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

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/01/05/web-developers-rejoice-internet-explorer-8-9-and-10-die-on-tuesday/

by kostas_echarta • 11 years ago

277 175 11 years ago

saurik• 11 years 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.

cm21872• 11 years 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• 11 years 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?

ars5• 11 years 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.

jmspring• 11 years ago

More than one entity is paying for continual patches for XP -- http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/26/technology/microsoft-windows...

pjc503• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

al2o3cr2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

inlined• 11 years 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.

xg152• 11 years 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?

tracker111• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

flurpitude• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Indeed, Vista being EOL 11 April 2017. It does mean that IE 10 is EOL, but not 9 for another 15 months.

tracker111• 11 years ago

Have they no Firefox? no Chrome?

gtk40• 11 years ago

Versions of IE as old as 7 are still supported if you look at various embedded and server editions of Windows and their support windows.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I...

mkurz• 11 years ago

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 What makes you think it is 2020?

yuhong• 11 years ago

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

noobermin• 11 years ago

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

yazaddaruvala• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Superior DOM API is the biggest utility of jQuery anyway.

OSButler• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

"I see dead browsers"

pjmlp• 11 years ago

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

frik2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

frik2• 11 years 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.

icebraining3• 11 years 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.

cmurf3• 11 years 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.

ars5• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

oneeyedpigeon• 11 years 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.

cmurf3• 11 years 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.

VLM• 11 years ago

If that got popular in general, think of the fun malware possibilities where "setting the clock" becomes a major security issue. Not to mention sabotage. Shut down the chemical plant by changing the time on a PC to the year 2200 (assuming it works past 2039 anyway), etc.

cmurf3• 11 years ago

Changing the clock is already a legitimate security concern. Only root should be able to make such modifications anyway, and if root is compromised it doesn't matter anyway because there are much easier ways to take down a system once someone's escalated privileges that far.

flohofwoe2• 11 years 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/pc/os.html.

madaxe_again3• 11 years 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".

danieltillett5• 11 years 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_wot6• 11 years ago

They can still install Firefox.

ars5• 11 years 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.

drdaeman4• 11 years 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".

ars5• 11 years 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.

douche• 11 years ago

Not even counting all the things like COM integration and embedded browser components in WinForms and the like...

I do some work with various embedded extension APIs in different office and collaboration tools, and it's quite a mess trying to figure out what those web browsers actually are

hs86• 11 years ago

I remember that installing an older version of IE on Windows 95 enabled some features like the Quick Launch bar in the task bar. Previously, I believed that this was a feature exclusive to the newer Windows 98 but that IE installation backported a lot of the visible Windows 98 changes into the Windows 95 Explorer.

jessaustin6• 11 years ago

...it's an operating system component, that's used in a lot of places...

This is a strategy tax, for a strategy that stopped being reasonable a decade ago. Numerous alternate browsers have had no problems competing with an "integrated" IE, for many years now. The DOJ case was settled by a completely different set of executives, so the current bunch don't have to pretend that OS integration is somehow vital to the function of a browser. Someone should draft a memo to the browser department: that stupid shit you were supposed to do 15 years ago? stop doing that. An organization that continues with such a farce for so many years is puzzling.

userbinator• 11 years 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 ), and other valuable repositories of information which are most at risk of being "appified" and making the Internet less accessible overall.

...and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961613

cageface• 11 years 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• 11 years 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).

oliwarner5• 11 years 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_wot6• 11 years 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.

iqonik2• 11 years 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.

jtheory• 11 years ago

Why this, specifically?

I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade

People using your product are discussing it on review sites, on social media, with friends/family, etc.. If you silently give some of them a broken product, a few will contact support; but I imagine most will assume your product is just low quality. So that's the word they'll spread.

For corporate users: well, you'd need to talk with your customers. They might be facing a seriously expensive upgrade process, and could be extremely unhappy to hear you're setting an arbitrary deadline for them.

oliwarner5• 11 years ago

It's easy to say this stuff, less easy to implement in a business. It depends on your demographic and your content. Take B2B sales or B2B SaaS. Enterprise users are THE main reason for crappy old browsers in my experience, so the real question becomes...

