8 ms·

This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

277 points by kostas_echarta 11y ago

saurik 11y ago
I feel like users in China will be more likely to install a "don't nag me about upgrading" counter-patch than actually upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer.
- cm2187 11y ago
  If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice. I work for a major European corporation and I am also stuck on XP. We don't exactly have the best in class IT dept (despite claims by a senior IT guy that we have more developpers than google and facebook together... we don't really have much to show for it).
  - silon7 11y ago
    Is it because of an in-house software maintenance problem, or mostly due to being tied to 3rd party software and would have to buy new licenses / migrate?
    - cm2187 11y ago
      I think it is a mix of lots of internally developped software which is not compatible, or at least not tested as compatible (and often this software is not developped anymore), cost constrains, and mostly a lot of bureaucracy and glacial-paced processes. I don't think it has to do with third party software. [edit] in fact if anything third party software is forcing us to upgrade as we see some critical third party software progressively becoming incompatible with XP.
  - ars 11y ago
    > If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice. I never understood why users stuck on XP don't just install a different browser (Chrome or Firefox). You don't have to use IE, especially not in the version is so old it barely works with modern sites.
    - jaxb 11y ago
      Because corporate policy says "no Chrome or Firefox Portable for you".
      - ars 11y ago
        Corporate policy is not a law of physics. It's just some dude that decided something. They can decide something else instead. Saying that doesn't actually answer the question, it just shifts it to "why would corporate policy say that".
  - jmspring 11y ago
    More than one entity is paying for continual patches for XP -- http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/26/technology/microsoft-windows-xp-navy-contract/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/26/technology/microsoft-windows...
  - pjc50 11y ago
    we have more developpers than google and facebook together That's probably why you can't get anything done (Mythical Man-Month passim)
rrss1122 11y ago
It will be a while still before you can actually party. As long as a measurable percentage of your users are still on these browsers, you're missing out on money of you don't support them.
- jedberg 11y ago
  True but at least now Microsoft will be bugging them (and more likely their IT departments) to upgrade. Even the most conservative CIO will have a hard time justifying not upgrading at this point.
- tombrossman 11y ago
  Businesses might be missing out on customer money if they don't support obsolete browsers, but the people developing the webapp/website/whatever are definitely missing out if they don't start with 'we support all modern mainstream browsers' and then supply a separate bid for old IE support. Let the business decide whether the significant extra cost is offset by the extra income from these users.
- al2o3cr 11y ago
  "As long as a measurable percentage of your users are still on these browsers, you're missing out on money of you don't support them." This seems to be a common refrain here. It's missing an important caveat: "unless supporting those browsers costs more than the customers are worth". Supporting ancient IEs means things like: avoiding features that can't be polyfilled, providing XP images for CI, debugging IE issues, etc. None of these happen for free.
TwoBit 11y ago
I have no idea how confident I should be in Edge's security. Microsoft just doesn't have a great history there.
- inlined 11y ago
  A major category of IE vulnerabilities involved tricking it into loading COM objects. The Chakra JS engine moved from a COM based implementation to compiled JS. And Edge doesn't support ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) like IE did either. It looks like most of the COM attack vectors have now been shut down, though some components like the clipboard still use COM to interact with the broader OS.
  - xg15 11y ago
    Out of couriosity: As BHOs were the closest IE had to browser extensions, does that mean Edge doesn't support extensions at all - or is there a different system in place?
    - Eric_WVGG 11y ago
      Edge will actually support both Chrome and Firefox extensions,,, http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-browser-supports-chrome-and-firefox-extensions http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-br... But not until later this year.
      - xg15 11y ago
        I'm just skimming this, but this sounds as if they plan to implement the WebExtension spec. That would really be a remarkable step forward and a distinct difference from IE.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Microsoft has actually had a pretty good security record for the past decade now... Most of the truly stupid decisions regarding security were prior to Windows XP. Since Melissa/ILoveYou and several other worms that wreaked havoc on data centers i the late 90's and early 00's there was a massive shift in terms of security conscience at MS. There have been attack vectors since, but that is true of every platform, and since Windows 7 in particular, most of them have been from third party software.
erik14th 11y ago
Aren't old android browsers more of a problem nowadays?
- flurpitude 11y ago
  Depends who you're developing for. If you're selling SaaS and your customers are large public or private sector organizations whose staff work at their desks, old versions of IE are still your biggest headache.
starquake 11y ago
Unfortunately this is not true: "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." The latest Internet Explorer version that runs on Windows Vista is Internet Explorer 9. So there will still be users using that... Windows Vista will have security updates till 2020.
- davidjgraph 11y ago
  Indeed, Vista being EOL 11 April 2017. It does mean that IE 10 is EOL, but not 9 for another 15 months.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Have they no Firefox? no Chrome?
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      Chrome will drop support for Windows Vista and XP in April 2016. Firefox still supports Windows versions all the way back to XP SP2. About 14% of Firefox users still run XP!
      - tracker1 11y ago
        Maybe it's time to stop running a 10+ year old operating system?
        nix0n 11y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. Some people are running programs that won't work on newer versions of Windows, and they would be using XP Mode anyway. Others just do Web stuff and Firefox is really their OS.
        totony 11y ago
        Why? It does the jobs well enough
