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Support for older versions of Internet Explorer ends on January 12, 2016

402 points by JoshGlazebrook 11y ago

stephenr 11y ago
From the document - "older" means < 11.
- jakswa 11y ago
  The latest IE for Vista SP2 looks to be IE9, so it looks like it'll continue to receive updates. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I...
  - melling 11y ago
    Doesn't seem to have much market share: https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... IE8 still has over 10%
    - dudus 11y ago
      Acording to this other source it's only 2%. These estimates are so different it's hard to trust on any of it. http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201410-201510 http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially... Browser trend will probably be more influenced by region and public. If your public is stay home dads in China you should definitvely be looking into iE8, if your public is tech workers in the Bay Area you shouldn't even care about iE11.
      - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
        There's a difference in methodology that explains some of the divergence: Netmarketshare counts each user only once per day (per site?). If you assume users if Chrome/Firefox etc are more active on the web than IE8 users then it fits. Which number is more important when deciding what to support on your site is a complicated question. Probably your own user demographic has a greater impact though.
      - mercurial 11y ago
        It's definitely a question of context. You have a large number of companies who either take a very long time to update to newer versions of Windows, or who developed a number of internal applications which will not work with newer IEs.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    Sigh I blame Microsoft's confusing description: > What is end of support? Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical supports and security updates. Internet Explorer 11 is the last version of Internet Explorer, and will continue to receive security updates, compatibility fixes, and technical support on Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. Not a single mention of Vista/etc.
    - taspeotis 11y ago
      Vista left mainstream support three years ago [1]. [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/lifecycle http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/lifecycle
      - mtgx 11y ago
        Mainstream supports means no more features, but it's still getting patches, I imagine.
        toyg 11y ago
        Nope. "End of support refers to the date when Microsoft no longer provides automatic fixes, updates, or online technical assistance. [...] you will no longer receive security updates"
        tempestn 11y ago
        That refers to the end of extended support, which just recently happened for Windows XP. Vista is under extended support until April 2017, as mentioned on the page you quoted from.
        Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y ago
        I think Microsoft is deliberately confusing there, but that's referring to the end of extended support. Extended support means only security fixes (and fixes you pay tons of money for). Scroll down to the table on this page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/lifepolicy https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/lifepolicy
  - nikbackm 11y ago
    But then only on Vista SP2 and not e.g. Windows 7/8/10 I would assume.
orionblastar 11y ago
There are a lot of businesses that use older versions of Windows and use Internet Explorer as their default web browser and use group policy from a Windows Server to prevent the install of a third part web browser. Forcing everyone to use IE. They will be vulnerable to attacks because of this and they will refuse to pay money to upgrade from XP or Vista to go to Windows 10. It will be because their business software only works with older Windows versions. They can't afford someone to migrate to Windows 10 or they lost the source code after programmers retired or got fired and took it with them on their personal laptops because they lacked a source control system. It is a big mess out there. Colleges are even worse as is the federal government who use outdated Windows Updates by three years and expired antivirus products.
- serge2k 11y ago
  If you aren't willing to invest in maintaining your infrastructure then it will start to fail.
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    I agree but I still know businesses that use Windows 95 machines and Wordperfect 6.0 for their business stuff. I know a lot of businesses still use DOS or OS/2 and very old PCs because they don't trust Windows. I would get offers to volunteer for non-profits that still use old PCs with older operating systems on them and they need help fixing them or maintaining them. There are a lot of third world nations using old surplus PCs because they cannot afford anything else. So they get our leftovers. For example in Thailand they still use Windows XP, a pirated version but they put it on every PC. They have a skin for it that looks like Vista but it is still XP SP3. A copy of legit Windows is too expensive so they used the pirated XP because they can buy it on the streets for $1 due to a lax copyright law.
- kbenson 11y ago
  In many cases we are talking about organizations using software that requires not just an obsolete internet explorer version, but an ancient one. There have been many years to assess and fix this problem, and just because companies stuck their heads in the sand and expected it would always be someone else's problem. I have little pity for the companies, but I feel deeply for the IT employees that will have to deal with the fallout from poor decision making from management. Buying or developing technologies that rely on weird proprietary quirks of free versions of software isn't very sane. There's not even a business model in place you can rely on to continue to want to support you since it's free. That brings up an interesting point though, a special NPAPI plugin that aimed to provide perfect compatibility with older IE versions for a small per-seat license fee could do really well...
daurnimator 11y ago
Interesting that the meta tag for this page is "end-of-xp-support"
Theodores 11y ago
So does this mean I no longer have to test my website with Windows IE (6!) 7-10 at all ever, under any circumstances? And be able to tell clients that IE11 onwards is all that has to work in IE-land?
- joshschreuder 11y ago
  You can tell your clients you only support whatever you want, and they can tell you they won't be a client of yours anymore unless you support what they want.
  - robzyb 11y ago
    It depends on what type of client / relationship we are talking about. It might go like this: Theodores: I only want to support IE11+ Client: No. What if our users have older browsers? * later * Theodores: I only want to support IE11+ Client: No. What if our users have older browsers? Theodores: That should be exceedingly rare, Microsoft have actually pulled support for those versions recently. See this link. Client: Oh, ok then, great. IE11+ it is.
- partiallypro 11y ago
  Depends on your client. Currently my company only supports IE9+. I personally only support IE10+, though I'll still throw on a shiv or use modernizer, but I'm not going out of my way. This hasn't cost any business. IE8's stickiness is largely from older business machines or China. For client facing sites in the U.S./E.U., imo the support isn't warranted unless you can point out through analytics that it would alienate a big portion of your audience.
douche 11y ago