Are you really willing to take a 10% hit on sales?

You can announce EOLs until the cows come home (Microsoft has and look how well it has done them). If your product stops working, they'll complain at you and then cancel their contract and find another provider who will support them.

I'm speaking from a gruelling 15 years experience developing enterprise SaaS. We've only just dropped IE6. It'll be years before IE8 goes away.

jacquesm9• 11 years ago

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.

perlgeek• 11 years ago

Giving 15% of your users a shitty experience is a really bad of doing business.

grandalf• 11 years ago

It's not as if web developers like supporting broken, outdated browsers. It's done because without the users using those browsers, the business would be worse off.

There are lots of intermediate steps like warning about an inferior experience, but at this point it's necessary to test most websites on at least a few versions of IE9.

I've found that using react I've had very easy compatibility with older IE, etc. The only thing I've had to do is install a polyfill or two.

kdamken• 11 years ago

While I completely get where you're coming from, realistically this can be very messy. You'd quickly find that an increasing number of your support calls were from those users having issues. 15% doesn't sound like a lot, but 15% of a million people is 150,000 people.

So, you'd succeed in angering a lot of customers. Much better to try and inform all of your customers (not just corporate) of the upcoming changes, and provide support materials for them to follow while giving them a reasonable timeframe to do so.

kbutler• 11 years ago

If I was a developer,

It's pretty clear you're not a developer (or wouldn't be for long).

There are two really bad decisions here:

1) You are driving away up to 15% of people who actually use your product. How much would you spend to acquire that many active users? It's easier to keep existing users than acquire new users.

2) Sending users through a ticket system for errors you could have prevented with a simple warning is a bad experience for them and far more work for you. And most users will silently disappear instead.

bosdev2• 11 years ago

Not showing a message to your users is very user hostile. It's one thing to not offer a service, it's another to frustrate your potential users.

tracker111• 11 years ago

At my current job, IE < 10 is less than 2% and support for IE8 has already dropped, and IE9 will next month iirc.

szastupov• 11 years ago

Obligatory comment about Safari being the new IE.

J_Darnley2• 11 years ago

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

bosdev2• 11 years 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_Darnley2• 11 years 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/ or http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ or this website Hacker News.

al2o3cr2• 11 years 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.

flohofwoe2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

zanny2• 11 years 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.

manigandham2• 11 years ago

This is just maintenance, pure and simple. Applies to any other piece of equipment, software or otherwise.

Plenty of hardware components that can probably keep running for a long time without maintenance, but you wouldn't do that would you?

tracker111• 11 years ago

Because the browser isn't isolated to only using a single website/application... users are likely to hit any number of sites, including those with popups that look like security warnings that then exploit and infect the rest of your network only to destroy everything.

For example look at speedtest.com in a windows browser, when you really meant speedtest.net ... This is only a single example, it happens and bad people are out there.

yock• 11 years ago

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?

Because by choosing that system in the first place you implicitly chose to tie yourself closely to their support. Both the buyer and the seller have a responsibility to plan for following these support decisions. Scenarios like this should inform future purchase decisions, including whether or not to buy again from the company who failed to keep up.

oliwarner5• 11 years ago

When you've got a system that is, for example, underpinning your whole business operation (eg billing, machine controls, whatever) and that cost thousands (often tens or hundreds of thousands) to implement and it only works on a legacy version of an operating system (be that Win 3.11, Linux 2.4, or even just XP) you WILL move heaven and earth to avoid disrupting that system.

Even if it's a smooth migration to a current release, it doesn't have 15 years of perfect history behind it.

And that's when you can migrate. There are plenty of control systems for devices that cost $millions that were bought decades ago that just need to keep working. You don't have source. The vendor went out of business with the dot-com bubble.

Yeah, we probably could replace all the things, but at what cost? Will it beat the last 15 years of perfect uptime? Are you the buy willing to stake your job on it? Or shall we just paper over the cracks and keep shovelling coal into that server in the corner?

