Internet Explorer has few fans amongst the tech community, with it’s blatant disregard for web standards and numerous security and privacy issues over the years. It has been some time in the works, but Microsoft has announced that the ‘end of life‘ of these older versions of their web browser as of Tuesday.
The ‘end of life’ announcement comes with a patch to go live on the 12th of January, KB3123303, providing a few final bug and security fixes for the browser, as well as introducing a ‘notification feature’. This feature will inform users upon starting the software that they should update to either the last supported version of IE, 11 or the new Microsoft Edge browser for Windows 10. Those stubbornly wishing to stick to their current version of IE and enterprises that are yet to transition from the unsupported versions the notification can be disabled. Microsoft provided a step by step guide to this process, however, it does involve editing the registry, so the less experienced user may just be better giving in and updating.
In a way, it is surprising that support for Internet Explorer has lasted so long, with Microsoft demoting the browser to ‘legacy’ status last year and planning to end support for it’s older versions since 2014. Whether this move by Microsoft will drive the hundreds of millions of users of outdated IE users to update to 11 or make the jump to Windows 10 with Edge is debatable. The move may just drive the users to competitor’s browsers instead of upgrading as their copy of IE becomes a security liability.