noobermin 11y ago
Does this mean jquery will lose a significant part of its utility?
- yazaddaruvala 11y ago
  Unlikely.. - 1% of traffic is still significant for most businesses. - Consistency/Training/Hiring. Everyone that has ever written JavaScript has learnt jQuery. Some people don't even "know" JavaScript, they "know" jQuery (I say this as a testament to jQuery, not as a detriment to these developers. jQuery is all they have needed, why know anything else?) - jQuery has so many plugins/frameworks that depend on it. Bootstrap alone gives it a ton of utility. Backbone/Ember are extremely tied to jQuery (or "clones"). - While ofcourse plugins/frameworks can be rewritten to exclude the jQuery dependency. jQuery is provenly stable. You would need significant counter inertia to rock the boat. At that point, why rock the boat? No one ever got fired for using jQuery: huge utility. - Ergonomics. AJAX, Animations, Custom Events would all need custom wrappers / util libraries - Forward compatibility. If you use jQuery today, all you'll have to do is upgrade the version of jQuery and you're using the latest and greatest browser internals (when appropriate) but no change to your API (mostly) And I'm sure I'm missing a couple. P.S. Before anyone starts, there are tons of good reasons to not use jQuery. Are the reasons to drop jQuery greater than the reasons to keep it? I don't really care. That is for individuals/teams to decide. I am just answering the parent's implicit question: "Is there utility to jQuery beyond legacy browser support?"
  - epmatsw 11y ago
    Plus with the current state of the web, jQuery from a major CDN is in probably every single browser cache in the world. There's something to be said for a core web library that almost never has to be re-downloaded.
- Grue3 11y ago
  Superior DOM API is the biggest utility of jQuery anyway.
OSButler 11y ago
Those companies that have kept running outdated IE versions will most likely still ignore upgrading. I've had a client upgrade their IE6 machines to IE8 just a few months ago. Even their own employees were frustrated with the old equipment, but there was nothing they could do until their IT dept. finally provided the upgrade for them.
yehosef 11y ago
"I see dead browsers"
pjmlp 11y ago
No fear, Webkit has replaced IE, with each device using its own version of it.
frik 11y ago
IE9 support is already in a sad state. Many new websites already look in IE9 as bad as in IE6. Chrome should spawns less processes (hold some more tabs in one process). IE spawns less processes than Chrome and therefor is less of a memory hog. Firefox finally needs a proper multi-process implementation. Even the latest Developer edition just uses two processes (firefox.exe and plugin-container.exe) - I just tried it again with a new profile. Good luck keeping 100 tabs open (with "open" I mean "in memory"). If one tab crashes... you switch back to IE/Chrome. In the current state Firefox is great for development, but not for my daily web usage.
- robgibbons 11y ago
  I'm kind of sick of hearing complaints about Chrome's multiple processes being somehow a bad thing. You want fewer processes in Chrome, then you go on to complain about Firefox's crashed tabs. Do you understand that's one of the benefits of having multiple processes? If one process crashes, it very rarely effects the performance of any other processes. It's not keeping all of your eggs in one basket. It provides better security as well. So I'm at a loss as to why so few people can appreciate it. Considering these benefits, memory usage is totally reasonable.
  - frik 11y ago
    Are you answering my comment? You wrote your own unrelated rant. I only wrote about it would be great if you could configure Chrome's process spawning logic. IE does it in an more intelligent way to consume less memory by spawning a bit less processes (a trade off, as if one tab crashes more tabs have to be reloaded). But giving a power user (who have 100+ tabs open) a choice would be great.
- icebraining 11y ago
  It's not the default yet, but you can already enable multi-process in Firefox by toggling the "browser.tabs.remote" option in about:config. It should ship as the default this year.
cmurf 11y ago
I think it should have a built in kill switch. It knows it's own EOL date, and just wouldn't work after that.
- ars 11y ago
  Really? I know that would be easier for developers, but think about it from a "it's my computer" point of view - do you really want people doing that to you? It's your computer, you should be able to to run whatever software you like. A reminder to upgrade, OK, that's fine. But actually disabling? You go too far.
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    I laughed a little bit imagining a user yelling out "it's my computer!" and actually believing they should have full, absolute control over anything it does... while running a Microsoft operating system.
    - 72deluxe 11y ago
      My Windows 3.11 VM works fine though thanks!
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    That's definitely the direction we appear to be heading, though. Different 'app stores' are varying degrees of the way there, but auto-updates coupled with an inability to download past versions makes this almost a thing. I don't want to be overly negative, though. I foresee a future in which there is a split between completely walled gardens and completely open systems, so those who really want the latter will still be catered for.
  - cmurf 11y ago
    Except most of the time, it's not really your computer anymore. First, if it's proprietary software, you've licensed it, you don't own it, it's not yours, you have no say what the policy is. The company lawyers could make a case such an EOL switch is necessary just to avoid liablity once they're no longer providing security fixes. If you want this kind of choice, the only way is free and open source software. That's the reality, and it's been that way for a very long time, just read the EULA. It isn't yours. They're not doing things "to you" by preventing it from working, they're protecting themselves. Free software could decline to work by default, with something like an about:config opt out feature. That's because free software belongs to everyone. Next, hardware. Apple, the most among all the companies making hardware, explicitly reserves the right to modify the hardware after sale. There is in effect a hardware EULA. Your rights are fairly limited to turning it off or disposing of the phone. You don't have a right to modify it, you don't have a right to jail break it, you don't have a right to run software that Apple doesn't, through its license that you've agreed to, approve of. Not only is the software not yours, there is tacit residual hardware right reserved by Apple. I don't like it, you don't have to like it, that's how the agreement effectively works though. So if you really don't like it, then you shouldn't buy those kinds of products. Android, it's fairly similar license wise, but there is at least in most implementations the option to enable 3rd party software installation. So you could install some ancient unpatched web browser if that's what you wanted to do. And of course Cyanogenmod and other free OS's you have a lot more control because the software is yours by virtue of you having possession of it. You have a legal right to modify it if you don't like how it behaves.
