmarks are stored in a single file aptly named "bookmarks", just move the file to the new computer. Done.
Firefox also stores your bookmarks in a single file. Just replace the file on the new computer and you're done.
Surely copying a single file can't be more of a pain than copying many individual files.
Nobody uses ActiveX on the web anymore, due to it's IE-only nature. Sure, websites still exist, but they have become rarer over the past half-decade.
With your example: if you have a user that can't figure out how to click on a different browser icon on their desktop, this is nothing more than a user training issue.. or if you are that adamant that Chrome is a serious problem for you, just use group policy to prevent your users from installing it.
I manage several thousand users, most use chrome, some use firefox, and internet explorer is also there for people that aren't familiar with other browsers, or need to access special (poorly designed) websites. All browsers are managed with group policy and bookmarks are managed with ease.
User complaints are at zero because so far everyone has been able to tell the difference between the icons.
The best reason to upgrade is that as of April next year XP is no longer going to get security updates unless when a problem is found you pay MS to release a fix for it.
Our major clients (two of the largest investment banks in the country) have recently moved to IE8 on XP and will soon be moving to IE8 on Win7. They will be keeping IE8 as they have a lot of legacy code that they don't want to spend time/money testing (and fixing as needed) against browsers (including IE9+) that don't share all "classic IE"'s bugs upon which some code may be accidentally dependent. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17671383/ for an example where newer IE has trouble with code that worked in older versions - there are examples that don't involve ActiveX too so even if ActiveX isn't an issue (it is for some of our client's legacy "intranet" apps) you could hit problems like this.
The only reason they finally moved off IE6 is that is soon drops out of any support window even for security updates (this is the main reason they will soon be moving off XP too, the other biggie here being new hardware increasingly not having drivers available that work with XP). Win7 and IE8 leave their final extended support window in 2020 IIRC so we'll be stuck supporting IE8 for some time, but we can at least consider using SNI once we know they've dropped XP on their standard machine builds.
Of course anything that targets mobile people might still not be able to consider SNI even once XP is long enough buried, as some mobile browsers won't play ball. There are still a lot of Android 2.x devices out there and the stock browsers on those won't like it for a start.
We had to create a separate machine as a CDN load balancer specifically to handle XP.
Well, we have to migrate about 6000 pcs, and it's a 1 and ½ years project. Much more than six moths.
Also, there are a fair number of desktop software products which don't even support Windows 8 yet. Hard as it may seem for the crowd here, most of the software world is not on the HTML5/Ruby/OMGMVCJAVASCRIPTBRO bandwagon yet.
The exact same thing is a key reason why XP has remained in use for so long.
Doesn't matter that much if it's on a private network.
> Also, you double your licensing costs.
Not if the OS and virtualization solution require no license.
For a large organisation IT/TS cost is a problem with that solution. As well as managing everything else about their user's machines they'd have an extra app/service to maintain (whichever VM solution they go for) and an extra OS (XP in the VM) to somehow keep up-to-date for each user. Not insurmountable by any means, but far from zero hassle/cost.
Once an ancient version of IE is out of support, assuming that is the app you are running in a VM in this case, you also have an extra complication: making sure the VMs can only talk to your intranet sites that require it, as you don't want your users browsing more public hosts with a potentially insecure UA. Again not rocket science, just some routing/firewall tweaks, but something that has to be added to the support cost of your environments.
Depending on the licensing deal the company has with MS (or relevant distributor) there might also be extra cost involved in providing a second OS instance to all your users.
By the time they've made that decision, Windows 9 may be out :)
It would light the PC industry on fire if they made it one click to move your stuff to another machine.
You can buy a new Mac every year and only wait a few hours to move everything, but on Windows it takes months.
I was at a meeting recently where people were still saying that they had applications which would only run on XP, which was why they hadn't upgraded.
The problem for corporates now is likely that they won't/can't complete an upgrade before the deadline and the risks of having unsupported XP are unknown. One theory is that a lot of potential attacker will be holding any XP exploits they have at the moment with the intent to use them after the end of support, when there will likely be no patch.
I can't be bothered to post links to every distro and every consultant on the planet, but just for laughs:
http://www.debian.org/consultants/
And this is just independents (mostly) and just Debian. I'm sure IBM and other major corps would be glad to help as long as its legal, which is not an issue with FOSS unlike windows.
Now if MS opensourced windows XP as part of the abandonment, that might be interesting.
The irony of that line in a discussion primarily about microsoft products is fairly humorous.
Ubuntu, Suse, and RHEL are commercial support. Novel, Canonical, and Red Hat make good chunks of profits from support contracts. They have a business model at all because of businesses that adopt them and pay for support, and Red Hat is a billion dollar business!
Note most of that support is server side, but I know all 3 offer some variant of standard desktop support as well. So do a lot of Ubuntu PC vendors like system76.
Even though Unity and other desktop environments are quite intuitive at this point, changing over would cause a massive disruption to laymen who have been using a Start menu, Windows Explorer, and Outlook for years.
The benefits of switching (license costs, I suppose) far, far outweigh the benefits.
The most entertaining part to watch is psuedo-embedded devices. All you need to do to upgrade, is throw out an entire $10M MRI machine and buy another. Yes your steam boiler is OK but the monitoring system runs XP and we don't sell upgrade kits of just a new monitoring system, although we could make you a deal on a completely new steam boiler system. Or a (in)security system, a HVAC system that runs independently but can only be reprogrammed using some weird XP only driver and software, or a zillion other PC assisted technologies.
And Exchange support is so wonderful on Linux apps. And Active Directory, that's just a walk in the park.