Thank goodness. IE 11 has enough warts and weirdness; having to deal with all the brokenness in IE 8 was driving my front-end colleagues to alcoholism... I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome...
- Flenser 11y ago
  IE11 has an IE7 compatibility mode so line-of-business apps are going to be targeting IE7 for a long time to come. One of my employer's clients is only now willing to pay to upgrade from IE5.5 rendering on IE8 to IE7 on 11.
  - polskibus 11y ago
    Ie11 compat. mode is not the same as in older versions of ie.
  - flomo 11y ago
    I was involved in a similar discussion and the logic was hilarious. "Browser standards change too often." (!?) "So we're only to support an old buggy implementation of the specs that is sorta emulated in one modern browser." They sounded like they were afraid of having their security blanket ripped away. If you still have some IE5 stuff, my guess is that you have to bring it up to the HTML5 table layout zone. And then you need to back polyfill a bunch of stuff to deal with the "IE7 mode" requirement.
- isomorphic 11y ago
  > I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome... I understand the sentiment, but to be clear: Ideally we do not want any one vendor with a majority browser share. Otherwise someone will get complacent and we'll have a repeat of the dark times (IE6). Having multiple browser vendors is good for the web.
  - debaserab2 11y ago
    Yeah... but I kinda wouldn't mind if they were all using the same open source rendering engine under the hood.
kyberias 11y ago
Are there any guesses when the support for IE 11 ends? Or when will Microsoft remove IE from Windows? Never?
- zamalek 11y ago
  With plugin support being dropped from browsers "never" is likely. You're always going to need that one browser that supports the "old web."
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  The impression I get from this site and similar blog posts: IE 11 ends with Windows 10. Edge the Browser isn't classified as a Windows component, to my knowledge, and so also shouldn't classify for "extended support" like IE has in the past. It certainly sounds like the intention is to drop IE entirely once Edge has feature parity and user adoption on its side. (Things are a bit trickier when talking about EdgeHTML the Renderer which I would think is a Windows component still, given that it runs some of the Windows Universal Platform, but here also the benefit of forking it from IE is that they can keep the support policies clear from day one as opposed to having to fix up things after the fact like they did here.)
  - kyberias 11y ago
    Edge cannot have feature parity. For example, it will not support plugins. I don't think they can drop IE from Windows due to enterprise use and LOB applications.
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      By parity here I do not meant "exact same feature set" or even really "equivalent feature set", but "enough features to get the job done and feel like a real browser". For instance, Chrome-style JS extensions (~plugins) are coming soon enough. Beyond that, if an enterprise has not gotten the message not to build LOB applications as browser plugins and not to build for one and only one browser model any time since IE6 has been deprecated, then IMNSHO they deserve what they get when IE11 dies as the last "IE". Given the support timeline expected for Windows 10, enterprises have presumably roughly a decade of extended support to adapt before IE dies. Really hope enterprises are paying attention to that (but of course we know a bunch will not and will complain in ten years about lack of support and those of us that got the memo today can proudly mock them then).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zmmmmm 11y ago
It's pretty interesting to see Microsoft edging out onto this limb of abandoning their long held policy of supporting their software for long periods of time. There is pretty much no alternative, so on the one hand it is not like their enterprise customers have anywhere else to go. On the other hand, it's one less argument for companies to stick with Microsoft if they are already on the edge. I'll be interested to see how it turns out if they keep pushing in this direction.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  This IE "change" isn't so much an abandoning of their long held policies as clarifying them and fixing some wrong assumptions companies had made in the past. Microsoft's support policies for the OS components has long held that what they will provide (extended) support for is the most recent Service Pack version that has kept up with Windows Updates. For various reasons, companies have tried to take advantage of the fact that IE is an OS component to qualify it for extended support and also taking advantage of the concept that IE updated/versioned at a slightly different pace from Windows Service Packs to assume that they could claim the extended support timeframe for an individual IE release as if it were entire OS versions. The amazing thing is that Microsoft took this long to correct what should have been an obvious mistake: that IE versions apply like other Windows components and they should only need to support the most up to date one for that OS version. The kind thing here is that Microsoft has taken ownership of that mistake, publicly admitted that they made it and that the fix was coming, and given companies more than a year and a half (and advertising to that effect, such as the site linked here) to adjust to the fix.
pilif 11y ago
Of course this doesn't change anything for the 70% of our users who are still on XP and Vista. At best we get IE9, at worst IE8
- thanksgiving 11y ago
  You should start nudging people to use alternative browsers. I'd suggest Mozilla Firefox. You do not need administrative privileges to use Mozilla Firefox and with the extended support releases, there is no reason why anything other than legacy internal services (running on internal network) should use Internet Explorer at all. Assuming your application does not need IE specific features, what are some reasons that prevent you from nudging users this direction?
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    Related: "Today, we’re announcing the end of Chrome’s support for Windows XP, as well as Windows Vista" http://chrome.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/updates-to-chrome-platform-support.html http://chrome.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/updates-to-chrome-plat...
  - pilif 11y ago
    >what are some reasons that prevent you from nudging users this direction our customers want to sell to these IE8 users. The response to telling them to upgrade is "we'll use a different vendor then - one which does support IE8"
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Firefox still supports Windows XP Service Pack 2. Mozilla has no immediate plans to retire XP SP2 support. In fact, Mozilla is adapting the mozilla.org website's SSL/TLS support so IE users on XP can still access the Firefox download page. :) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works-some-versions-windows-xp https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works...
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
This is good news for those who aren't using older versions of Windows (older than Windows 7). For everyone else (which is still a lot of people), this is very bad news.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  Actually it is not a lot. Windows XP already lost support for their latest release of IE years ago, so this doesn't impact them. This may impact Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 but both are out of mainstream support, and Vista's numbers are extremely low overall. Supposedly 1.74-1.77%.
