This arrived in my inbox at work today.
Microsoft is ending support for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 next week on January 12th, releasing a final patch encouraging users to upgrade to one of the company's more recent browsers. The end of support means that these older versions of Internet Explorer will no longer receive security updates or technical support, making anyone who uses them much more vulnerable to hackers. A recently-announced patch will deliver the last few bug fixes, as well as an "End of Life" notification telling users to upgrade to IE 11 or Microsoft Edge — the company's successor to Internet Explorer, built for Windows 10
OH NO PANIC! PANIC!
That is, er, no, you don’t have to panic.
The good news if, if you are running Windows 7, you can easily upgrade to IE 11. (In fact, you probably already have it.) Windows 8 and 8.1 came with IE11. If you’ve got Windows 10, it came with Edge.
If you have Windows 7, and you have been running regular Windows updates, you should have IE11. You can check by going to Internet Explorer, and clicking the little gear icon in the corner, and selecting “About Internet Explorer.”
Who is this going to affect? Well, mostly IT departments running on Windows machines that dragged their feet upgrading to IE11, either because some piece of legacy software needed an older version to run, or because they just didn’t think it was a priority. Now, it is.
Windows XP and Vista are no longer fully supported by Microsoft, so if you have those older operating systems, your system is already more vulnerable to exploits and hacks. You should consider upgrading. (If you can’t afford an upgrade, either operating system-wise or hardware wise, and you only use your system for checking email and doing basic work in a word processor or spreadsheet, you can consider the free Ubuntu operating system as an alternate to Windows. It’ll easily install on any Windows XP or Vista machine. Just be sure to back up all your files first.)
Check below the fold for some IT crunchy numbers.
I used to support a department that had an external facing website. Due to the magic of Google analytics, we were able to determine which browsers people were using to access the website.
They were, in order:
- IE11
- iOS
- Android/Chrome
- Firefox
- Safari
- IE9
- IE10
- IE8
- Kindle
IE8, 9, and 10 were combined less than 10% of the folks accessing our browsers. Based on this information, it was pretty easy for us to convince the VP of IT that we could safely drop support for IE 8-10 and focus on fully supporting Android and iOS instead.