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back to article Still running IE10? Not for long, says Microsoft

Microsoft is advising Windows users to update their browsers ahead of a new policy that will see some versions of Internet Explorer no longer supported. The Redmond software giant said that beginning January 12, 2016, it will only support the newest version of its browser available in each operating system. "The newest …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    we have all these addicts and are going to stop selling them drugs...

    Well I can tell you that the #1 SMB medical cloud app us eClinicalWorks and it works best with IE 10, IE 11 has issues and they do not suggest we upgrade to IE 11 on Windows 7 x64...

    I could have told al you dip SH!TS to not tie your application to IE but you had some PHB that said if everyone is doing it we are OK and that it will be so popular there will be automagic migration tools to move from the SH!T code to standards based code and apps so we don't have to lift a finger or use our brains to fix our broken code...

    So much for that idea!

    21 2 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: we have all these addicts and are going to stop selling them drugs...

      <meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“IE=10”>

      5 1 Reply
      1. a_yank_lurker
        Reply Icon

        Re: we have all these addicts and are going to stop selling them drugs...

        It is probably more complex than that given Idiot Explorer's notoriously erratic support of the web standards. With some versions of IE (~6), the support was so bad that one almost had to write a web page twice: Idiot Explorer compliant and standards compliant.

        The real problem is too many PHBs with a sort of workable idea demanded the coding was done to IE standards only and not web compliant. Looking at the scores for HTML5 compliance for major browsers at html5test.com, all versions of IE poorly support html5.

        6 4 Reply
    2. Da Weezil
      Reply Icon

      Re: we have all these addicts and are going to stop selling them drugs...

      Ditto the DVLA ELV site that refuses to play nice with any browser except IE 10. Pathetic

      2 0 Reply
    3. 33rpm
      Reply Icon

      Re: we have all these addicts and are going to stop selling them drugs...

      It's always the craptastic application writers who make some app that is java, flash, or browser specific that makes things difficult.

      0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MS stopping support for IE10

    Fine, how about MS release a tool to completely uninstall it then

    If people do not want to upgrade and microsoft do not want to remove the errors in their coding they can atleast allow users to remove it completely so it doesnt cause any further problems. Those that have corporate web intranet systems that require it can be given a free upgrade.

    I can understand MS wanting to drop support to save cash but sadly they took the money when people bought their products and whilst these systems are still "working" they should be required to support them or offer a free alternative.

    7 8 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: MS stopping support for IE10

      A free alternative? You mean like the upgrade to a newer version that they already offer?

      10 4 Reply
    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: MS stopping support for IE10

      Based on the stats I can see IE 10's market share is already minimal (2% for most of the year). Most systems on which it could be installed on have already been updated to IE 11 or people are using another browser.

      IE 9 is a bit more of a problem because of Vista but again, market share is low (around 4% and falling slowly). Internally it's the largely the same engine as 10 and 11 so there shouldn't be too many problems. The odd glitch maybe. Still, MS should really do what it takes get IE 11 to run on Vista,

      What all of us in developer land are really happy about is that people really are stopping using IE 8. Market share has now dropped off a cliff from around 4-5% all year to just over 1% now.

      3 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: MS stopping support for IE10

      "Fine, how about MS release a tool to completely uninstall it then"

      No can do. Internet Explorer is a required and critical part of Windows and removing it from Windows would render Windows unusable. At least, isn't that (more or less) what MS said, under oath, 15 years ago??? If they released an uninstaller for IE now, then it could be argued that they were lying back then.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Kiwi
        Reply Icon
        Linux

        Re: MS stopping support for IE10

        If they released an uninstaller for IE now, then it could be argued that they were lying back then.

        I am someone who quite hates M$, as a quick look at my posts would show :)

        Given the flack they've had in the last 15 years, and given that even they now seem to recognise that IE is a worthless pile of steaming brown stuff, they could simply argue that they improved Windoze to not have that shiteware stuck deeply inside it.

        That said, it's probably an indication of how they really want to treat their users.. Some disgusting disease-ridden thing buried deeply inside where it can hurt the most.....

