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."
Only 17 months to go... (Score:3)
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: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: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.
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Or they could fix the broken version detection code, so that it only does that with actually "broken" versions of IE.
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.
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"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?
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IE 5 and 6 were, when introduced, very good browsers by the standards of the time, and often better at standards conformance than their rivals (or rival). Having produced a better browser than Netscape could, Microsoft dominated the field and stopped improving. By the time people started moving away from IE6, IE6 was an embarrassing and insecure dinosaur, and Microsoft has played catch-up ever since (well, ever since they got off their metaphorical ass anyway).
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And interestingly enough - setting IE11 to compatibility mode doesn't resolve the issues I have seen.
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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 re
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If that's so, then why not switch to Firefox or Chrome? Wasn't the whole reason to use IE that some sites will not render properly/refuse to work otherwise?
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.
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I agree with this. 3-5 is probably the sweet spot. Any more and developers are going to start slacking and not test all the
browsers. Unfortunately we have 3-5 browsers and then a dozen different versions of each. This move by microsoft
is a move in the right direction. Web developers shouldn't be expected to support 6 different versions of IE and 6 different
versions of firefox. After 3 years you should probably get a security warning every time you open your browser
telling you that your web browser is
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It's worse than that. Most non-IE browsers nowadays have pretty similar rendering engines. IE isn't a WebKit-derived browser, and it's useful to have it out there competing.
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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.
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When new, standards-compliant IE becomes more widespread, people can just remove the code for supporting bad old IE altogether.
No they can't because they never Kill old IE. Even on their life cycle chart, they are supporting 3 Different Versions of IE, so devs have to code for the lowest common denominator (IE9) or force users away from IE altogether. Chances are it's going to get worse once Windows 7 goes into extended support and they quit updating IE for it as well.
They need to Support 1 IE Version acro
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Many major companies also rely heavily on older versions of IE
some people just don't learn.
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I recently had a similar problem with Microsoft Test Manager. With IE11 the content of the administration web page was not visible. I could not find the reason in the security settings (and accessing the web page from the same system suggests that it should be a "trusted zone"). Firefox 31 did the job though.
So I suspect this was another case of IE11 being broken for a Microsoft service.
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The fact that Oracle applications demand IE at all is quite ironic...
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it is difficult to get working with various Enterprise Java applications without disabling Protected Mode and completely unsecuring it
Wait, are you complaining IE is too secure?
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Yes, if you want to run java, run it as a standalone app not in the browser.
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.
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Wait... MS is going to start actually supporting IE now?!? Will it actually properly implement the HTML standards now?? :D
It's about time.
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No browser properly implements the Markup Language. Further, too many people think they are 'developers' because they coded some little scripts inside the marked up document. Or some big ugly script, frighteningly.
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No, they are saying, that the most recent version will be supported. If it will be MSIE 13, then 11 and 12 won't be supported anymore. Isn't it the same with, say, Chrome? Just asking.
they might as well (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
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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.
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If you can make IE work that is - today it doesn't even work well with M$ services.
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Using IE8 or IE9 often appears to be an effective workaround here. For some reason webmail appears especially troublesome with IE10 and IE11.
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Webmail?
pop.google.com works great for me. I never even see any ads.
Mail on a machine where you lack root (Score:3)
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Hows that Mozilla Kool-Aid taste?
You want security, use Opera, Safari, Chrome, anything-- but Mozilla is a disaster.
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.
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Not really. The only real difference between 6 and 7 from a CSS perspective was a few extra selectors and bug fixes. The real improvements came with version 8, which finally had full support for CSS 2.
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Does Windows 7 support IE 6 in XP compatibility mode?
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Yes (in the sense that the XP Compatibility Mode image comes with IE6 installed), but also no (in the sense that XP in general is no longer supported).
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It is even worse for vendors, In companies that sells services and products for other companies you have to use the lowest common multiple which was IE6 until a couple of years ago, now it is IE8.
You are also absolutely right about your points for IE9, I had to fight with my bosses for our new product to be >= IE9 only. They wanted the latests HTML5 buzzwords but also to be able to run on old IE. The alternative was building everything using Java Applets...
