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."
Corp IT that can't seem to follow. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
This is sad (Score:2, Interesting)
Hell No (Score:1, Interesting)
There is a reason why nobody should "automatically" update Windows. It's an identical reason toy why you shouldn't let Linux or MacOS X update automatically.
If the administrative account isn't used to confirm installing updates, then it will be compromised.
Here's one example:
After installing X product that shall remain nameless, suddenly Windows sees a need to push 20 updates or so. Ok whatevers. So those updates are installed, but now when I try to install Visual Studio and the SDK's they all fail. Now why is that? Maybe if I had installed Visual Studio and the SDK's first this wouldn't have happened. But nooo... Windows Update wants all the updates to be installed at that time. Some of the updates even fail, resulting in multiple reboots before they all install.
Linux is nearly as bad, if not worse. Because of huge obnoxious chains of dependency in response to OSS developers fond of reinventing the wheel to circumvent licenses they don't ideologically agree with, I have to put up with things like OpenSSL being replaced by LibreSSL, or MySQL being replaced with MariaDB for no damn reason.
MacOS X has the least obnoxious behavior, but the update window is much shorter. It does things right by confirming to install updates, but has to restart the OS for everything including iTunes, which shouldn't need an update if it's all user-space.
The problem with the Microsoft Platform, is that MSIE is "integrated" into Windows in a way that will always be more dangerous than simply using Firefox or Chrome.This goes back to Windows 98SE and MSIE 4. The entire monopoly problem. Had the law people not interfered we might have been looking at a world of websites that only work with ActiveX apps (believe me, certain CRM software did this even as late as 2004, and I'm talking about you Siebel)
Microsoft's screw up was integrating it. The only good that came out of that lawsuit was that Microsoft couldn't co-opt the XHTML or CSS standards with propietary extensions, and it likely drove off a lot more people from MSIE when other browsers ... oh wait I'm getting ahead of myself. There were no other browsers.
Netscape's last version was 4. Mozilla restarted from scratch, Opera was still a pay browser, and nobody else put anything else worth a damn. It took APPLE to take KHTML and make Webkit to create a third browser. Everyone thank Apple for that, because if they didn't, Google Chrome would not exist, and no smartphone would exist either.
Re:Only 17 months to go... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.