flohofwoe 11y ago
Very funny, End of Life for a popular product just means more trouble for 3rd-party-devs since they need to continue supporting the product as long as a significant chunk of their users don't feel like upgrading, but with support for the required SDKs cut off. Case in point: WindowsXP's End of Life was 2 years ago, but between 25% and 35% of (mostly casual) gamers still run it worldwide (this is heavily skewed by XP installations in China): http://hwstats.unity3d.com/web/os-win.html http://hwstats.unity3d.com/web/os-win.html, http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os.html http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os.html.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Yeah. Microsoft may no longer support them but we'll be stuck supporting them until june 2018 at least, when the tls apocalypse may cause holdouts to upgrade - or just complain loudly at Web developers for "breaking my Internet".
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I am in this situation. A good chunk of my users are stuck on xp so I am stuck on supporting xp too. There is no way around this for me as the reason my users are stuck on xp is because of hardware. Arg!
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    They can still install Firefox.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Firefox probably won't help with non-browser software, if that's what the parent comment was referring to. I also have to develop an app for a client for XP because of some proprietary hardware that still doesn't have a Windows 7/8/10 driver.
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        Yes this is my problem. The hardware manufacturer does not want to support upgrades (they want to sell new hardware) and so I am stuck supporting XP. In my situation there is not even hardware the customer can upgrade to as the original hardware supplier has left the market. We are all stuck with XP until something catastrophic happens.
ars 11y ago
I don't understand why Microsoft divides its browsers this way. They seem to be the only one that actually has versions, and [security] updates within a version. Instead just have a single browser (instead of 5 or more counting from IE6) and any update increments the version. Both Firefox and Chrome work this way. They would have to allow installing the latest version of IE on any machine all the way back to XP, but there is no reason they can't do that. They just don't want to. I know they hope people will upgrade the Windows version - but has that ever happened? Has someone ever upgraded Windows just to get a new browser? I highly doubt it, that's not why people upgrade the OS. So just give it up, let any version of IE run on any version of Windows and stop making developers (and users) crazy.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  I don't think they can. IE's (since IE5) is not your usual standalone browser application - it's an operating system component, that's used in a lot of places, starting right from the desktop. Tighter integration and mutual OS-browser dependence means it's not as easy as saying "ok, let's allow IE10 to run on Vista".
  - ars 11y ago
    I've heard that, but no one is forcing them to program it that way. They could do the equivalent of static linking and include the necessary components in the browser instead of the OS. That's more or less what the Utilu IE Collection does I think.
    - netheril96 11y ago
      Yeah, they could do that now, but that doesn't help the IE 6, 7, 8 problems, does that?
      - lmm 11y ago
        Yes it does. They could ship a statically-linked copy of Edge to Windows Vista (and even XP) users via Windows Update. The old IE DLLs would have to stay there to be used by the system, but the actual web browser could be a newer one.
userbinator 11y ago
Given that IE may be the only widely-used browser that restrains web developers from going completely gung-ho with the fancy new stuff and creating even more sites that are just plain user-hostile and annoying (e.g. see the rise of superfluous SPAs and/or massive amounts of JS required to load simple static content, replacing sites that worked fine without), I fear that this will make casual browsing a worse experience even for those not using IE... It's not the new sites which are already fancy webapps, the ones doing new things that would be nearly impossible in older browsers and require the very latest browser versions that I'm concerned about; it's the sites that cater to a mass audience like news, webmail, search engines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8254743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8254743 ), and other valuable repositories of information which are most at risk of being "appified" and making the Internet less accessible overall. Related article: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing_th.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing... ...and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613
- cageface 11y ago
  It's at least as much the case that devs load up their apps with tons of third-party junk CSS and JS to smooth over the differences between old, broken versions of IE and modern browsers. If we could count on people using reasonably modern browsers we could code to the standards and dispense with a lot of these clunky wrappers and workarounds.
- draw_down 11y ago
  That ship sailed long ago. The people who make use of all the cool new stuff either explicitly don't care about IE, or ship polyfills and then don't really check to make sure they work (because they don't care about IE).
oliwarner 11y ago
Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox. If they are corporate users, I would be about now announcing that as Micirosft are EOL'img these IE versions only IE 11 and upwards will be supported. I'd probably give a grace period of 3 months officially, and depending on which can clients are affected I'd possibly give them 4-5 months to upgrade.
  - iqonik 11y ago
    And then when your clients don't renew, your revenue is significantly affected, you have to lay off staff, you have a realization that this works in an ideal world, but we don't live in one.
    - mcs_ 11y ago
      i don't know... how much is the cost to develop an application to cover 100% of the available desktop browsers? maybe use that value to improve mobile target make more sense at this point?!