Oh Boy! (Score:2)
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As long as the functionality is there I couldn't care less if they changed to an AA, AB, AC etc. scheme.
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Incompatibilities aren't recognisable by their number.
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It makes no difference to the end user. But it makes a big difference to corporations that decide what software to allow on computers. Or what software their product supports or works with.
Even the various Linux flavors keep a 'long-term' version of their os, just so businesses know they can count on that version for more than a month or half-year.
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The "Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release" is one solution to the problem, others publishing serious software should do similar.
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Usually the X. number is a family of related versions, and sometimes the #.X is also a family of related versions. When this is used it's much easier to know to support all of X.# or Y.X.# because of similarity. To apply this to Firefox specifically, 29-31 would be one X.X.# or X.# if grouped logically.
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 custo
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.
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Its not that we dont want to upgrade, its that management dont want any disruption to anything.
Possibly also the managment does not want to spend the money on testing to ensure that any disruption is minimised. Especially when one "upgrade" can requ
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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 ...
That tradition goes back to mainframes. One difference is that in the IBM mainframe days, a "version" came out every blue moon, thoroughly tested by an itty bitty monopoly, and justifying similar thorough testing by users; whereas today a "version" can arrive every few days (or faster for people who watch commits to the archive) and testing would almost be continuous.
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Oh baby, your hard code feels so good inside me.
Cool (Score:1)
Sounds like a great reason to not use Internet Explorer.
In the past 7 years I've only had to use it a relatively few times - For instance Illinois gubment can't be bothered to make their apps non IE friendly.
but hey, to each their own.
This is sad (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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"This will teach them a lesson they'll hopefully never forget".
Most individuals learn, not everybody. Some organizations learn, not all of them. Humanity almost always repeats past mistakes.
The same forces that made people use the "IE-6 only solutions" will always exist. New MBAs and engineers will keep only these forces in mind and will not even consider the impact of their decision on the "potential" distant future. It is not that they will not be aware of the dangers, it is just that feeling the pain in
Support??? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, what, huh? (Score:1)
IE is supported? When did this happen?
Last I heard, they reluctantly release updates when other parts of the OS beat them on bugs per kg of code. (They stopped measuring lines when someone googled the term.)
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bugs per kg of code
That code is heavy, man /hippie.
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
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Customers using internet explorer (Score:1)
should upgrade to an operating system.
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I'd take a stable OS like OpenVMS then.
So are they going to fix the issues wtih IE ? (Score:2)
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Microsoft IE11 isn't even backwards compatible with older versions of Outlook web mail, and by older I mean pretty recent versions... I had to resort to Opera to be able to access the web mail at work from home.
Not that I use IE for anything else so I can't tell...
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IE11 breaks loads of third-party apps and doesn't play nicely with some of Microsoft's own software like older versions of Sharepoint and Dynamics. I'm always tripping over IE11 issues at work and having to use Chrome instead because somehow the other browser makers seem to be able to not royally screw things up every time there's an upgrade. I'm not looking forward to IE12. At least the developer tools finally allow you to choose which Javascript file you want to look at rather than having to move throu
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Sorry, I had no problems with ASP.NET (both WebForms and MVC) and MSIE 11. Could it be something in your code?
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.
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Seriously?
This is such an antiquated IT Industry philosophy! (if it ain't broke don't fix it).
Thanks to this idea, Microsoft has to spend most of it's resources patching old systems, (which they no longer receive revenue for), making upgrading more expensive.
Granted Microsoft needs to rethink how upgrades can be more efficient and provide a better model, but we could all benefit from a smoother and cheaper upgrade model especially if Microsoft didn't have to keep plugging today's security holes for yesterda
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Of course it would be nice if we could get people educated about th
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They have really shiney file cabinets at the company that produces file cabinets. Their file clerks rate very high on the jobs satisfaction scores, too.
It would be nice if we could get everybody else educated about the importance of file clerks and data custodians. And that nice gray crackle finish on the filing cabinets.
