Microsoft To Drop Support For Older Versions of Internet Explorer 138
An anonymous reader writes After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, 9, or 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support. From the blog post: "Microsoft recommends enabling automatic updates to ensure an up-to-date computing experience—including the latest version of Internet Explorer—and most consumers use automatic updates today. Commercial customers are encouraged to test and accept updates quickly, especially security updates. Regular updates provide significant benefits, such as decreased security risk and increased reliability, and Windows Update can automatically install updates for Internet Explorer and Windows."
Re:they might as well (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, using a 15 day old build of firefox to assert that IE is terribly insecure (because it has an unpatched vuln).
Of course, you couldnt have made this post 15 days ago, because the score would have been "1 unpatched for IE11, 11 unpatched for mozilla [mozilla.org]"
IE isnt the greatest security-wise, but Id probably trust it over Firefox these days.
Re:they might as well (Score:5, Informative)
"Unsupported" is the magic word to get huge companies like mine to at last move on. I can't tell you how happy that will make me, an intranet programmer, if my company's official browser is IE 11 or something.
Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6, which our official browser until just a few years ago. I fought with IE 6 for years and it felt like it would it never quite go away. I know that there are some poor souls in the world still using IE 6, but since it's no longer our company's official browser, I don't have to think about it. The thing that made my company finally upgrade was because a vendor forced them to, saying that their web app would no longer work in IE 6.
While IE 7 and 8 brought real improvements in CSS support, JavaScript is quirky until at least 9. Microsoft's unpredictable implementation of JavaScript is part of the reason JavaScript has a shady reputation. If Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari were the only browsers I had to write against, it would have been a different life.
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:5, Informative)
The latest version of IE does not send "MSIE" in the user agent. Microsoft did this intentionally to encourage feature detection instead of browser detection. Most detection code relies on "MSIE" being present.
If you must, it is still easy to catch IE though. "Trident" is still present.