- jinst8gmi 11y ago
  Why not just download Firefox if you have an old version of Windows? Any particular reason why anyone would prefer IE 7/8 for personal use?
hartror 11y ago
We still have customers with IE6. Risk adverse institutions like airports really don't want to upgrade things.
- thanksgiving 11y ago
  I'd say they are not very risk averse if they are still using IE6. In fact, I'd say they are living on the edge. I hope the CTO has a really nice golden parachute because they will need it when (and not if) the proverbial poop hits the proverbial fan.
  - larister 11y ago
    I hope they _don't_ have a golden parachute
    - douche 11y ago
      How about a parachute _made of_ gold...
- orblivion 11y ago
  Maybe there should be a much more stripped down thing like the web with a much smaller attack surface or need for new features, so updates will only be occasional security updates.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  In China? If you look at the numbers and include China they're quite bleak. If you exclude China it doesn't seem quite so bad. But China has a massive Windows XP piracy problem that isn't going away.
- yuhong 11y ago
  How many have XP/Server 2003 custom support?
- gulpahum 11y ago
  I believe those are closed systems not connected to the internet. It still would be better to upgrade them (for easier access to spare parts, knowledge, etc). Otherwise they end up like this French airport which was shut down just few weeks ago because their Windows 3.1 failed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559687
tempestn 11y ago
Wow, I'm all for EOL'ing old versions of IE, but I'm surprised at the complete lack of notice (on a corporate scale). Was this known to be in the works for a while? My thinking is just that most larger companies will have zero chance of hitting a January deadline, and once the deadline passes, there's really no urgency to upgrade by any particular time. I would think a ~12 month deadline might be more effective in getting people to upgrade (as well as resulting in fewer compromised browsers).
- paulirish 11y ago
  This was announced in August 2014: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-internet-explorer.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-dat...
  - tempestn 11y ago
    Cool, thanks. Perhaps a year and a half is too long! More likely I just didn't notice at the time since I don't use IE.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  I think a lot of people would have seen this coming, I'm surprised they 'supported' older browsers for so long.
  - runholm 11y ago
    Corporate scale business does not want to depend on "seeing things coming". When you have millions upon millions invested you want to get explicit deadlines for when support for products you depend upon will be dropped. It is very expensive to either do unnecessary rewrites or getting started too late on necessary rewrites.
nowprovision 11y ago
How will I sleep tonight...
sengork 11y ago
Some of the lower tier (but very common) LAN network hardware requires old versions of IE to function during firmware upgrades and configuration changes with no CLI equivalent options. In most cases the hardware vendors never address the browser compatibility issue (due to focus on new products) and only provide a warning sign upon login. Likewise the hardware isn't easy to replace in some environments. This use case is completely absent from the web browsing traffic usage patterns on the internet which predominate in browser usage statistics.
- cletusw 11y ago
  Use the old, unsupported, insecure browser only during those upgrades and a modern browser for everyday use. The end-of-life-ed browsers will continue functioning, they just won't get updated. Might require use of a VM, but the cost of that added complexity is vastly inferior to what web developers worldwide spend supporting those old browsers.
- i386081 11y ago
  That reminds me of the webinterface of my old router. If you looked at the badly written javascript source, you would see why it refused to work on anything other than internet explorer. They were even explicitly checking for it in the useragent!
Falkon1313 11y ago
Apologies for the rant, but this is the second article today that I've seen about a company discontinuing support for outdated software. (The other being a gnu rant about Windows not supporting XP.) And there was a third a couple days ago about an open source community announcing pending EOL of an old version. What bugs me is so many negative comments along the lines of "What about all those poor helpless trillion dollar megacorporations that are stuck on an old version because they use proprietary custom software? Microsoft is evil because they don't guarantee to support and repair everything that they've ever made for free until the heat death of the universe!" Those companies and organizations are stuck not because of Microsoft, but because they mismanaged their own proprietary software or web applications. For more than a decade, they never even bothered to plan for maintenance, although they routinely plan, budget, and schedule depreciation and maintenance for everything else in the business - things that move much slower than software and far far slower than web development. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but that's their fault, not Microsoft's. My Windows machine is still on Windows 7 now, and not ready to upgrade to 10 yet due to compatibility issues. But I have 4 more years to get things working in a virtual environment, or find replacements. Software that I run dates back to the 70s, so some didn't work by default in 7, but in the end there was only 1 program that I couldn't replace or get working with an upgrade or VM. I reverse engineered the data to migrate it (it used an obsolete floating point format from before floating point ops were standard in PCs). If I can do that, a company or large organization can do it. For web software, the pace of the state of the art is even faster. Most anything over a few years old probably needs a rewrite and data migration if it hasn't been maintained properly (and possibly even if it has). Especially anything that used old plugins. But the focus on browser versions is weird. I strongly dislike the practice of web developers/designers speaking of 'supporting' IE6/IE8 or whatever. That's a Microsoft product, Microsoft supports it or not, you and I don't. We support the websites that we build, which we build to current industry standards (such as they are). If you try to access it using a nonstandard client like IE6, Arachne running on DOS, Hyperlink on a C64, or a line mode browser on a teletype, then your experience will be different. The server side will work fine, but your client may not do what it's not capable of. You can't expect to stick a blu-ray disc on a record player or shove a flash drive full of MP3s into an 8-track tape deck and have the end-user experience be the same. It just doesn't work that way. Sure we can try to build custom client-side workarounds, but is that worth the cost (especially given that new browsers are free)? Overheard at a meeting once: Client: "Our stats say that'll be fine for our customers, but our executive team mostly has older versions of IE, so this won't work for them. We don't want it to look bad to the CEO." 3rd Party Agency Manager: "We'll order new laptops for them and have them delivered, just tell us how many and where to send them. It will be much cheaper for you and save us all a lot of time."
watson 11y ago
Am I the only one who finds all the happy faces Microsoft have injected into the page a bit weird? It feels like they are trying to sell me some bad news but make me feel happy at the same time. Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off
