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."
they might as well (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I have is that IE11+ is such a PITA and it is difficult to get working with various Enterprise Java applications without disabling Protected Mode and completely unsecuring it or setting custom registry keys/policies. EMC Unisphere, various Cisco apps like UCSM and Fabric Manager... Even several recent Oracle tools just gag on IE11+ without spending hours configuring it to work every time you launch it.
Well, all the more reason to dump it altogether.
Re:Corp IT that can't seem to follow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one welcome this. I work in a company that up till a few months ago was still on IE8. They upgraded to IE10 instead of going directly to IE11 which is totally insane in my mind and the reasoning by the folks doing the deployment was to use stable and tested.
This same company still uses to this day a version of Java that is both old and recommended by Oracle to update immediately because it has critical vulnerabilities which is even more insane to me when you factor in that they work with so much customer data breaches and the potential for lawsuits just seems extremely high.
As a sysadmin, running the current version -1 is the safe bet for most businesses. The problem is that few businesses have an upgrade path, policy or methodology so you end up being current version -2 or -3 because no-one is willing to sign off on an upgrade.
Its not that we dont want to upgrade, its that management dont want any disruption to anything. So they refuse to allow upgrades until eventually the manufacturer forces the issue (and sometimes not even then). As for running out of date versions of Java (or anything else) it's always due to one legacy application that relies on that version and that version only. Its always a critical application that was written by some rock star developer a few years ago and since that developer left a few years ago no-one know how it works or how to upgrade it to function with a more current version of Java. Whenever I hear a developer say "oh, I can write a little application to do that" for an important process or requirement I want to beat them to death with a rusty pipe.
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even some of Microsofts own services (Outlook web mail for example) works well with IE11 - they work with Opera or Firefox though, so something is broken in IE11.
Many major companies also rely heavily on older versions of IE and outright prohibits other than the approved version through scripts instead of making sure that they are conformant with web standards using HTML and CSS validators. Of course - if there's Javascript involved then it's necessary to test with more than one browser since there's no good Javascript validator around ensuring portable code.
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:4, Insightful)
Since there's already a pre-release version of IE12, probably not! They've increased the release rate a good bit the last few years; Win7 shipped with IE8. Still nowhere near as fast as Firefox and Chrome bump their "major" version numbers these days, of course, but that's no surprise.
Re:This is sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad? I'd say it's happy.
So many big companies locked themselves in to "microsoft IE-6 only solutions" - and open source advocates have long cautioned them against depending too much on a vendor that might yank support whenever management changes or quarterly profits dictate yanking support to encourage upgrades.
This will teach them a lesson they'll hopefully never forget; and look for cross platform solutions in the future.
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:4, Insightful)
From my experience so far, IE11 with default settings renders far more like Firefox/Safari than any prior version of IE. A lot of the brokenness probably comes down to web apps detecting IE, then serving content designed for old, broken IE. When new, standards-compliant IE becomes more widespread, people can just remove the code for supporting bad old IE altogether.
Or they could fix the broken version detection code, so that it only does that with actually "broken" versions of IE.
You're describing the fundamental problem with browser detection -- when you write it, you don't know how it will work with future browser versions.
If you deploy browser detection code, you *must* take responsibility for contantly re-testing it against every new browser that gets released. That's not easy to do in practice, and nobody actually manages to do it (or remembers to do it, or even realises that the need to do it), and thus we still have sites that break whenever a new version of IE comes out, or whatever other browser that falls foul of their detection code.
And that is why browser detection is bad practice. It puts an additional burden on you for ongoing support.
Please also stop supporting newer versions. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, those customers aren't going to replace their still-working XP boxes with brand-new computers running Windows 8.1 Upgrade 1 Patch 1 Service Pack 1, especially not to get a browser update. As long as those computers don't physically break down they're going to keep running Windows XP; after all, replacing a working tool is unneccessary cost and businesses don't like unneccessary costs. So IE 8 compatibility remains important, at least for those customers who still use it to look at their websites.
All of that would change if Microsoft wrote IE to support the same platforms Firefox and Chrome do. Firefox 31 runs on XP SP2, as does Chrome 36. So should IE 11. Then we could finally move on from the days of horrible IE-specific hacks and dozens of kilobytes of compatibility code and actually get some work done. As it is, the only recourse we have is to keep telling people to never run IE under any circumstance except to download a better browser; hopefully at some point we will have drilled "IE is always the wrong choice" into people's head hard enough that they will reflexively use a browser with a sane update policy and IE will be marginalized enough to be irrelevant.
Which would be sad; more competition in the browser market would be good. But not through an obsolescence factory like IE.
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition's never a bad thing. I'll take three viable web browsers over two. No-one wants to go back to the days of sites targeting specific browsers. "Best experienced with Netscape" - screw that.
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:2, Insightful)
"If you deploy browser detection code, you *must* take responsibility for contantly re-testing it against every new browser that gets released. "
So, every 2 days for Firefox?
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:2, Insightful)
IE11 does not support CSS conditionals *at all*. That is what people have used for many years to include additional CSS containing hacks for older IE with inferior CSS support.
This breaks my head. In IE9 and IE10, for example, there are render modes you can use to test content in older versions of the browsers. It wasn't completely perfect but it was 99%, and good enough for me not to have to run VMs with older IEs to do all of my IE testing. IE11 though - it still has support to view content in an older rendering mode, but without the CSS conditional support, it's close to worthless for any site that uses those conditionals to apply CSS fixes, which is most all of them.
Progress.