Internet Explorer became such a bane to web developers that even Microsoft itself declared for its extinction.
Now that IE6 is out of the way, what about IE7 and IE8?
How many IE versions are we going to contend with anyway!?!
IE7 plays with PNGs and has less CSS issues, but it has the same (although faster) JavaScript engine.
IE8 brings more to the table, like localStorage, postMEssage and hashchange event, but it too has its limitations. Remember, IE8 was released in 2009, so it’s far from contemporary.
Windows XP
The problem comes with Windows XP.
XP accounts for 46.6% of Windows users, and since IE9 isn’t available for XP, its global adoption is severally stunted:
Only Microsoft would shoot them in the foot like this. After all, Firefox and Chrome continues to ship versions that will run on XP. So, unless a huge portion of XP users upgrade or their PC dies, we’re going to be contending with multiple outdated browsers for quite some time.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it.
More Cycles
Although Firefox and Chrome are on a six week release cycle, Microsoft has upped their cycle to once a year. Nice, right?
Not quite.
Dean Hachamovitch, IE Corporate VP says,
Products like Windows and Office have a lifecycle policy that typically runs 10+ years because that’s what these organizations need. As part of Windows, IE honors that 10+ year commitment.
Uh-oh.
According to Microsoft support, IE9 and IE10 are scheduled to be sunset in 2020.
Since IE8 shipped with Windows 7, you can look at dropping support in nine years.
Bad Plan
If we follow the thread, we see that IE17 will be released in 2019, just before IE8, 9 and 10 are gone.
So, as a web developer, you’ll be expected to support one version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera and ten versions of IE?
This is a bad plan.
[via Paul Irish]
Calum Henderson says
It will be sad if that many versions of IE are out there!
Eric Dye says
FACT.
Kevin says
I’d rather not support any version of IE. Chrome or Firefox FTW!
Eric Dye says
For real!