Microsoft to Stop Supporting older versions of Internet Explorer in January 2016.

I think a lot of us remember when Internet Explorer was the dominant browser, way back when there was little or no competition, in 2002 Internet Explorer had 85% of the market share with the rest divided between Netscape and AOL. This fell over the years, in 2006 it had dropped to 60% with Firefox gaining 29.9% of the market share. Currently Internet Explorer has around 8% of the market with Chrome being the most dominant browser at 62.5%, these figures have been acquired from w3Schools.com(1) These figures definitely show that IE’s support has definitely fallen away over the years. In a blog on MSDN, Roger Capriotti advises people to enable automatic updates to ensure an up-to-date computing experience, with advice to commercial customers to test and accept updates quickly, especially security updates, he continues to state that ‘After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, or Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support.’ blogs.msdn.com (2)

The Microsoft Support Lifecycle page, availabe at https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/lifecycle/search?sort=PN&alpha=internet%20explorer&wa=wsignin1.0#gp/msl-Windows-81/en-gb can be an invaluable resource to identify what Microsoft products are approaching their End of life for support and need to be upgraded or replaced accordingly.

References

1. W3Schools.com Browser Statistics http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Retrieved 10/2/2015

2. blogs.msdn.com Stay up-to-date with Internet Explorer Roger Capriotti http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-internet-explorer.aspx Retrieved 10/2/2015