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Of course it would be nice if we could get people educated about that sort of thing. Then the only ones we'd have to worry about would be those who just plain can't upgrade - either because they have custom software or because their job-specific hardware has no drivers for modern Windows versions.
So true, education is the key, move forward or don't complain about redundant old functionality with security holes everywhere. It gets to the point where silicon just won't fix your leaky pipe.
Though;
Custom software should always be being redeveloped etc, if it hasn't changed in a long time, then it's probably time to rethink it's purpose and efficiency. Plus specific to IE, IE "should be able to" handle all web comms since the dawn of time. (maybe if Microsoft had more resources this might be better)
Backw
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Get out of the IT business and top management would rather not think about IT any more than they have to. Any time or energy spent on managing IT is time or energy not spent on something that might increase revenue or seriously cut costs. IT is one of those support functions that isn't really related to what the business is about, like HR. Trying to convince them that they should update without need is not going to work, nor should it. (Trying to convince them that IT is a special snowflake isn't going
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Upgrading software isn't free, especially something like IE where each successive version breaks stuff that worked in the previous one.
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"This is such an antiquated IT Industry philosophy! (if it ain't broke don't fix it)."
Yea, you go fuck your BIOS up just because you wanted some extra SSD speed. Watch your system brick out.
Have fun with that BIOS hot swap, assuming that doesn't fail as well.
There's a reason we don't fix non-broken things in the IT industry. It's called 'uptime.'
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If MS is spending most of its resources patching old systems, they're doing something wrong. Most of their resources should be spent on trying to develop new products.
I don't hear car manufacturers whining they have to have parts available for 20 year old cars, and cars cost significantly more than any piece of software (excluding the crap from Oracle and SAP).
And for the record, I do support as well as m
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All of that would change if Microsoft wrote IE to support the same platforms Firefox and Chrome do.
IE's only advantage is being closely coupled to the OS. Remove that advantage and there is absolutely no benefit to it. And Microsoft wants you to be locked in, they don't care if it's good for you.
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I actually like some of IE's features that other browsers don't have. Their tab grouping beats anything available out-of-the-box in Firefox or Chrome, and their Quick Tabs feature was excellent (until they inexplicably axed it in IE11). The built-in support for mapping or translating highlighted text is also quite nice. The best, though, is probably the built-in "tracking protection" (which actually makes an excellent ad blocker). I know there are other (niche) browsers with built-in ad blocking, but IE's f
Don't forget #11 (Score:1)
As I said yesterday. . . (Score:2)
in the discussion about Skype being made to stop working with older versions of OS X and comparing it, Skype, to phone usage, when you can get Microsoft or Apple to have its software work for thirty or forty years like one can with a telephone, you let me know.
Microsoft can stop support all it wants but that doesn't mean people aren't gong to stop using these older versions. People, particularly corporations, will tell them they're sick of constantly being forced to "upgrade" when there is nothing wrong ph
And I am reading this in IE 8 (Score:2)
MSIE11 can't into Windows Server 2012 (Score:1)
Ok, but MSIE 11 can't be installed on Windows Server 2012, only on Windows Server 2012 R2. Unlike the Windows 8.1, the R2 wasn't the free upgrade. So, if MSIE 10 won't be supported, can we still say that Microsoft is supporting the Windows Server 2012?
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So it would probably make better sense for them to work to enable newer IE versions on older OS versions. That said, what's logical, and what MS actually do often ain't the same!
IE11=IE6 all over again (Score:3)
Sure, all we have to do is rewrite the internet to work with IE11 and we'll be fine. I propose Microsoft should start with Sharepoint, Project server, CRM Dynamics etc that currently don't work well with IE11...
Firefox 3.6 has better overall compatibility than IE11!
Even Microsoft's websites doesn't support IE 11 (Score:1)
It just points you to a web page telling you to use Windows Update. If you need Office updates, you have to downgrade to IE 10, enable MS Update, and re-update to IE 11...
finally... an end is in sight. (Score:2)
I am counting the days until 2016!
I would love to put auto update on (Score:1)
KB2670838 (Score:1)