So as of this past Tuesday, if you're still running Internet Explorer 8, 9, or 10, Microsoft has officially stopped patching them. January 12th was the cutoff — no more security updates, no more anything, for anything except the latest IE version available on your particular flavor of Windows (which for most people means IE11, unless you've jumped to Edge on Windows 10).
Microsoft actually told us this was coming back in 2014, so nobody gets to act surprised. But I spent about four hours this week dealing with the fallout anyway, because I still do a little freelance work on the side and one of my clients runs an internal ordering system that was, I kid you not, built for IE8 and never touched since. It still technically works in IE11's compatibility mode, mostly, except for a date picker that throws a JavaScript error every third click. Nobody in that office wants to hear "you need to modernize your intranet app," they just want to order staples. I get it. I do not enjoy being the messenger.
Here's the thing that annoys me about this whole rollout, though: killing off IE8/9/10 is the right call, full stop. Those browsers were a nightmare to build for and an even bigger nightmare to secure — running a decade-old rendering engine connected to the open internet in 2016 is asking for trouble. I'm not defending them. What bugs me is how many companies treat "Microsoft will support this forever" as an actual business assumption, and then act shocked when the bill comes due. This happens every single time there's an end-of-support date, whether it was Windows XP or Server 2003 or now this. You'd think IT departments would start building in the assumption that nothing lasts, but nope, same fire drill, different year.
Anyway. If you're a dev reading this and you've got old <!--[if IE 9]--> conditional comments sitting in your CSS somewhere, this is your semi-official permission to rip them out. I did it to two client sites this week and it felt fantastic, like cleaning out a garage. One of the stylesheets had a fix in it for an IE7 float bug. IE7. That browser came out in 2006.
Small unrelated thing that made me laugh this week: Wednesday night was the big Powerball drawing, the $1.5-something billion one, and apparently the ticket-buying frenzy was so intense that at least a few state lottery websites just fell over under the traffic. I saw people on Twitter posting screenshots of error pages from state lottery sites that clearly were never built to handle a traffic spike like that, because why would they be, most days it's a few thousand people checking if they won forty bucks. Then suddenly the entire country decides simultaneously that today is the day they're finally going to be rich, and the server room somewhere in a state government building just quietly catches fire. I don't have a grand point to make about it, I just think it's funny that both stories this week are basically "old infrastructure meets unexpected load and does not cope well." One's a browser nobody wanted to keep supporting, one's a website nobody expected to need supporting at that scale. Same lesson, different flavor.
I did not buy a Powerball ticket, for what it's worth. I never do the math on it seriously but I did once actually work out the odds for a blog post a few years back and it cured me of ever bothering again. Something like 1 in 292 million for the jackpot. You have better odds of a lot of genuinely bizarre things happening to you first. My spouse still buys one occasionally "for fun" and I've stopped arguing about it because it's five dollars and arguing about five dollars is not a good use of anyone's marriage.
If your job touches the web at all, go check your analytics for old-browser traffic this week. I checked mine (yes, this blog has analytics, don't judge me, I like knowing if anyone's actually reading this thing) and IE9/10 combined are still pulling about 1.8% of my visits, which is higher than I expected for a personal blog with maybe a few hundred regular readers. Somewhere out there, someone is reading my ramblings about programming and browser support on the exact browser I'm complaining about. That's either deeply ironic or exactly the kind of person who needed to read this post. Possibly both.