Microsoft has announced the end of life for IE 8, 9 and 10. This isn’t that big of a surprise because Microsoft issued a death sentence for these versions back in November. On January 12th Microsoft will issue an “End of Life” patch for the three versions of their popular browser. This means that these versions will no longer receive any new security patches or updates. As with a lot of updates, millions of users will avoid these patches which will make them at greater risk of malicious activity.
This action can be very frustrating for IT professionals because so many applications are programmed specifically for Internet Explorer and are often pretty version-specific. I work with a couple of companies that will face big challenges because the software they depend on won’t run in Microsoft’s latest browser called Edge. It could cost these companies many thousands of dollars to upgrade their software, if and when it is available. Microsoft has taken a few steps to ease the pain by offering an emulation mode for IE11 to allow legacy apps to run. Trouble is, if your app doesn’t work in IE11, this is no help.
Honestly, it’ll be very nice to see IE 8,9 and 10 finally die. Internet Explorer behaves differently than other browsers and making websites and ecommerce solutions work properly in them can be difficult. It’ll be nice to see the share of these browsers decrease.
Remember: keep your websites up to date! There is likely to be a wave of hackers attacking websites in the coming months with the hopes of injecting code to infiltrate these dead browsers.
