5 ms·

It's so great that IE9 is essentially extinct.

nightski 10y ago
It must be nice. I work in commodities and there are many plants and facilities that still only have access to IE8/9. It was a large struggle to even drop IE6/7 with a huge amount of backlash.
- godzillabrennus 10y ago
  No wonder infrastructure gets hacked all the time. You'd think they'd at least go to embedded systems instead of using old PC's for these roles.
- intrasight 10y ago
  I just tell them that anything below IE11 is a violation of corporate security standards and won't be supported.
  - nightski 10y ago
    I am not a direct employee. It's actually the IT departments that push back.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      It's their company on the line. IE6 is basically a giant security hole. Anyone using it on any system whatsoever is putting themselves at huge risk.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      What I did (last year) was to make sure they had at least read https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE-support https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE.... IT only pushes back because the business users who use old web apps push back. Gotta make sure that IT knows the MSFT no longer has their back and so they need to be more aggressive with the business users and their app vendors.
  - gtk40 10y ago
    But it depends on the OS being used. Older versions (as old as IE7 ?!) are still supported on some versions of Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-explorer/en-us https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-ex...
    - lomnakkus 10y ago
      Those are extremely marginal as they're POS systems (+"Thin PC", I guess. I have no idea what that actually is.) EDIT: I mean, I understand if you want to be able to keep using a JS/CSS framework, but it's not really reasonable to ask for upstreams to keep supporting such marginal systems.
      - astrodust 10y ago
        Maybe if you live in a universe where nobody ever takes advantage of known security flaws. I swear there are bank machines in the field still running Windows XP. It's truly astonishing.
        lomnakkus 10y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean, I think we were discussing upstreams (such as Bootstrap or whatever) supporting old browsers? The old browsers are presumably (according to that page) still getting security updates by Microsoft, so I'm not what you're arguing. (Either way, if the browsers are not getting security updates, that's on Microsoft, not on upstreams.) Can you explain what you mean? EDIT: Hopefully to clarify what I'm puzzled about: How is having to use an old Bootstrap a security issue?
        tim333 10y ago
        If you're thinking ATMs it's not such a problem because they are not connected to the internet and if bad guys get physical access it's pretty much game over regardless of the OS.
  - EugeneOZ 10y ago
    They will ask links to proofs.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Maybe find a link that crashes their computer through a remote-execution hole in their old, crappy browser.
- dougmccune 10y ago
  We sell an enterprise web app to insurance companies and only this month fully dropped support for IE<11 after a year long campaign to reach out to our large IE 8 customers. The official MS drop of support at the beginning of the year was finally the ammunition we needed to make it a reality (by framing it purely as a security risk), but even then it took us a year to be comfortable pulling the trigger. But from someone who knows how difficult it can be: there is hope.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Send older clients unstyled no-JS HTML.
fudgy73 10y ago
We're in healthcare and just found out a couple of our users are using Windows XP. I'm no lawyer, but I think that's illegal.
- mortenjorck 10y ago
  If they're using XP to work with protected health information (PHI), and aren't on an extended service contract with Microsoft, they're accessing PHI on an insecure system and are, at least to how my team would interpret it, in direct violation of HIPAA. In fact – and I too am not a lawyer, so don't consider this actionable advice – you might do well to throw up a warning, if not altogether disable access, to whatever product it is your users are accessing on XP, just to make sure you have all your HIPAA bases covered.
  - azinman2 10y ago
    I bet you a significant portion of healthcare is running xp. This is not a fast moving industry, and "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Hypothetical security isn't something most healthcare workers will consider broke.
  - pageld 10y ago
    The key phrase is "my team would interpret it." Everyone interprets HIPAA differently and based on a statement like: "Continuing to use Windows XP after 4/8/14 (or other unsupported operating systems) becomes a HIPAA violation if it’s not addressed in your security risk analysis[0]." You can run XP indefinitely as long as your IT says it's OK and they've "secured it properly." However, if they do get hacked or whatnot, they can get a fine if their security analysis wasn't good enough. I don't recommend it. I actually despise it and try my hardest to get people to drop it. But in the end, I've had to deal with a lot of XP running IE8 systems that need connections to the software I'm in charge of. There's nothing I can do unless I get rid of those users and most of the time I can't because I have to "support modern browsers" as noted in the contract and the contract is with the state, not the individual users. Yes, the contracts will get updated to be more specific, but most of the contracts are on 5 year cycles. State .gov contract work is amazing. /s [0] https://pimsyehr.com/resources/compliance/hippa-compliance/241-com-pbm-phc-pem-will-windows-xp-violate-hipaa-as-of-4-8-14 https://pimsyehr.com/resources/compliance/hippa-compliance/2...
dorianm 10y ago
IE: 10%, IE9: 0.82% and even less for IE < 9 So it seems it's pretty safe to remove support for it. Source: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-browser/browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
- dumbmatter 10y ago
  You missed the 2% on IE 7.
- eterm 10y ago
  That's fine if you're B2C and selling direct to that 1%. But if you're B2B then, you're not selling to that 1%, you're selling to a range of companies. So 1% of end users having IE9 translates to 10% of your customers having (some) users with IE9. Sometimes you're not even selling to companies, you're selling to partners or resellers selling to companies, so now that 10% of companies translates to 60% of your partners / resellers having (some) companies which themselves have (some) users with IE9. So what was 1% of users can translate to much more than 1% of revenue lost just by dropping support. And that's before I get started on how general those analytics are rather than breaking it down to office workers during work. Again, if your business is selling SaaS that targets workers then you'll likely come across a client with a need for older IE support sooner rather than later. There's another reason why B2C is fine to drop support: People are resourceful, if you have a website which breaks in IE9 then they'll probably just switch to chrome and it'll work fine if it's something they really want. Companies however tend to be less flexible, if they know they have IE9 installed they'll insist on having "IE9 support" in the acceptance criteria, even if it's only installed on a few machines which likely will never be used with your software. I'm actually happy to see bootstrap, jquery etc drop IE9 support because it makes it much easier during negotiation to drop support and push back against such proposals. IE9 is still in extended support until April due to the fact it's the most recent IE that can run on Vista, and Vista is still in extended support until April 11.
  - trome 10y ago
    I've seen the details of quite a few B2B SaaS and Govt SaaS deals as of late, and most dev orgs are just not supporting anything other than evergreen browsers. If you don't have the latest browser version, your ticket will be closed since supporting browser based GIS with IE8/9 is a giant waste of money.