      - iqonik 11y ago
        In my experience it is far less than the cost of acquiring new customers, onboarding and supporting them, also far less risky.
szastupov 11y ago
Obligatory comment about Safari being the new IE.
J_Darnley 11y ago
If you were writing HTML documents would it really matter which browsers people were using?
- bosdev 11y ago
  You mean without JavaScript and CSS? The reason browser versions matter is because there has been a massive amount of innovation in JS and CSS in the last decade. That innovation has allowed websites to move closer and closer to the capabilities of desktop applications, which is a win for ease-of-installation, security and for the web as a platform.
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    Yes, basically. You don't need javascript for presentation. You don't need overloaded eye candy driven by oodles of css. An HTML document is like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ or http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ or this website Hacker News.
al2o3cr 11y ago
I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP": Vista shipped in 2007, so if your company wrote software after that that was locked to XP they made a mistake - one they've had EIGHT YEARS to fix. Everything except the most expensive, vertical-market hardware (that might require XP for driver support) has nigh-certainly already been depreciated to zero on the books.
- flohofwoe 11y ago
  Let me play the devil's advocate: Why should I as a user be forced to upgrade from a system which does it's job just fine only because the system's manufacturer decides that they don't want to spend any more resources on patching up errors in this system? Having bought the system, shouldn't I have gotten a product that is reasonably secure in the first place? How do I know that the new shiny replacement system doesn't introduce new problems which take years until they are discovered and could be much worse than the old system where already a lot of work has gone into fixing bugs? I bet the real reasons are much more mundane. I've seen several times where updating a single tool in game production teams takes years, because the 'time is never right', the update can't be done incrementally, and the production can't afford to switch the whole team over and risk weeks of instability and bug-hunting because unexpected bugs crop up that didn't manifest in small-scale tests. Basically: never change a running system :)
  - melling 11y ago
    I guess if you don't mind the person running an unsupported system then don't. Most businesses desire support, however. You can't control when the old unsupported system is going to fail. You might find yourself doing a forced upgrade to a new system at an inconvenient time with zero time for transition. Strikes me as irresponsible.
  - zanny 11y ago
    > Why should I as a user be forced to upgrade from a system You aren't forced. But you will be exploited for it, any security vulnerability will destroy your entire operation, and your customers should distrust you for being so stupid. Its not that you made a mistake trying to keep the system running. Your mistake was using a proprietary foundation with no commitment from the provider it will be supported forever. So of course you have no option when the rug is pulled out from under you - but that was your mistake. If you were built on top of Linux 2.4 like the superposter said, you could just pay the developer costs to maintain it yourself.
the_watcher 11y ago
I get that this is good news in that it should reduce the number of users running them, but this doesn't remove them from machines running them.
hitekker 11y ago
I have a fun story. IE10 and below have two modes. "Browser" mode, which means the IE10, IE9, IE8, IE7 rendering engines. "Document" mode which means the engine treating the page like it was meant for IE9, IE8, IE7 etc. Or so it says. Confused? Take a look at this chart: https://i-msdn.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC780294.jpg https://i-msdn.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC780294.jpg More confused? So was and am I. I don't fully understand document mode and I suspect Microsoft doesn't either. Likely the reason they deprecated the moment Windows 10 came out[1] So what's the problem? Well, even though a web page would render fine in IE9, IE9 could look at it, take issue with your markup, and then, surprise! Your user sees it like it's IE7... using the IE9 rendering engine. For most web developers that needed to support IE, you basically always needed to insert a <meta> tag with a value of X-UA-Compatible in the <head> of your page. It forces the latest document mode, i.e., "treat this page like a modern page and render it without being stupid." 99% of the time this is what you want. 1% of the time (the need for document mode) is when a page was so reliant on older browser quirks that it needs to be treated as an IE7 page. Cool, that's all we need right? Enter oracle.com. In all versions of IE9, there is a hidden, built in compatibility mapping which will always force a certain document mode[2]. So even if your little page brings with it a valid meta tag and uses completely valid markup, IE9 will take look at its name on its blacklist, smile, pat your page on the head, and then shove it the trash compactor. Smash. So IE9 forces a terrible document mode upon all pages on oracle.com and several other domains mode and Microsoft, to this days, says just about nothing about the hidden blacklist in their documentation. The only way I found this out was by searching "oracle.com" in all of IE9's source code, whereupon I found the responsible XML file, the blacklist. So what's the solution? Well, after some hair loss, I discovered the solution is to bring the X-UA-Compatible OUTSIDE of the <head> tag and put it right above the HTML one. In complete contrivance to everything Microsoft said in its documentation, and also normal browser logic. ... That, kids, is why IE9 and below needs to die. [1]https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn384051(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn384051(v=vs.85).a...
andyhnj 11y ago
Oh, this must be why the company I work for is finally pushing out IE11. (I upgraded my own machine a long time ago, but many people here are still on IE8.)
niuzeta 11y ago
Their obituaries have been posted and celebrated so many times that I feel we're all secretly enjoying IE, with some sort of guilty pleasure.
fibo 11y ago
The big issue with IE<11 is that they are not happybrowsers, i.e. with automatic updates. Thanks God, the world evolves and things get better.
whoopdedo 11y ago
Does Edge have Java yet? No? Then IE isn't going anywhere.
DrScump 11y ago
How does an article like this, with such a blatantly false clickbaity title, not get flagged into oblivion rather than getting 270+ upvotes?