- derefr 11y ago
  Hey, they're probably happy as heck to be free of the enterprise support burden.
  - iwwr 11y ago
    Not so fast, it just means enterprise support prices have gone up for those organisations resisting change and still requiring security. For example, the entire country of South Korea.
    - zitterbewegung 11y ago
      So they are happy that they will get more from their Support partners
- adrianbye 11y ago
  it sounds like you criticizing our stock art photo overlords..
- kintamanimatt 11y ago
  I don't think it's weird at all, and it's probably a deliberate design choice by the developer that made this page. They've probably probably suffered for years because of IE's poor support for standards and other quirks. I think it's a mini celebration by way of design!
- johnny99 11y ago
  You are not the only one. My immediate thought was, what's up with the dazed-looking Microsoft stock humans.
qxxx 11y ago
ok, microsoft wont support it.. but my customers will support it forever. As a webdeveloper i have still customers that are using internet explorer 8 because it is their company policy (big company)
- alkonaut 11y ago
  Making a corporate decision to stay on a 6 year old browser that doesn't receive security updates because "that's the one we certified" (or whatever the reason may be) is madness. The whole point of microsofts' action here is to say that it doesn't work like that. If you have an infrastructure of webapps/intranets/whetever then you must carry the continuous cost of making sure they sure they work on new browsers all the time, because old browsers will be quickly become insecure.
davidjgraph 11y ago
I love the way they can't even give a straight answer to their own questions: "Does this mean Microsoft is changing the support lifecycle policy for Internet Explorer?" "The latest version of Internet Explorer will continue to follow the component policy, which means that it follows the support lifecycle and is supported for as long as the Windows operating system on which it is installed. Focusing support on the latest version of Internet Explorer for a supported Windows operating system is in line with industry standards." A simple yes or no will do.
- robzyb 11y ago
  > A simple yes or no will do. Haven't they done better than that? Except they've dealt with the possible issue that the reader has an incorrect understanding of the support lifecycle policy for Internet Explorer.
gglnx 11y ago
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I... As Vista is still supported, the IE9 lives on.
ollie87 11y ago
My work ICT department recently upgraded us. To IE 9. :(
Zardoz84 11y ago
Oh... And we must support IE 8 ¬¬
andy_ppp 11y ago
The document makes things wildly unclear as to which versions of IE are actually supported by Microsoft. In practical terms it's still IE9 and IE11 for a while (so far as I can tell)? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I... I'm sure there is still a load of Windows Vista SP2 machines around...
- mkozlows 11y ago
  Yes, Vista still exists -- but it's not much of the market, because it only existed for a short while before Win7 replaced it, and it never got much corporate adoption (where people hold onto legacy IE forever). Unsupported XP is, in practice, probably more of an issue than Vista.
- gtk40 11y ago
  My thoughts too. If versions of Windows less than Windows 7 are supported which cannot run IE11, and IE11 is the only version being supported, are those older versions of Windows still really supported? Windows Vista has support through 2017 and Windows Server 2008 has support through 2020.
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    IE9 remains supported on Vista (as it's the last release of IE that runs on it). IE9/IE11 is all that remains supported on client releases on Windows (Server and Embedded versions of Windows continue to use pretty much everything from IE7 upwards). https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-explorer?wa=wsignin1.0 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-ex... provides a clearer overview of what the supported version where is. (Note that it excludes OSes that are currently supported by end support before 12 Jan 2016.)
pass-word 11y ago
ie ,be well.edge,goodbye.
jgalt212 11y ago
Our front-end team welcomes this news, but I still think a non-trivial amount enterprises who do their own security work will still be using IE 8 into 2017.
tow21 11y ago
An unfortunate datapoint: for one of our products I'm still seeing >25% users on IE8. This is a (primarily UK) product most of whose users are on internal bank networks. It's come down from about 40% 2 years ago, so it's heading in the right direction - but I'm not sure I see it going away any time soon. There's huge organizational inertia inside these banks around IT systems - if we want to serve them, we need to support IE8 for the foreseeable future.
- randlet 11y ago
  Same story for me. I run an open source project used by hospitals and I think I'm stuck supporting IE8 for another year or two.
  - hippich 11y ago
    hi, which project is that?
    - randlet 11y ago
      http://qatrackplus.com http://qatrackplus.com It's a self hosted Django app for tracking quality assurance data for radiation therapy centres (although it could easily be adapted for other purposes).
- rogeryu 11y ago
  They are probably XP users. You can create a small notification on top of your website, notifying them that they should move to Firefox or Chrome because their browser is not safe anymore...
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Chrome support for XP ends at the end of the year. http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/google-will-still-support-chrome-on-windows-xp-until-the-end-of-the-year/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/google-will-still-support-c... Firefox (as far as I can tell) still supports XP SP2, but who knows for how long.
_ao789 11y ago
everyone smiling there is a frontend dev
- err4nt 11y ago
  we'll still have to support it, now I can just consider more recent versions of IE as 'legacy support' which it is. My definition of a modern browser is one that self-updates, this is essential for security. There are plenty to choose from, but if you're using a browser that doesn't keep itself up to date you're asking for security problems.
kriro 11y ago
Random thought that popped into my head when reading this (apart from the obvious...stockhappyness): I'm curious and know very little about this topic in general. How does an announcement like this affect 0-day prices? My guess is that IE11- 0-days should skyrocket for a bit but then fall because for a while they'll be really valuable and no patches will come but then eventually too many people migrate to the higher version? Could 0-day prices actually be a decent way to forecast future adaption?
hackerboos 11y ago
Are they just going to do what they did with XP and extend support to those that have the cash?
jp_sc 11y ago
After that day we only need a really bad 0-day exploit to make everybody actually update their browser or switch to Chrome.
- Guest192038 11y ago
  Let's save a step, and simply create an exploit that automatically installs Firefox/Chrome, and uninstalls IE.
- scholia 11y ago
  They still need to update IE, even if they don't use it. It's code on their hard drives....
dfar1 11y ago
Best Christmas gift ever!
kentbrew 11y ago
Just updated http://noaiee.com http://noaiee.com to reflect the new countdown deadline and discovered that conditional comments aren't working in IE10. Anyone know how to detect IE10 without using JavaScript?