Edit: I'm describing worst-case scenarios in specific use-cases but even if there isn't a good reason to stay behind, the feeling of "why fix what ain't broke?" is pervasive in management, especially IT management. Maybe it's a generational thing and we'll see waves on waves of upgrades in the next decade or two but I'm fairly sure that'll just lead to another generation of "make do"ers.

pilsetnieks• 11 years ago

why fix what ain't broke

Because it will break eventually. That decrepit PC full of metal dust running XP that controls this here multimillion CNC mill will, given enough time, fail. Some part or other will fail, and eventually you won't be able to find new parts anymore that work with it. Granted, for an XP PC it's far in the future but still.

Besides, a Win 3.11 or XP PC won't have a 15 year uptime, it will probably have a sticker on it reminding users to reboot it daily.

yeukhon• 11 years ago

I agree and disagree. As an operation person, I think we need to make an argument for why X can't be done right away, but we must have a plan Y for migration. I know for a fact there is still some ancient database server running in our data center serving our critical business but there's a plan to migrate that to modern databases. While re implementing everything is costly, company has to hire specialist from a specific consulting firm to support such ancient database, and how long can we retain such talent without spending extreme amount and caution? "I am scared if I did this will screw everything up." There will be a point they have to migrate such database to something modern, and the cost is still several million plus.

The same argument that corporate world doesn't allow Python 3 or has a hard time to migrate to Python 3 because machines are running on some ancient RHEL servers or because of some security requirement. I get it and I don't get it. First, let's ditch RHLE. Fuck that. I really don't see reason to use RHLE; fine, YMMV. But it is people's job to do work. Some pieces can die, and some pieces will have to evolve, either from scratch, or slowly. No one said software development and operation support are easy, see https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWC74tOVAAAsls0.jpg:large.

madaxe_again3• 11 years ago

What's wrong with continuous improvement?

Our entire ethos is that software is never finished.

theandrewbailey• 11 years ago

I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP"

Can you understand the concept of people being too poor to ever upgrade? Can you understand the concept of people who live in places where up-to-date technology is hard to get? (see Cloudflare's recent SHA1 deprecation post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sha-1-deprecation-no-browser-lef... )

And before you say "there's Linux that's free", the idea of Linux being free if you don't value your time is absolutely applicable to these people. They perceive their time as having more important uses than acquiring and learning different software.

zanny2• 11 years ago

The mistake is not what they are using, the mistake is every person today falling into that trap. We know it exists, yet everyone is still buying Windows computers running versions of a proprietary operating system we know Microsoft will stop supporting within 8 years (at least for Vista through 8, we still have no idea what Microsoft is doing with 10 going forward, and they honestly can do whatever they want - they control the software).

I mourn those stuck on XP, destined to be exploited for eternity by the thousands of malware payloads targeting them now, but you are right in nothing can be done about them really. But the real injustice is every person without the time to learn new systems (and that is a barrier on Windows and Linux - try switching someone from XP to 10 and it as massive a leap, or even more massive, than going from XP to Lubuntu).

manigandham2• 11 years ago

I'm always amazed by what kind of software is so tied down to an operating system like that. Windows has incredible backwards compatibility so I struggle to see what exactly is so hard to move.

This strikes me more as management and economic policy issues within the organization of why waste money for something they might not appreciate or see the necessity of.

makecheck• 11 years ago

This is a frustrating thing as a software developer: not enough people outside the industry know how to audit what they're buying. The expectation is that you reward a developer for simply implementing X, and no attention is given to whether or not the implementation sucks. A lack of open-source mandates may be one factor, and a lack of quality regulation may be another.

It is entirely possible to implement a "working" system that will require Herculean efforts to make the slightest change: a system that will collapse in on itself entirely if anything is touched anywhere else. And if you already spent a lot of money to get this far, you may assume a lot more is required to patch it.

Sadly, although we as an industry do know how to build hardened systems that are a lot more likely to adapt with the times and provide stable operation, people outside of the software industry really don't seem to know the difference. And if better software comes at a premium up front, cheap organizations may always pick the lower bid because they're thinking of software like an office chair and not a bridge that's holding up a road.

the_watcher• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

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...

andyhnj• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

DrScump• 11 years ago

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

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

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