277 points by kostas_echarta 11y ago

I feel like users in China will be more likely to install a "don't nag me about upgrading" counter-patch than actually upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer.

cm2187 11y ago
If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice. I work for a major European corporation and I am also stuck on XP. We don't exactly have the best in class IT dept (despite claims by a senior IT guy that we have more developpers than google and facebook together... we don't really have much to show for it).
- silon7 11y ago
  Is it because of an in-house software maintenance problem, or mostly due to being tied to 3rd party software and would have to buy new licenses / migrate?
  - cm2187 11y ago
    I think it is a mix of lots of internally developped software which is not compatible, or at least not tested as compatible (and often this software is not developped anymore), cost constrains, and mostly a lot of bureaucracy and glacial-paced processes. I don't think it has to do with third party software. [edit] in fact if anything third party software is forcing us to upgrade as we see some critical third party software progressively becoming incompatible with XP.
- ars 11y ago
  > If they are stuck on XP it's not really a choice. I never understood why users stuck on XP don't just install a different browser (Chrome or Firefox). You don't have to use IE, especially not in the version is so old it barely works with modern sites.
  - jaxb 11y ago
    Because corporate policy says "no Chrome or Firefox Portable for you".
    - ars 11y ago
      Corporate policy is not a law of physics. It's just some dude that decided something. They can decide something else instead. Saying that doesn't actually answer the question, it just shifts it to "why would corporate policy say that".
- jmspring 11y ago
  More than one entity is paying for continual patches for XP -- http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/26/technology/microsoft-windows-xp-navy-contract/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/26/technology/microsoft-windows...
- pjc50 11y ago
  we have more developpers than google and facebook together That's probably why you can't get anything done (Mythical Man-Month passim)

rrss1122 11y ago

It will be a while still before you can actually party. As long as a measurable percentage of your users are still on these browsers, you're missing out on money of you don't support them.

jedberg 11y ago
True but at least now Microsoft will be bugging them (and more likely their IT departments) to upgrade. Even the most conservative CIO will have a hard time justifying not upgrading at this point.
tombrossman 11y ago
Businesses might be missing out on customer money if they don't support obsolete browsers, but the people developing the webapp/website/whatever are definitely missing out if they don't start with 'we support all modern mainstream browsers' and then supply a separate bid for old IE support. Let the business decide whether the significant extra cost is offset by the extra income from these users.
al2o3cr 11y ago
"As long as a measurable percentage of your users are still on these browsers, you're missing out on money of you don't support them." This seems to be a common refrain here. It's missing an important caveat: "unless supporting those browsers costs more than the customers are worth". Supporting ancient IEs means things like: avoiding features that can't be polyfilled, providing XP images for CI, debugging IE issues, etc. None of these happen for free.

TwoBit 11y ago

I have no idea how confident I should be in Edge's security. Microsoft just doesn't have a great history there.

inlined 11y ago
A major category of IE vulnerabilities involved tricking it into loading COM objects. The Chakra JS engine moved from a COM based implementation to compiled JS. And Edge doesn't support ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) like IE did either. It looks like most of the COM attack vectors have now been shut down, though some components like the clipboard still use COM to interact with the broader OS.
- xg15 11y ago
  Out of couriosity: As BHOs were the closest IE had to browser extensions, does that mean Edge doesn't support extensions at all - or is there a different system in place?
  - Eric_WVGG 11y ago
    Edge will actually support both Chrome and Firefox extensions,,, http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-browser-supports-chrome-and-firefox-extensions http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-br... But not until later this year.
    - xg15 11y ago
      I'm just skimming this, but this sounds as if they plan to implement the WebExtension spec. That would really be a remarkable step forward and a distinct difference from IE.
tracker1 11y ago
Microsoft has actually had a pretty good security record for the past decade now... Most of the truly stupid decisions regarding security were prior to Windows XP. Since Melissa/ILoveYou and several other worms that wreaked havoc on data centers i the late 90's and early 00's there was a massive shift in terms of security conscience at MS. There have been attack vectors since, but that is true of every platform, and since Windows 7 in particular, most of them have been from third party software.

erik14th 11y ago

Aren't old android browsers more of a problem nowadays?

flurpitude 11y ago
Depends who you're developing for. If you're selling SaaS and your customers are large public or private sector organizations whose staff work at their desks, old versions of IE are still your biggest headache.

starquake 11y ago

Unfortunately this is not true: "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." The latest Internet Explorer version that runs on Windows Vista is Internet Explorer 9. So there will still be users using that... Windows Vista will have security updates till 2020.

davidjgraph 11y ago
Indeed, Vista being EOL 11 April 2017. It does mean that IE 10 is EOL, but not 9 for another 15 months.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Have they no Firefox? no Chrome?
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Chrome will drop support for Windows Vista and XP in April 2016. Firefox still supports Windows versions all the way back to XP SP2. About 14% of Firefox users still run XP!
    - tracker1 11y ago
      Maybe it's time to stop running a 10+ year old operating system?
      - nix0n 11y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. Some people are running programs that won't work on newer versions of Windows, and they would be using XP Mode anyway. Others just do Web stuff and Firefox is really their OS.
      - totony 11y ago
        Why? It does the jobs well enough

noobermin 11y ago

Does this mean jquery will lose a significant part of its utility?