402 points by JoshGlazebrook 11y ago

stephenr 11y ago

From the document - "older" means < 11.

jakswa 11y ago
The latest IE for Vista SP2 looks to be IE9, so it looks like it'll continue to receive updates. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I...
- melling 11y ago
  Doesn't seem to have much market share: https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... IE8 still has over 10%
  - dudus 11y ago
    Acording to this other source it's only 2%. These estimates are so different it's hard to trust on any of it. http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201410-201510 http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially... Browser trend will probably be more influenced by region and public. If your public is stay home dads in China you should definitvely be looking into iE8, if your public is tech workers in the Bay Area you shouldn't even care about iE11.
    - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      There's a difference in methodology that explains some of the divergence: Netmarketshare counts each user only once per day (per site?). If you assume users if Chrome/Firefox etc are more active on the web than IE8 users then it fits. Which number is more important when deciding what to support on your site is a complicated question. Probably your own user demographic has a greater impact though.
    - mercurial 11y ago
      It's definitely a question of context. You have a large number of companies who either take a very long time to update to newer versions of Windows, or who developed a number of internal applications which will not work with newer IEs.
- stephenr 11y ago
  Sigh I blame Microsoft's confusing description: > What is end of support? Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical supports and security updates. Internet Explorer 11 is the last version of Internet Explorer, and will continue to receive security updates, compatibility fixes, and technical support on Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. Not a single mention of Vista/etc.
  - taspeotis 11y ago
    Vista left mainstream support three years ago [1]. [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/lifecycle http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/lifecycle
    - mtgx 11y ago
      Mainstream supports means no more features, but it's still getting patches, I imagine.
      - toyg 11y ago
        Nope. "End of support refers to the date when Microsoft no longer provides automatic fixes, updates, or online technical assistance. [...] you will no longer receive security updates"
        tempestn 11y ago
        That refers to the end of extended support, which just recently happened for Windows XP. Vista is under extended support until April 2017, as mentioned on the page you quoted from.
        Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y ago
        I think Microsoft is deliberately confusing there, but that's referring to the end of extended support. Extended support means only security fixes (and fixes you pay tons of money for). Scroll down to the table on this page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/lifepolicy https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/lifepolicy
- nikbackm 11y ago
  But then only on Vista SP2 and not e.g. Windows 7/8/10 I would assume.

orionblastar 11y ago

There are a lot of businesses that use older versions of Windows and use Internet Explorer as their default web browser and use group policy from a Windows Server to prevent the install of a third part web browser. Forcing everyone to use IE. They will be vulnerable to attacks because of this and they will refuse to pay money to upgrade from XP or Vista to go to Windows 10. It will be because their business software only works with older Windows versions. They can't afford someone to migrate to Windows 10 or they lost the source code after programmers retired or got fired and took it with them on their personal laptops because they lacked a source control system. It is a big mess out there. Colleges are even worse as is the federal government who use outdated Windows Updates by three years and expired antivirus products.

serge2k 11y ago
If you aren't willing to invest in maintaining your infrastructure then it will start to fail.
- orionblastar 11y ago
  I agree but I still know businesses that use Windows 95 machines and Wordperfect 6.0 for their business stuff. I know a lot of businesses still use DOS or OS/2 and very old PCs because they don't trust Windows. I would get offers to volunteer for non-profits that still use old PCs with older operating systems on them and they need help fixing them or maintaining them. There are a lot of third world nations using old surplus PCs because they cannot afford anything else. So they get our leftovers. For example in Thailand they still use Windows XP, a pirated version but they put it on every PC. They have a skin for it that looks like Vista but it is still XP SP3. A copy of legit Windows is too expensive so they used the pirated XP because they can buy it on the streets for $1 due to a lax copyright law.
kbenson 11y ago
In many cases we are talking about organizations using software that requires not just an obsolete internet explorer version, but an ancient one. There have been many years to assess and fix this problem, and just because companies stuck their heads in the sand and expected it would always be someone else's problem. I have little pity for the companies, but I feel deeply for the IT employees that will have to deal with the fallout from poor decision making from management. Buying or developing technologies that rely on weird proprietary quirks of free versions of software isn't very sane. There's not even a business model in place you can rely on to continue to want to support you since it's free. That brings up an interesting point though, a special NPAPI plugin that aimed to provide perfect compatibility with older IE versions for a small per-seat license fee could do really well...

daurnimator 11y ago

Interesting that the meta tag for this page is "end-of-xp-support"

Theodores 11y ago

So does this mean I no longer have to test my website with Windows IE (6!) 7-10 at all ever, under any circumstances? And be able to tell clients that IE11 onwards is all that has to work in IE-land?

joshschreuder 11y ago
You can tell your clients you only support whatever you want, and they can tell you they won't be a client of yours anymore unless you support what they want.
- robzyb 11y ago
  It depends on what type of client / relationship we are talking about. It might go like this: Theodores: I only want to support IE11+ Client: No. What if our users have older browsers? * later * Theodores: I only want to support IE11+ Client: No. What if our users have older browsers? Theodores: That should be exceedingly rare, Microsoft have actually pulled support for those versions recently. See this link. Client: Oh, ok then, great. IE11+ it is.
partiallypro 11y ago
Depends on your client. Currently my company only supports IE9+. I personally only support IE10+, though I'll still throw on a shiv or use modernizer, but I'm not going out of my way. This hasn't cost any business. IE8's stickiness is largely from older business machines or China. For client facing sites in the U.S./E.U., imo the support isn't warranted unless you can point out through analytics that it would alienate a big portion of your audience.

douche 11y ago

Thank goodness. IE 11 has enough warts and weirdness; having to deal with all the brokenness in IE 8 was driving my front-end colleagues to alcoholism... I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome...