It must be nice. I work in commodities and there are many plants and facilities that still only have access to IE8/9. It was a large struggle to even drop IE6/7 with a huge amount of backlash.

godzillabrennus 10y ago
No wonder infrastructure gets hacked all the time. You'd think they'd at least go to embedded systems instead of using old PC's for these roles.
intrasight 10y ago
I just tell them that anything below IE11 is a violation of corporate security standards and won't be supported.
- nightski 10y ago
  I am not a direct employee. It's actually the IT departments that push back.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    It's their company on the line. IE6 is basically a giant security hole. Anyone using it on any system whatsoever is putting themselves at huge risk.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    What I did (last year) was to make sure they had at least read https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE-support https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE.... IT only pushes back because the business users who use old web apps push back. Gotta make sure that IT knows the MSFT no longer has their back and so they need to be more aggressive with the business users and their app vendors.
- gtk40 10y ago
  But it depends on the OS being used. Older versions (as old as IE7 ?!) are still supported on some versions of Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-explorer/en-us https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-ex...
  - lomnakkus 10y ago
    Those are extremely marginal as they're POS systems (+"Thin PC", I guess. I have no idea what that actually is.) EDIT: I mean, I understand if you want to be able to keep using a JS/CSS framework, but it's not really reasonable to ask for upstreams to keep supporting such marginal systems.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Maybe if you live in a universe where nobody ever takes advantage of known security flaws. I swear there are bank machines in the field still running Windows XP. It's truly astonishing.
      - lomnakkus 10y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean, I think we were discussing upstreams (such as Bootstrap or whatever) supporting old browsers? The old browsers are presumably (according to that page) still getting security updates by Microsoft, so I'm not what you're arguing. (Either way, if the browsers are not getting security updates, that's on Microsoft, not on upstreams.) Can you explain what you mean? EDIT: Hopefully to clarify what I'm puzzled about: How is having to use an old Bootstrap a security issue?
      - tim333 10y ago
        If you're thinking ATMs it's not such a problem because they are not connected to the internet and if bad guys get physical access it's pretty much game over regardless of the OS.
- EugeneOZ 10y ago
  They will ask links to proofs.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Maybe find a link that crashes their computer through a remote-execution hole in their old, crappy browser.
dougmccune 10y ago
We sell an enterprise web app to insurance companies and only this month fully dropped support for IE<11 after a year long campaign to reach out to our large IE 8 customers. The official MS drop of support at the beginning of the year was finally the ammunition we needed to make it a reality (by framing it purely as a security risk), but even then it took us a year to be comfortable pulling the trigger. But from someone who knows how difficult it can be: there is hope.
rhizome 10y ago
Send older clients unstyled no-JS HTML.