yazaddaruvala 11y ago
Unlikely.. - 1% of traffic is still significant for most businesses. - Consistency/Training/Hiring. Everyone that has ever written JavaScript has learnt jQuery. Some people don't even "know" JavaScript, they "know" jQuery (I say this as a testament to jQuery, not as a detriment to these developers. jQuery is all they have needed, why know anything else?) - jQuery has so many plugins/frameworks that depend on it. Bootstrap alone gives it a ton of utility. Backbone/Ember are extremely tied to jQuery (or "clones"). - While ofcourse plugins/frameworks can be rewritten to exclude the jQuery dependency. jQuery is provenly stable. You would need significant counter inertia to rock the boat. At that point, why rock the boat? No one ever got fired for using jQuery: huge utility. - Ergonomics. AJAX, Animations, Custom Events would all need custom wrappers / util libraries - Forward compatibility. If you use jQuery today, all you'll have to do is upgrade the version of jQuery and you're using the latest and greatest browser internals (when appropriate) but no change to your API (mostly) And I'm sure I'm missing a couple. P.S. Before anyone starts, there are tons of good reasons to not use jQuery. Are the reasons to drop jQuery greater than the reasons to keep it? I don't really care. That is for individuals/teams to decide. I am just answering the parent's implicit question: "Is there utility to jQuery beyond legacy browser support?"
- epmatsw 11y ago
  Plus with the current state of the web, jQuery from a major CDN is in probably every single browser cache in the world. There's something to be said for a core web library that almost never has to be re-downloaded.
Grue3 11y ago
Superior DOM API is the biggest utility of jQuery anyway.

OSButler 11y ago

Those companies that have kept running outdated IE versions will most likely still ignore upgrading. I've had a client upgrade their IE6 machines to IE8 just a few months ago. Even their own employees were frustrated with the old equipment, but there was nothing they could do until their IT dept. finally provided the upgrade for them.

yehosef 11y ago

"I see dead browsers"

pjmlp 11y ago

No fear, Webkit has replaced IE, with each device using its own version of it.

frik 11y ago

IE9 support is already in a sad state. Many new websites already look in IE9 as bad as in IE6. Chrome should spawns less processes (hold some more tabs in one process). IE spawns less processes than Chrome and therefor is less of a memory hog. Firefox finally needs a proper multi-process implementation. Even the latest Developer edition just uses two processes (firefox.exe and plugin-container.exe) - I just tried it again with a new profile. Good luck keeping 100 tabs open (with "open" I mean "in memory"). If one tab crashes... you switch back to IE/Chrome. In the current state Firefox is great for development, but not for my daily web usage.

robgibbons 11y ago
I'm kind of sick of hearing complaints about Chrome's multiple processes being somehow a bad thing. You want fewer processes in Chrome, then you go on to complain about Firefox's crashed tabs. Do you understand that's one of the benefits of having multiple processes? If one process crashes, it very rarely effects the performance of any other processes. It's not keeping all of your eggs in one basket. It provides better security as well. So I'm at a loss as to why so few people can appreciate it. Considering these benefits, memory usage is totally reasonable.
- frik 11y ago
  Are you answering my comment? You wrote your own unrelated rant. I only wrote about it would be great if you could configure Chrome's process spawning logic. IE does it in an more intelligent way to consume less memory by spawning a bit less processes (a trade off, as if one tab crashes more tabs have to be reloaded). But giving a power user (who have 100+ tabs open) a choice would be great.
icebraining 11y ago
It's not the default yet, but you can already enable multi-process in Firefox by toggling the "browser.tabs.remote" option in about:config. It should ship as the default this year.

cmurf 11y ago

I think it should have a built in kill switch. It knows it's own EOL date, and just wouldn't work after that.

ars 11y ago
Really? I know that would be easier for developers, but think about it from a "it's my computer" point of view - do you really want people doing that to you? It's your computer, you should be able to to run whatever software you like. A reminder to upgrade, OK, that's fine. But actually disabling? You go too far.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  I laughed a little bit imagining a user yelling out "it's my computer!" and actually believing they should have full, absolute control over anything it does... while running a Microsoft operating system.
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    My Windows 3.11 VM works fine though thanks!
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  That's definitely the direction we appear to be heading, though. Different 'app stores' are varying degrees of the way there, but auto-updates coupled with an inability to download past versions makes this almost a thing. I don't want to be overly negative, though. I foresee a future in which there is a split between completely walled gardens and completely open systems, so those who really want the latter will still be catered for.
- cmurf 11y ago
  Except most of the time, it's not really your computer anymore. First, if it's proprietary software, you've licensed it, you don't own it, it's not yours, you have no say what the policy is. The company lawyers could make a case such an EOL switch is necessary just to avoid liablity once they're no longer providing security fixes. If you want this kind of choice, the only way is free and open source software. That's the reality, and it's been that way for a very long time, just read the EULA. It isn't yours. They're not doing things "to you" by preventing it from working, they're protecting themselves. Free software could decline to work by default, with something like an about:config opt out feature. That's because free software belongs to everyone. Next, hardware. Apple, the most among all the companies making hardware, explicitly reserves the right to modify the hardware after sale. There is in effect a hardware EULA. Your rights are fairly limited to turning it off or disposing of the phone. You don't have a right to modify it, you don't have a right to jail break it, you don't have a right to run software that Apple doesn't, through its license that you've agreed to, approve of. Not only is the software not yours, there is tacit residual hardware right reserved by Apple. I don't like it, you don't have to like it, that's how the agreement effectively works though. So if you really don't like it, then you shouldn't buy those kinds of products. Android, it's fairly similar license wise, but there is at least in most implementations the option to enable 3rd party software installation. So you could install some ancient unpatched web browser if that's what you wanted to do. And of course Cyanogenmod and other free OS's you have a lot more control because the software is yours by virtue of you having possession of it. You have a legal right to modify it if you don't like how it behaves.

