Am I the only one who finds all the happy faces Microsoft have injected into the page a bit weird? It feels like they are trying to sell me some bad news but make me feel happy at the same time.
Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off
The fake-grin people in the pictures are nurses and technicians from hospitals still stuck on IE6 because their late 1990s medical imaging ActiveX controls are bug-for-bug compatible with that wonderful piece of software.
Behind their grins are the questions, "what now?" or maybe even "where do I want to go today."
Their IT krewes are wondering, "how am I going to get the CFO to approve an upgrade to the GE medical imaging suite? we've been out of maintenance for 15 years."
And their info security guy is considering seeking asylum in a foreign country.
Everyone using a browser that doesn't get security patches is basically a walking malware farm. Not supporting them with your site and pushing them to upgrade is the moral high ground.
It's a good first step though. This means that websites can start telling users "we don't support this browser because Microsoft doesn't", etc., and they will die off quicker.
Manipulation (aka advertising/PR/marketing) techniques 101. Showing pictures of happy faces makes the audience (not you in particular, but the average reader) have more positive feelings about the announcement. There's no other plausible reason for using a row of random smiley faces as a page separator in an announcement like this.
But in this case they overdid it, and now it feels a bit like a scam/domain hijacked website with tons of stock photos. I might not have noticed a single row, but it has 4 rows!
I don't think it's weird at all, and it's probably a deliberate design choice by the developer that made this page. They've probably probably suffered for years because of IE's poor support for standards and other quirks. I think it's a mini celebration by way of design!
Not so fast, it just means enterprise support prices have gone up for those organisations resisting change and still requiring security. For example, the entire country of South Korea.
When I read your comment, I thought they had inserted happy smileys in their text. It made me curious enough to open the page and see the regular marketing faces for Microsoft. That was a bit of a bummer. It would have made my day to see real smileys on that page! ;-)
Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off