Microsoft to stop supporting older versions of IE

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Renegade

Renegade

Staff member
Mastermind
Finally a good bit of news for the webmasters and users who access sites through their office PCs coz now they don't have to optimize their site for the legacy versions which is time consuming and lends little benefit in terms of usage base.

This was needed to force companies to abandon their older versions and move to the newer version of IE. This however would not be so simple as most companies have legacy applications which run only on the older IE versions. This is going to be a huge undertaking for them in terms of time and cost. Needed nevertheless.

They don't even run on Chrome and Firefox but even if they did, some companies do not allow installation of any third party software unless it is part of their authorized application list.

In a surprise announcement yesterday, the head of IE's marketing said that after Jan. 12, 2016, Microsoft would support IE9 only on Windows Vista, IE10 only on Windows Server 2012, and IE11 on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.IE7 and IE8 will drop off support completely, no matter what OS they run on.

The browsers will continue working, but Microsoft will halt technical support and stop serving security updates for the banned versions. Because of the large number of critical vulnerabilities Microsoft patches in its browser -- 84 in the last two months alone -- it will be extremely risky running an unsupported version.

"My main concern is that, even with a long lead time [to January 2016], we're talking about businesses who generally need to take long lengths of time for change, often for compliance reasons," said Miller of Directions. "Even with almost a year and a half, enterprises need to get in motion soon. But I think a lot aren't going to, so they'll go through a fire drill, like when they chose to hang on to XP."
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Source
 
6pack said:
They should have ditched IE completely and put resources on something else.
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IE11 is good, but I prefer Firefox. Chrome gets slow after keeping multiple tabs open for a while.

The IE brand has suffered irreplaceable damage. Not sure anyone from the present generation will take it seriously even if they build something marvellous now. Same with the Windows brand. They need to do a massive overhaul, and not just on the technical front.
 
Oh yeah, please do it soon. I come in the category
...some companies do not allow installation of any third party software unless it is part of their authorized application list.
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And on IE8, which I am forced to use, some sites really starts dancing :P and some sites (udemy) simply put down a banner to f*** off old IE users.
 
ssslayer said:
And to add, Chrome and Safari are that high only because of popularity of Android and iPhone.
Otherwise it was always IE > FF > others perhaps not worthy of mention.
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what? even before smartphone euphoria, i remember since 2010 almost all my friends ditched ie for chrome. i love firefox though
 
srkmish said:
what? even before smartphone euphoria, i remember since 2010 almost all my friends ditched ie for chrome. i love firefox though
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Till 2007-08 (Thats when Chrome was launched, and that's when the smartphones really took off because of iPhone).
We have a clear IE dominance, and FF trailing quite close by.

Till 2010 we have a slow and steady rise of Chrome due to people ditching IE for it. Like you have said.
But the recent 2011 onwards growth of Chrome as the most dominant browser - I would squarely place popularity of Android.
The same goes for Safari.
 
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