flohofwoe 11y ago

Very funny, End of Life for a popular product just means more trouble for 3rd-party-devs since they need to continue supporting the product as long as a significant chunk of their users don't feel like upgrading, but with support for the required SDKs cut off. Case in point: WindowsXP's End of Life was 2 years ago, but between 25% and 35% of (mostly casual) gamers still run it worldwide (this is heavily skewed by XP installations in China): http://hwstats.unity3d.com/web/os-win.html http://hwstats.unity3d.com/web/os-win.html, http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os.html http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os.html.

madaxe_again 11y ago
Yeah. Microsoft may no longer support them but we'll be stuck supporting them until june 2018 at least, when the tls apocalypse may cause holdouts to upgrade - or just complain loudly at Web developers for "breaking my Internet".
danieltillett 11y ago
I am in this situation. A good chunk of my users are stuck on xp so I am stuck on supporting xp too. There is no way around this for me as the reason my users are stuck on xp is because of hardware. Arg!
- chris_wot 11y ago
  They can still install Firefox.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Firefox probably won't help with non-browser software, if that's what the parent comment was referring to. I also have to develop an app for a client for XP because of some proprietary hardware that still doesn't have a Windows 7/8/10 driver.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Yes this is my problem. The hardware manufacturer does not want to support upgrades (they want to sell new hardware) and so I am stuck supporting XP. In my situation there is not even hardware the customer can upgrade to as the original hardware supplier has left the market. We are all stuck with XP until something catastrophic happens.

ars 11y ago

I don't understand why Microsoft divides its browsers this way. They seem to be the only one that actually has versions, and [security] updates within a version. Instead just have a single browser (instead of 5 or more counting from IE6) and any update increments the version. Both Firefox and Chrome work this way. They would have to allow installing the latest version of IE on any machine all the way back to XP, but there is no reason they can't do that. They just don't want to. I know they hope people will upgrade the Windows version - but has that ever happened? Has someone ever upgraded Windows just to get a new browser? I highly doubt it, that's not why people upgrade the OS. So just give it up, let any version of IE run on any version of Windows and stop making developers (and users) crazy.

drdaeman 11y ago
I don't think they can. IE's (since IE5) is not your usual standalone browser application - it's an operating system component, that's used in a lot of places, starting right from the desktop. Tighter integration and mutual OS-browser dependence means it's not as easy as saying "ok, let's allow IE10 to run on Vista".
- ars 11y ago
  I've heard that, but no one is forcing them to program it that way. They could do the equivalent of static linking and include the necessary components in the browser instead of the OS. That's more or less what the Utilu IE Collection does I think.
  - netheril96 11y ago
    Yeah, they could do that now, but that doesn't help the IE 6, 7, 8 problems, does that?
    - lmm 11y ago
      Yes it does. They could ship a statically-linked copy of Edge to Windows Vista (and even XP) users via Windows Update. The old IE DLLs would have to stay there to be used by the system, but the actual web browser could be a newer one.

userbinator 11y ago

Given that IE may be the only widely-used browser that restrains web developers from going completely gung-ho with the fancy new stuff and creating even more sites that are just plain user-hostile and annoying (e.g. see the rise of superfluous SPAs and/or massive amounts of JS required to load simple static content, replacing sites that worked fine without), I fear that this will make casual browsing a worse experience even for those not using IE... It's not the new sites which are already fancy webapps, the ones doing new things that would be nearly impossible in older browsers and require the very latest browser versions that I'm concerned about; it's the sites that cater to a mass audience like news, webmail, search engines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8254743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8254743 ), and other valuable repositories of information which are most at risk of being "appified" and making the Internet less accessible overall. Related article: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing_th.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing... ...and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613

cageface 11y ago
It's at least as much the case that devs load up their apps with tons of third-party junk CSS and JS to smooth over the differences between old, broken versions of IE and modern browsers. If we could count on people using reasonably modern browsers we could code to the standards and dispense with a lot of these clunky wrappers and workarounds.
draw_down 11y ago
That ship sailed long ago. The people who make use of all the cool new stuff either explicitly don't care about IE, or ship polyfills and then don't really check to make sure they work (because they don't care about IE).

oliwarner 11y ago

Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.

chris_wot 11y ago
If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox. If they are corporate users, I would be about now announcing that as Micirosft are EOL'img these IE versions only IE 11 and upwards will be supported. I'd probably give a grace period of 3 months officially, and depending on which can clients are affected I'd possibly give them 4-5 months to upgrade.
- iqonik 11y ago
  And then when your clients don't renew, your revenue is significantly affected, you have to lay off staff, you have a realization that this works in an ideal world, but we don't live in one.
  - mcs_ 11y ago
    i don't know... how much is the cost to develop an application to cover 100% of the available desktop browsers? maybe use that value to improve mobile target make more sense at this point?!
    - iqonik 11y ago
      In my experience it is far less than the cost of acquiring new customers, onboarding and supporting them, also far less risky.

szastupov 11y ago

Obligatory comment about Safari being the new IE.