Flenser 11y ago
IE11 has an IE7 compatibility mode so line-of-business apps are going to be targeting IE7 for a long time to come. One of my employer's clients is only now willing to pay to upgrade from IE5.5 rendering on IE8 to IE7 on 11.
- polskibus 11y ago
  Ie11 compat. mode is not the same as in older versions of ie.
- flomo 11y ago
  I was involved in a similar discussion and the logic was hilarious. "Browser standards change too often." (!?) "So we're only to support an old buggy implementation of the specs that is sorta emulated in one modern browser." They sounded like they were afraid of having their security blanket ripped away. If you still have some IE5 stuff, my guess is that you have to bring it up to the HTML5 table layout zone. And then you need to back polyfill a bunch of stuff to deal with the "IE7 mode" requirement.
isomorphic 11y ago
> I have a beautiful dream sometimes, where I go to work, and I only have to care about supporting Chrome... I understand the sentiment, but to be clear: Ideally we do not want any one vendor with a majority browser share. Otherwise someone will get complacent and we'll have a repeat of the dark times (IE6). Having multiple browser vendors is good for the web.
- debaserab2 11y ago
  Yeah... but I kinda wouldn't mind if they were all using the same open source rendering engine under the hood.

kyberias 11y ago

Are there any guesses when the support for IE 11 ends? Or when will Microsoft remove IE from Windows? Never?

zamalek 11y ago
With plugin support being dropped from browsers "never" is likely. You're always going to need that one browser that supports the "old web."
WorldMaker 11y ago
The impression I get from this site and similar blog posts: IE 11 ends with Windows 10. Edge the Browser isn't classified as a Windows component, to my knowledge, and so also shouldn't classify for "extended support" like IE has in the past. It certainly sounds like the intention is to drop IE entirely once Edge has feature parity and user adoption on its side. (Things are a bit trickier when talking about EdgeHTML the Renderer which I would think is a Windows component still, given that it runs some of the Windows Universal Platform, but here also the benefit of forking it from IE is that they can keep the support policies clear from day one as opposed to having to fix up things after the fact like they did here.)
- kyberias 11y ago
  Edge cannot have feature parity. For example, it will not support plugins. I don't think they can drop IE from Windows due to enterprise use and LOB applications.
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    By parity here I do not meant "exact same feature set" or even really "equivalent feature set", but "enough features to get the job done and feel like a real browser". For instance, Chrome-style JS extensions (~plugins) are coming soon enough. Beyond that, if an enterprise has not gotten the message not to build LOB applications as browser plugins and not to build for one and only one browser model any time since IE6 has been deprecated, then IMNSHO they deserve what they get when IE11 dies as the last "IE". Given the support timeline expected for Windows 10, enterprises have presumably roughly a decade of extended support to adapt before IE dies. Really hope enterprises are paying attention to that (but of course we know a bunch will not and will complain in ten years about lack of support and those of us that got the memo today can proudly mock them then).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

zmmmmm 11y ago

It's pretty interesting to see Microsoft edging out onto this limb of abandoning their long held policy of supporting their software for long periods of time. There is pretty much no alternative, so on the one hand it is not like their enterprise customers have anywhere else to go. On the other hand, it's one less argument for companies to stick with Microsoft if they are already on the edge. I'll be interested to see how it turns out if they keep pushing in this direction.

WorldMaker 11y ago
This IE "change" isn't so much an abandoning of their long held policies as clarifying them and fixing some wrong assumptions companies had made in the past. Microsoft's support policies for the OS components has long held that what they will provide (extended) support for is the most recent Service Pack version that has kept up with Windows Updates. For various reasons, companies have tried to take advantage of the fact that IE is an OS component to qualify it for extended support and also taking advantage of the concept that IE updated/versioned at a slightly different pace from Windows Service Packs to assume that they could claim the extended support timeframe for an individual IE release as if it were entire OS versions. The amazing thing is that Microsoft took this long to correct what should have been an obvious mistake: that IE versions apply like other Windows components and they should only need to support the most up to date one for that OS version. The kind thing here is that Microsoft has taken ownership of that mistake, publicly admitted that they made it and that the fix was coming, and given companies more than a year and a half (and advertising to that effect, such as the site linked here) to adjust to the fix.

pilif 11y ago

Of course this doesn't change anything for the 70% of our users who are still on XP and Vista. At best we get IE9, at worst IE8

thanksgiving 11y ago
You should start nudging people to use alternative browsers. I'd suggest Mozilla Firefox. You do not need administrative privileges to use Mozilla Firefox and with the extended support releases, there is no reason why anything other than legacy internal services (running on internal network) should use Internet Explorer at all. Assuming your application does not need IE specific features, what are some reasons that prevent you from nudging users this direction?
- kalleboo 11y ago
  Related: "Today, we’re announcing the end of Chrome’s support for Windows XP, as well as Windows Vista" http://chrome.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/updates-to-chrome-platform-support.html http://chrome.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/updates-to-chrome-plat...
- pilif 11y ago
  >what are some reasons that prevent you from nudging users this direction our customers want to sell to these IE8 users. The response to telling them to upgrade is "we'll use a different vendor then - one which does support IE8"
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Firefox still supports Windows XP Service Pack 2. Mozilla has no immediate plans to retire XP SP2 support. In fact, Mozilla is adapting the mozilla.org website's SSL/TLS support so IE users on XP can still access the Firefox download page. :) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works-some-versions-windows-xp https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works...

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

This is good news for those who aren't using older versions of Windows (older than Windows 7). For everyone else (which is still a lot of people), this is very bad news.

