
This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday - kostas_echarta
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/01/05/web-developers-rejoice-internet-explorer-8-9-and-10-die-on-tuesday/
======
starquake
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.

~~~
mkurz
> Windows Vista will have security updates till 2020

This isn't true. Windows Vista EOL is April 11, 2017. See
[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/lifecycle](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle)
What makes you think it is 2020?

~~~
yuhong
The fun thing is that Server 2008 does, and it is based on the same code as
Vista.

------
oliwarner
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
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.

~~~
jacquesm
That's not a very good way to run a commercial entity. And it is also why
developers should not be making the call about which browser to support and
which not.

The reason why is that the fixed cost of a business are that: fixed. The
profit is usually over-represented in the last few percentage points of the
people using the service or buying the products so if you lop off some
arbitrary percentage at the top that 15% of your users might be 80% of your
profits. That's a very quick way to die.

~~~
chris_wot
Encouraging or even assisting users with browsers that have security bugs is
also not a responsible way of going about doing business!

~~~
jacquesm
Every browser has security issues. And as a business it is not up to you to
decide what browsers people use, the best you could do is inform them but the
decision is up to them.

~~~
chris_wot
Still using MD5 summed SSL certificates?

What security issues does the latest version of Chrome have, incidentally?

------
flohofwoe
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).

~~~
danieltillett
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
They can still install Firefox.

~~~
nitrogen
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
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.

~~~
aidenn0
I know a chemist still stuck with a windows 98 machine for a similar reason
(it's the most recent OS that a particular piece of lab equipment has a driver
for).

~~~
nitrogen
There are developers out there who would be willing to write new drivers if
the manufacturers won't and the labs are willing to pay.

~~~
danieltillett
The problem is for an individual lab the cost is very high - there needs to be
some sort of forum where labs can get together and put a bounty together for
new drivers.

------
userbinator
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...](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing_th.html)

...and discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613)

~~~
cageface
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.

------
ars
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
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
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.

~~~
pjc50
It's the other way round: programs include the browser as a COM component.
[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/aa752040%28VS.85%29...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/aa752040%28VS.85%29.aspx)

So on the older operating systems, programs that shipped with the OS will be
embedding the browser as a COM component, usually for help purposes. If
they're rendering local HTML (or generated HTML!) then they require that to
keep working. So that particular interface has to be maintained, making it
very difficult to upgrade.

Microsoft were kind of correct in the "browser choice" lawsuit that they'd
used the browser as an OS component, and everyone else was correct that this
was kind of a bad idea.

On the other hand, how _do_ you embed a browser component in a forward-
compatible way?

~~~
scholia
_> Microsoft were kind of correct in the "browser choice" lawsuit that they'd
used the browser as an OS component, and everyone else was correct that this
was kind of a bad idea._

Unfortunately, Microsoft signed a consent decree with the DoJ in 1995 which
allowed them to add features to the operating system but meant they couldn't
tie a separate program to the operating system. Therefore the browser _had to
be_ an added feature.

This was only a tiny part of a much broader decree. None the less, you can
thank Janet Reno and the US government for the problems this has caused ever
since ;-)

~~~
pjc50
The consent decree is a large part of why we have browser (and OS!) choice at
the moment. Imagine the world where IE6 won and use of ActiveX controls on
websites was routine.

~~~
icebraining
I don't see how that follows, seeing as the IE dominance era came years
_after_ the consent decree was signed (2000-2003).

~~~
jessaustin
The implication is that absent the consent decree IE would have been _more_
dominant in that era, and that the dominance would have lasted longer than it
did. This is plausible, since a world of sites built with non-web-standard
crap would have been barren ground for nascent Firefox. It was for that exact
purpose that IE has always been the way it has been, and would have been worse
without the decree. Yeah, we're grateful for XHR, but that was just the tip of
the iceberg.

~~~
icebraining
But the consent decree didn't impede the creation of non-web-standard crap,
and in fact XHR was made after it was signed, so how did it help?

Remember that "the decree does not address any of Microsoft's applications
software." It only regarded their dealings with OEMs.

------
al2o3cr
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
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 :)

~~~
zanny
> 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.

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

------
saurik
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
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).

~~~
ars
> 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
Because corporate policy says "no Chrome or Firefox Portable for you".

~~~
ars
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".

------
erik14th
Aren't old android browsers more of a problem nowadays?

~~~
flurpitude
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.

------
hitekker
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).a...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dn384051\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

------
frik
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
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
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.

------
rrss1122
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.

~~~
tombrossman
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.

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

~~~
yazaddaruvala
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
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.

------
szastupov
Obligatory comment about Safari being the new IE.

------
OSButler
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.

------
andyhnj
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.)

------
DrScump
How does an article like this, with such a blatantly false clickbaity title,
_not_ get flagged into oblivion rather than getting 270+ upvotes?

------
the_watcher
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.

------
fibo
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.

------
niuzeta
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.

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

~~~
bosdev
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
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.

------
yehosef
"I see dead browsers"

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

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

~~~
inlined
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
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
Edge will actually support both Chrome and Firefox extensions,,,
[http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-
br...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-browser-
supports-chrome-and-firefox-extensions) But not until later this year.

~~~
xg15
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.

------
cmurf
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
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
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
My Windows 3.11 VM works fine though thanks!