        2 0 Reply
  3. a_yank_lurker

    How many corporate pages will break

    Has Slurp considered that fact that many internal enterprise websites may not run on IE11 and will require a major rewrite? Too many office drones will not be doing much work when the internal corporate site crashes.

    4 11 Reply
    1. veti Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: How many corporate pages will break

      We hear this every time MS drops support for anything.

      Any PHB who tells their minions to code for a specific version of any software - should know by now what they're getting into. I don't see why Microsoft should be obliged to continue indefinitely supporting its customers' bad business decisions. (And I comment as one whose until-recently employer is still developing for Silverlight, even though it was a pointless choice for them even when it was new.)

      TL;DR: Screw 'em.

      15 1 Reply
      1. a_yank_lurker
        Reply Icon

        Re: How many corporate pages will break

        The timeline is about 6 weeks to upgrade non-compliant websites. This is somewhat different than XP EOL which announced at release and later extended. For many, the time line, particularly since there will about 3 weeks for working with the holidays seems a bit short. Now, if Slurp said, 1 July, no issue.

        1 9 Reply
        1. Sandtitz Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Go

          Re: How many corporate pages will break

          "For many, the time line, particularly since there will about 3 weeks for working with the holidays seems a bit short. Now, if Slurp said, 1 July, no issue."

          There is no issue.

          Microsoft has announced these EOL dates over a year ago.

          9 0 Reply
      2. Joe Montana
        Reply Icon

        Re: How many corporate pages will break

        Microsoft should be obliged because they actively encouraged their customers to get themselves locked in.

        4 4 Reply
    2. Grikath
      Reply Icon

      Re: How many corporate pages will break

      If they're properly coded? Including all the esoteric shyte some "people" insist be put on/in a bloody webpage? None.

      Because if between shifting/developing standards, rise and fall of popularity/idiosyncracies of browser [x], and several flavours of Hype du Jour over, say, the past decade or so, people still haven't learned to allow for ( the rather inevitable) EOL of a bit of software, you have to wonder what they're being paid for.

      4 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How many corporate pages will break

      I suspect anyone working in local government (councils) and NHS will probably be on IE8 still for various "legacy" reasons, that dodgy old housing system that only works on IE8 and we haven't been playing the developers for upgrades or support for the past few years etc.

      It's about time Microsoft did this, I'm sick of having our standard browser be so damn insecure, perhaps now management will go for the latest IE or maybe even let us move to Chrome, Firefox or even a minority browser.. probably not though.

      One risk assessment and we're stuck on IE8 indefinitely.

      0 1 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: How many corporate pages will break

        "NHS will probably be on IE8 still for various "legacy" reasons,"

        Ooh, ooh, [Puts up hand and clicks fingers frantically] that's us!!!

        Anon - 'cause I like to work

        1 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: How many corporate pages will break

          Not just the NHS; we're on IE8 too for internal apps (just had to go and check, as we're allowed to use slightly more up to date alternative browsers for actual web work - although staggeringly not everyone does; they seem to spend a lot of time complaining about how bad the internet is these days and how many sites don't seem to work properly...) & it's not a public sector organisation.

          1 0 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: How many corporate pages will break

            We are still on IE8 mostly (large american corp, 70,000+ employees), mainly due to some legacy internal apps not liking IE9 or newer, even with compatibility options.

            The companies workaround was to deploy an enterprise version of Firefox, and tell everyone to use that for everything other than the borked intranet sites.

            Personally I installed IE 11 anyway (Win 7), and just have IE8 in a VM for the few occasions when it's needed.

            1 0 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: How many corporate pages will break

        local government (councils) and NHS will probably be on IE8 still for various "legacy" reasons,....One risk assessment and we're stuck on IE8 indefinitely.

        Only so long as the risk assessment includes a caveat that the board of the council/trust acknowledges and underwrites the security and data risks and potential penalties of running obsolete and unsupported software.

        Then again, its the public sector, stick your fingers in your ears, and join in with me: "Lalalaa-alalala..alalala..alalalaaalalaaaaa".

        0 0 Reply
        1. Chika
          Reply Icon
          Unhappy

          Re: How many corporate pages will break

          I take considerable umbrage at the idea that all public sector systems are affected in this way, especially as I was part of a rollout at a certain public sector organisation that spent quite a bit of time and effort and money to make sure that this didn't happen.