J_Darnley 11y ago

If you were writing HTML documents would it really matter which browsers people were using?

bosdev 11y ago
You mean without JavaScript and CSS? The reason browser versions matter is because there has been a massive amount of innovation in JS and CSS in the last decade. That innovation has allowed websites to move closer and closer to the capabilities of desktop applications, which is a win for ease-of-installation, security and for the web as a platform.
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  Yes, basically. You don't need javascript for presentation. You don't need overloaded eye candy driven by oodles of css. An HTML document is like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ or http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ or this website Hacker News.

al2o3cr 11y ago

I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP": Vista shipped in 2007, so if your company wrote software after that that was locked to XP they made a mistake - one they've had EIGHT YEARS to fix. Everything except the most expensive, vertical-market hardware (that might require XP for driver support) has nigh-certainly already been depreciated to zero on the books.

flohofwoe 11y ago
Let me play the devil's advocate: Why should I as a user be forced to upgrade from a system which does it's job just fine only because the system's manufacturer decides that they don't want to spend any more resources on patching up errors in this system? Having bought the system, shouldn't I have gotten a product that is reasonably secure in the first place? How do I know that the new shiny replacement system doesn't introduce new problems which take years until they are discovered and could be much worse than the old system where already a lot of work has gone into fixing bugs? I bet the real reasons are much more mundane. I've seen several times where updating a single tool in game production teams takes years, because the 'time is never right', the update can't be done incrementally, and the production can't afford to switch the whole team over and risk weeks of instability and bug-hunting because unexpected bugs crop up that didn't manifest in small-scale tests. Basically: never change a running system :)
- melling 11y ago
  I guess if you don't mind the person running an unsupported system then don't. Most businesses desire support, however. You can't control when the old unsupported system is going to fail. You might find yourself doing a forced upgrade to a new system at an inconvenient time with zero time for transition. Strikes me as irresponsible.
- zanny 11y ago
  > Why should I as a user be forced to upgrade from a system You aren't forced. But you will be exploited for it, any security vulnerability will destroy your entire operation, and your customers should distrust you for being so stupid. Its not that you made a mistake trying to keep the system running. Your mistake was using a proprietary foundation with no commitment from the provider it will be supported forever. So of course you have no option when the rug is pulled out from under you - but that was your mistake. If you were built on top of Linux 2.4 like the superposter said, you could just pay the developer costs to maintain it yourself.

the_watcher 11y ago

I get that this is good news in that it should reduce the number of users running them, but this doesn't remove them from machines running them.

hitekker 11y ago

I have a fun story. IE10 and below have two modes. "Browser" mode, which means the IE10, IE9, IE8, IE7 rendering engines. "Document" mode which means the engine treating the page like it was meant for IE9, IE8, IE7 etc. Or so it says. Confused? Take a look at this chart: https://i-msdn.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC780294.jpg https://i-msdn.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC780294.jpg More confused? So was and am I. I don't fully understand document mode and I suspect Microsoft doesn't either. Likely the reason they deprecated the moment Windows 10 came out[1] So what's the problem? Well, even though a web page would render fine in IE9, IE9 could look at it, take issue with your markup, and then, surprise! Your user sees it like it's IE7... using the IE9 rendering engine. For most web developers that needed to support IE, you basically always needed to insert a <meta> tag with a value of X-UA-Compatible in the <head> of your page. It forces the latest document mode, i.e., "treat this page like a modern page and render it without being stupid." 99% of the time this is what you want. 1% of the time (the need for document mode) is when a page was so reliant on older browser quirks that it needs to be treated as an IE7 page. Cool, that's all we need right? Enter oracle.com. In all versions of IE9, there is a hidden, built in compatibility mapping which will always force a certain document mode[2]. So even if your little page brings with it a valid meta tag and uses completely valid markup, IE9 will take look at its name on its blacklist, smile, pat your page on the head, and then shove it the trash compactor. Smash. So IE9 forces a terrible document mode upon all pages on oracle.com and several other domains mode and Microsoft, to this days, says just about nothing about the hidden blacklist in their documentation. The only way I found this out was by searching "oracle.com" in all of IE9's source code, whereupon I found the responsible XML file, the blacklist. So what's the solution? Well, after some hair loss, I discovered the solution is to bring the X-UA-Compatible OUTSIDE of the <head> tag and put it right above the HTML one. In complete contrivance to everything Microsoft said in its documentation, and also normal browser logic. ... That, kids, is why IE9 and below needs to die. [1]https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn384051(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn384051(v=vs.85).a...

andyhnj 11y ago

Oh, this must be why the company I work for is finally pushing out IE11. (I upgraded my own machine a long time ago, but many people here are still on IE8.)

niuzeta 11y ago

Their obituaries have been posted and celebrated so many times that I feel we're all secretly enjoying IE, with some sort of guilty pleasure.

fibo 11y ago

The big issue with IE<11 is that they are not happybrowsers, i.e. with automatic updates. Thanks God, the world evolves and things get better.

whoopdedo 11y ago

Does Edge have Java yet? No? Then IE isn't going anywhere.

DrScump 11y ago

How does an article like this, with such a blatantly false clickbaity title, not get flagged into oblivion rather than getting 270+ upvotes?