fudgy73 10y ago

We're in healthcare and just found out a couple of our users are using Windows XP. I'm no lawyer, but I think that's illegal.

mortenjorck 10y ago
If they're using XP to work with protected health information (PHI), and aren't on an extended service contract with Microsoft, they're accessing PHI on an insecure system and are, at least to how my team would interpret it, in direct violation of HIPAA. In fact – and I too am not a lawyer, so don't consider this actionable advice – you might do well to throw up a warning, if not altogether disable access, to whatever product it is your users are accessing on XP, just to make sure you have all your HIPAA bases covered.
- azinman2 10y ago
  I bet you a significant portion of healthcare is running xp. This is not a fast moving industry, and "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Hypothetical security isn't something most healthcare workers will consider broke.
- pageld 10y ago
  The key phrase is "my team would interpret it." Everyone interprets HIPAA differently and based on a statement like: "Continuing to use Windows XP after 4/8/14 (or other unsupported operating systems) becomes a HIPAA violation if it’s not addressed in your security risk analysis[0]." You can run XP indefinitely as long as your IT says it's OK and they've "secured it properly." However, if they do get hacked or whatnot, they can get a fine if their security analysis wasn't good enough. I don't recommend it. I actually despise it and try my hardest to get people to drop it. But in the end, I've had to deal with a lot of XP running IE8 systems that need connections to the software I'm in charge of. There's nothing I can do unless I get rid of those users and most of the time I can't because I have to "support modern browsers" as noted in the contract and the contract is with the state, not the individual users. Yes, the contracts will get updated to be more specific, but most of the contracts are on 5 year cycles. State .gov contract work is amazing. /s [0] https://pimsyehr.com/resources/compliance/hippa-compliance/241-com-pbm-phc-pem-will-windows-xp-violate-hipaa-as-of-4-8-14 https://pimsyehr.com/resources/compliance/hippa-compliance/2...

dorianm 10y ago

IE: 10%, IE9: 0.82% and even less for IE < 9 So it seems it's pretty safe to remove support for it. Source: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-browser/browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...

dumbmatter 10y ago
You missed the 2% on IE 7.
eterm 10y ago
That's fine if you're B2C and selling direct to that 1%. But if you're B2B then, you're not selling to that 1%, you're selling to a range of companies. So 1% of end users having IE9 translates to 10% of your customers having (some) users with IE9. Sometimes you're not even selling to companies, you're selling to partners or resellers selling to companies, so now that 10% of companies translates to 60% of your partners / resellers having (some) companies which themselves have (some) users with IE9. So what was 1% of users can translate to much more than 1% of revenue lost just by dropping support. And that's before I get started on how general those analytics are rather than breaking it down to office workers during work. Again, if your business is selling SaaS that targets workers then you'll likely come across a client with a need for older IE support sooner rather than later. There's another reason why B2C is fine to drop support: People are resourceful, if you have a website which breaks in IE9 then they'll probably just switch to chrome and it'll work fine if it's something they really want. Companies however tend to be less flexible, if they know they have IE9 installed they'll insist on having "IE9 support" in the acceptance criteria, even if it's only installed on a few machines which likely will never be used with your software. I'm actually happy to see bootstrap, jquery etc drop IE9 support because it makes it much easier during negotiation to drop support and push back against such proposals. IE9 is still in extended support until April due to the fact it's the most recent IE that can run on Vista, and Vista is still in extended support until April 11.
- trome 10y ago
  I've seen the details of quite a few B2B SaaS and Govt SaaS deals as of late, and most dev orgs are just not supporting anything other than evergreen browsers. If you don't have the latest browser version, your ticket will be closed since supporting browser based GIS with IE8/9 is a giant waste of money.