          Then once that was done, I was given the boot...

          0 0 Reply
    4. lansalot
      Reply Icon

      Re: How many corporate pages will break

      That's why they have IE11 Enterprise Mode. Basically, you can via GPO deploy an XML file which says "load this site in IE8 mode", "this site in IE10 mode" etc.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: How many corporate pages will break

        >That's why they have IE11 Enterprise Mode.

        Does that work in XP? Because that's why most of the public sector is on IE8.

        2 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: How many corporate pages will break

          Well I'd propose sensible people should know that the moment a new version of an application is released the current version will become obsolete at some point and you should probably start the process of updating and checking for issues as soon as possible instead of when the end is finally announced.

          Don't most other browsers just update you now regardless of your desire.

          1 0 Reply
        2. lansalot
          Reply Icon

          Re: How many corporate pages will break

          Doesn't work in XP, but neither does IE11. It's not supported.

          Out of interest, Server 2012 latest supported is IE10, and Server 2008 (not R2) latest supported is IE9.

          0 0 Reply
  4. kitekrazy

    Tired of dumbed down browsers

    Edge as in what? Don't like it at all. Still using Firefox since it has menus. Google isn't great either.

    5 0 Reply
    1. gobaskof
      Reply Icon

      Re: Google isn't great either

      I also use Firefox, but I am really not that sure if it is my dislike of Chromium/Chrome or my own habits. The first version of Chrome that everyone shat a brick about didn't have RSS feeds as bookmarks (natively, perhaps via and addon), since that I have to admit I have barely tried it. But either way, at least like Firefox, Chromium consistently adheres to web standards.

      0 1 Reply
  5. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    Edge is hardly an alternative

    MS made it quite clear when it was announced, and the almost exact parallel in patching schedules since then has demonstrated, that Edge is just IE11 with the back-compat cruft taken out. It is touch and go whether we'll actually see something branded as IE12, but you can think of Edge as IE12 and you won't be far wrong.

    2 3 Reply
    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      Re: Edge is hardly an alternative

      Indeed. This is just yet another poorly written piece of clickbait.

      Basically anything that El Reg covers regarding browsers is only worth reading for the comments as some of us tend to know a thing or too.

      4 4 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Edge is hardly an alternative

        This is just yet another poorly written piece of clickbait.

        We're both here, so it worked. Not much point in complaining about it, when you knew in advance what to expect?

        2 0 Reply
        1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Edge is hardly an alternative

          We're both here, so it worked. Not much point in complaining about it, when you knew in advance what to expect?

          I skip the article and go straight to the comments and get rewarded: the schizophrenic policy of dropping support for IE 10 and IE 9 on Windows but maintaining it for Vista. This is increasingly the case for most of El Reg. The article could have had some value if it at least included data from El Reg's own website statistics, but as we know they never do.

          The question recently came up in discussions about a customer site: recommendation is to drop support for IE 9 and blame Microsoft.

          0 0 Reply
    2. Steve Foster
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      Re: Edge is hardly an alternative

      Particularly as it's not available as a standalone download for Vista, 7SP1, Server 2008, Server 2012 or any of those other listed OS's with an obsolete version of IE.

      0 0 Reply
  6. MJI Silver badge

    I have no idea what IE I have

    When my work PC was first set up Firefox was installed.

    Still running it as best of a bad baunch of web browsers with a back up of Pale Moon

    1 0 Reply
    1. Boothy
      Reply Icon

      Re: I have no idea what IE I have

      I use a Ninite installer on any new machines, with Chrome (or Firefox if that's your preference), Foxit Reader, and a few other 'default' items.

      That way I don't ever have to use IE :-)

      2 1 Reply
  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Curse MS

    They spent all that time generating a browser that had all this fancy non-standard stuff, which everyone then programmed in to their systems; there is hardware that is running web interfaces that use this s**t.

    And now they kill the non-standards compliant browsers to a rate where I am going to have to maintain a machine runnign an unsupported operating system (Vista) just so that I can run a browser to talk with the old kit.

    (actually, the old kit will get replaced in due course... but what I hate is how companies like M$ do all this crap and don't give a damn about the customer. Also, curse the hardware manufacturers, as they should have had more of a clue than to rely on non-standards kit in the bloody first place.)