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
Actually it is not a lot. Windows XP already lost support for their latest release of IE years ago, so this doesn't impact them. This may impact Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 but both are out of mainstream support, and Vista's numbers are extremely low overall. Supposedly 1.74-1.77%.
jinst8gmi 11y ago
Why not just download Firefox if you have an old version of Windows? Any particular reason why anyone would prefer IE 7/8 for personal use?

hartror 11y ago

We still have customers with IE6. Risk adverse institutions like airports really don't want to upgrade things.

thanksgiving 11y ago
I'd say they are not very risk averse if they are still using IE6. In fact, I'd say they are living on the edge. I hope the CTO has a really nice golden parachute because they will need it when (and not if) the proverbial poop hits the proverbial fan.
- larister 11y ago
  I hope they _don't_ have a golden parachute
  - douche 11y ago
    How about a parachute _made of_ gold...
orblivion 11y ago
Maybe there should be a much more stripped down thing like the web with a much smaller attack surface or need for new features, so updates will only be occasional security updates.
UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
In China? If you look at the numbers and include China they're quite bleak. If you exclude China it doesn't seem quite so bad. But China has a massive Windows XP piracy problem that isn't going away.
yuhong 11y ago
How many have XP/Server 2003 custom support?
gulpahum 11y ago
I believe those are closed systems not connected to the internet. It still would be better to upgrade them (for easier access to spare parts, knowledge, etc). Otherwise they end up like this French airport which was shut down just few weeks ago because their Windows 3.1 failed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559687

tempestn 11y ago

Wow, I'm all for EOL'ing old versions of IE, but I'm surprised at the complete lack of notice (on a corporate scale). Was this known to be in the works for a while? My thinking is just that most larger companies will have zero chance of hitting a January deadline, and once the deadline passes, there's really no urgency to upgrade by any particular time. I would think a ~12 month deadline might be more effective in getting people to upgrade (as well as resulting in fewer compromised browsers).

paulirish 11y ago
This was announced in August 2014: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-internet-explorer.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-dat...
- tempestn 11y ago
  Cool, thanks. Perhaps a year and a half is too long! More likely I just didn't notice at the time since I don't use IE.
mrmondo 11y ago
I think a lot of people would have seen this coming, I'm surprised they 'supported' older browsers for so long.
- runholm 11y ago
  Corporate scale business does not want to depend on "seeing things coming". When you have millions upon millions invested you want to get explicit deadlines for when support for products you depend upon will be dropped. It is very expensive to either do unnecessary rewrites or getting started too late on necessary rewrites.

nowprovision 11y ago

How will I sleep tonight...

sengork 11y ago

Some of the lower tier (but very common) LAN network hardware requires old versions of IE to function during firmware upgrades and configuration changes with no CLI equivalent options. In most cases the hardware vendors never address the browser compatibility issue (due to focus on new products) and only provide a warning sign upon login. Likewise the hardware isn't easy to replace in some environments. This use case is completely absent from the web browsing traffic usage patterns on the internet which predominate in browser usage statistics.

cletusw 11y ago
Use the old, unsupported, insecure browser only during those upgrades and a modern browser for everyday use. The end-of-life-ed browsers will continue functioning, they just won't get updated. Might require use of a VM, but the cost of that added complexity is vastly inferior to what web developers worldwide spend supporting those old browsers.
i386081 11y ago
That reminds me of the webinterface of my old router. If you looked at the badly written javascript source, you would see why it refused to work on anything other than internet explorer. They were even explicitly checking for it in the useragent!

Falkon1313 11y ago

Apologies for the rant, but this is the second article today that I've seen about a company discontinuing support for outdated software. (The other being a gnu rant about Windows not supporting XP.) And there was a third a couple days ago about an open source community announcing pending EOL of an old version. What bugs me is so many negative comments along the lines of "What about all those poor helpless trillion dollar megacorporations that are stuck on an old version because they use proprietary custom software? Microsoft is evil because they don't guarantee to support and repair everything that they've ever made for free until the heat death of the universe!" Those companies and organizations are stuck not because of Microsoft, but because they mismanaged their own proprietary software or web applications. For more than a decade, they never even bothered to plan for maintenance, although they routinely plan, budget, and schedule depreciation and maintenance for everything else in the business - things that move much slower than software and far far slower than web development. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but that's their fault, not Microsoft's. My Windows machine is still on Windows 7 now, and not ready to upgrade to 10 yet due to compatibility issues. But I have 4 more years to get things working in a virtual environment, or find replacements. Software that I run dates back to the 70s, so some didn't work by default in 7, but in the end there was only 1 program that I couldn't replace or get working with an upgrade or VM. I reverse engineered the data to migrate it (it used an obsolete floating point format from before floating point ops were standard in PCs). If I can do that, a company or large organization can do it. For web software, the pace of the state of the art is even faster. Most anything over a few years old probably needs a rewrite and data migration if it hasn't been maintained properly (and possibly even if it has). Especially anything that used old plugins. But the focus on browser versions is weird. I strongly dislike the practice of web developers/designers speaking of 'supporting' IE6/IE8 or whatever. That's a Microsoft product, Microsoft supports it or not, you and I don't. We support the websites that we build, which we build to current industry standards (such as they are). If you try to access it using a nonstandard client like IE6, Arachne running on DOS, Hyperlink on a C64, or a line mode browser on a teletype, then your experience will be different. The server side will work fine, but your client may not do what it's not capable of. You can't expect to stick a blu-ray disc on a record player or shove a flash drive full of MP3s into an 8-track tape deck and have the end-user experience be the same. It just doesn't work that way. Sure we can try to build custom client-side workarounds, but is that worth the cost (especially given that new browsers are free)? Overheard at a meeting once: Client: "Our stats say that'll be fine for our customers, but our executive team mostly has older versions of IE, so this won't work for them. We don't want it to look bad to the CEO." 3rd Party Agency Manager: "We'll order new laptops for them and have them delivered, just tell us how many and where to send them. It will be much cheaper for you and save us all a lot of time."

