Microsoft's support-stoppage mandate- Ready to discard IE old versions?

According to the mandate passed by Microsoft, around 70% of the IE users currently relying on the older version either have to upgrade to the new IE version or switch to another browser. The time limit set is 16 months. According to the Microsoft, their borrowers will be stopping the support function during the early part of 2016 hence it recommended for the current old version users to upgrade. But looks like the IE users are in no mood to let go their older versions.

Microsoft’s announcement can as surprise on 7th August wherein they stated that post January 2016, they will support IE.9 on Windows Vista, Windows server 2012 will need to have IE.10 and Windows 7 and 8.1 will need to have the IE.11 version. It was informed that IE 7 and IE.8 support will be completely dropped off and some other versions on specific editions like IE.10 on windows 7.

Even though the browser will continue to function; but there will not be any technical support provided by Microsoft and no security updates will be sent to the users after the versions will be banned.

It has been recommended that it will risky for a user to still rely on unsupported versions as Microsoft will no longer will be patching any bugs in the banned versions. Microsoft has always been constantly working on fixing bugs in the current versions. Microsoft has urged to their 2/3 of the old versions users to ditch the versions and upgrade to a supported version by the end of 2015.

IE.9 is the newest version able to run on windows vista and has been able to gain a stable ground. Vista which powers around only 3% of the windows computers and runs mainly on Windows 7 needs to be discarded by the users by Jan 2016.

Microsoft has announced that IE.8 will have more issues. The basic default explorer in many standard Windows XP computers has been adopted by many companies for being user friendly and has also been implemented on certain windows 7 by many businesses. IE.8 last month accounted for about 21.4 percent of all the browsers and 36.6% of different versions of IE. IE currently has 58.8% browser space share when compared to all the browsers available.

IE.6 and IE.7 was supported last month but IE.6 is still available on Windows server 2003 as it no longer supports windows XP. IE 6 is scheduled for being unsupported/retirement in July, 2015. IE 10 has barely shown improvement in terms of usage, it accounted at 6.2% among all the browsers and 10.6% among all copies of Internet explorer. IE.11 was able to show some improvement as it was averaging at 17.6% among other browsers and 30 percent of all copies.

With the above browser space %, IE 8 and IE 9 might have to be suppressed in order to increase the percentage share. The numbers are quite daunting for Microsoft has forced them to urge the users of old version to move to new upgraded versions.