    0 7 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Curse MS

      It's not like there hasn't been plenty of time for people/company to fix legacy non-standard sites.

      MS made it very clear they were moving towards standards compliance and away from fancy non-standard stuff back in 2008/2009, when IE 9 launched (beta in 2008, release in 2009).

      • Any site that was developed before 2009, using the fancy non-standard stuff, has had 6 years to update or replace those sites.

      • Any site that was developed after 2009 using the fancy non-standard stuff, has only themselves (or their managers etc) to blame.

      AC, as I work for a company that has failed on both the above points, with old intranet sites that have not been updated for years, and newer sites (including their primary internal Help Desk site) using things like ActiveX etc. :-/

      3 0 Reply
  8. RNixon

    A serious browser question.

    Are there any Windows browsers with a decent touch UI other than Edge?

    Firefox and Chrome removed their touch UIs. I've got a Win10 tablet and I haven't found a browser that has both adblock AND a usable UI.

    0 0 Reply
  9. Dale Loyd

    A serious browser question.

    @RNixon - tried PaleMoon, the fork of Firefox from around version 27 or 28? It has the old Firefox UI and still supports most FF extensions.

    1 1 Reply
    1. RNixon
      Reply Icon

      Re: A serious browser question.

      PaleMoon's UI is much nicer than standard Firefox, but it's still nigh unusable on an 8" touchscreen. I've got a Dell Venue 8 Pro and it's actually quite a handy little slab, but Edge is the only browser that's really usable via touch on it. Opera is better than FF or Chrome, but it's still not 'good'.

      0 0 Reply
  10. Jess

    Seems rather artificial.

    They will support 9, 10 and 11 but only on the certain platforms.

    Would have been better if they made 11 available everywhere, and dropped the rest.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Seems rather artificial.

      >They will support 9, 10 and 11 but only on the certain platforms.

      There's a huge stack (millions) of terminals and specialist hardware running WinCE6 embedded - IE6 still gets monthly security updates from MS there...and will until mid-2018.

      0 0 Reply
  11. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    I've never used IE, but I know I wouldn't like it.

    1 2 Reply
  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A proper solution to discontinued support...

    ...would be a 500 Billion Euro class action lawsuit to demonstrate that Microsucks can't just decide to stop supporting defective software that they have sold to the public under the guise of being a secure and reliable product when it is neither. Migrating to IE11 or IE 200006 still won't provide a secure, reliable, defect free product that Microsucks is charging for but not delivering and unable to properly secure and/repair despite chronic security updates - which often create more security issues. Holding Microsucks accountable for all defective code should be mandatory and the financial consequences for knowingly selling defective software, extreme to deter this outrageous exploitation of society as has been ongoing since the 80's.

    3 2 Reply
  13. Efros

    What is this IE you speak of?

    Is it something like Mosaic?

    2 0 Reply
    1. Chika
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      Re: What is this IE you speak of?

      Is it something like Mosaic?

      Sort of. I think the name came from the frustration that somebody had when they used it.

      AYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

      0 0 Reply
  14. Bleu

    I understand

    that some businesses have applications which rely on certain standards-breaking quirks of IE 6, but the only times I have ever used their browser product were in ''net cafes or hotels where downloading an alternative would have taken too much time, only to be eliminated by a re-boot, except at the many hotels where. if one wanted to be randomly malicious, one could have a field day.

    Not being randomly malicious, I generally just erase the mass of stored passwords and login names, of course, usually after logging out. I tell the staff, they are generally clueless, but that is not the fault of IE.

    However, using it at times over the years, it is clear that any 'idea' MS has ever had was based on

    1. trying to break the Internet to make it an MS monopoly (sure, they don't do it much now, but it was a guiding strategy under Gates after he worked out that he'd missed the Internet bus) and

    2. lame copying of features from others.

    Why does anybody (except for the businesses with programs depending on quirks in IE 6), bother to boot it up?

    Even the name is supremely lame. 'Hey, those people have "navigator", why don't we call ours something really different, like, say "explorer"?'

    Pathetic.

    0 0 Reply

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