watson 11y ago

Am I the only one who finds all the happy faces Microsoft have injected into the page a bit weird? It feels like they are trying to sell me some bad news but make me feel happy at the same time. Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off

derefr 11y ago
Hey, they're probably happy as heck to be free of the enterprise support burden.
- iwwr 11y ago
  Not so fast, it just means enterprise support prices have gone up for those organisations resisting change and still requiring security. For example, the entire country of South Korea.
  - zitterbewegung 11y ago
    So they are happy that they will get more from their Support partners
adrianbye 11y ago
it sounds like you criticizing our stock art photo overlords..
kintamanimatt 11y ago
I don't think it's weird at all, and it's probably a deliberate design choice by the developer that made this page. They've probably probably suffered for years because of IE's poor support for standards and other quirks. I think it's a mini celebration by way of design!
johnny99 11y ago
You are not the only one. My immediate thought was, what's up with the dazed-looking Microsoft stock humans.

qxxx 11y ago

ok, microsoft wont support it.. but my customers will support it forever. As a webdeveloper i have still customers that are using internet explorer 8 because it is their company policy (big company)

alkonaut 11y ago
Making a corporate decision to stay on a 6 year old browser that doesn't receive security updates because "that's the one we certified" (or whatever the reason may be) is madness. The whole point of microsofts' action here is to say that it doesn't work like that. If you have an infrastructure of webapps/intranets/whetever then you must carry the continuous cost of making sure they sure they work on new browsers all the time, because old browsers will be quickly become insecure.

davidjgraph 11y ago

I love the way they can't even give a straight answer to their own questions: "Does this mean Microsoft is changing the support lifecycle policy for Internet Explorer?" "The latest version of Internet Explorer will continue to follow the component policy, which means that it follows the support lifecycle and is supported for as long as the Windows operating system on which it is installed. Focusing support on the latest version of Internet Explorer for a supported Windows operating system is in line with industry standards." A simple yes or no will do.

robzyb 11y ago
> A simple yes or no will do. Haven't they done better than that? Except they've dealt with the possible issue that the reader has an incorrect understanding of the support lifecycle policy for Internet Explorer.

gglnx 11y ago

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I... As Vista is still supported, the IE9 lives on.

ollie87 11y ago

My work ICT department recently upgraded us. To IE 9. :(

Zardoz84 11y ago

Oh... And we must support IE 8 ¬¬

andy_ppp 11y ago

The document makes things wildly unclear as to which versions of IE are actually supported by Microsoft. In practical terms it's still IE9 and IE11 for a while (so far as I can tell)? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I... I'm sure there is still a load of Windows Vista SP2 machines around...

mkozlows 11y ago
Yes, Vista still exists -- but it's not much of the market, because it only existed for a short while before Win7 replaced it, and it never got much corporate adoption (where people hold onto legacy IE forever). Unsupported XP is, in practice, probably more of an issue than Vista.
gtk40 11y ago
My thoughts too. If versions of Windows less than Windows 7 are supported which cannot run IE11, and IE11 is the only version being supported, are those older versions of Windows still really supported? Windows Vista has support through 2017 and Windows Server 2008 has support through 2020.
- gsnedders 11y ago
  IE9 remains supported on Vista (as it's the last release of IE that runs on it). IE9/IE11 is all that remains supported on client releases on Windows (Server and Embedded versions of Windows continue to use pretty much everything from IE7 upwards). https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-explorer?wa=wsignin1.0 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-ex... provides a clearer overview of what the supported version where is. (Note that it excludes OSes that are currently supported by end support before 12 Jan 2016.)

pass-word 11y ago

ie ,be well.edge,goodbye.

jgalt212 11y ago

Our front-end team welcomes this news, but I still think a non-trivial amount enterprises who do their own security work will still be using IE 8 into 2017.

tow21 11y ago

An unfortunate datapoint: for one of our products I'm still seeing >25% users on IE8. This is a (primarily UK) product most of whose users are on internal bank networks. It's come down from about 40% 2 years ago, so it's heading in the right direction - but I'm not sure I see it going away any time soon. There's huge organizational inertia inside these banks around IT systems - if we want to serve them, we need to support IE8 for the foreseeable future.

randlet 11y ago
Same story for me. I run an open source project used by hospitals and I think I'm stuck supporting IE8 for another year or two.
- hippich 11y ago
  hi, which project is that?
  - randlet 11y ago
    http://qatrackplus.com http://qatrackplus.com It's a self hosted Django app for tracking quality assurance data for radiation therapy centres (although it could easily be adapted for other purposes).
rogeryu 11y ago
They are probably XP users. You can create a small notification on top of your website, notifying them that they should move to Firefox or Chrome because their browser is not safe anymore...
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Chrome support for XP ends at the end of the year. http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/google-will-still-support-chrome-on-windows-xp-until-the-end-of-the-year/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/google-will-still-support-c... Firefox (as far as I can tell) still supports XP SP2, but who knows for how long.

_ao789 11y ago

everyone smiling there is a frontend dev

err4nt 11y ago
we'll still have to support it, now I can just consider more recent versions of IE as 'legacy support' which it is. My definition of a modern browser is one that self-updates, this is essential for security. There are plenty to choose from, but if you're using a browser that doesn't keep itself up to date you're asking for security problems.

kriro 11y ago

Random thought that popped into my head when reading this (apart from the obvious...stockhappyness): I'm curious and know very little about this topic in general. How does an announcement like this affect 0-day prices? My guess is that IE11- 0-days should skyrocket for a bit but then fall because for a while they'll be really valuable and no patches will come but then eventually too many people migrate to the higher version? Could 0-day prices actually be a decent way to forecast future adaption?

hackerboos 11y ago

Are they just going to do what they did with XP and extend support to those that have the cash?

jp_sc 11y ago

After that day we only need a really bad 0-day exploit to make everybody actually update their browser or switch to Chrome.

Guest192038 11y ago
Let's save a step, and simply create an exploit that automatically installs Firefox/Chrome, and uninstalls IE.
scholia 11y ago
They still need to update IE, even if they don't use it. It's code on their hard drives....

dfar1 11y ago

Best Christmas gift ever!

kentbrew 11y ago

Just updated http://noaiee.com http://noaiee.com to reflect the new countdown deadline and discovered that conditional comments aren't working in IE10. Anyone know how to detect IE10 without using JavaScript?