Articles about Internet Explorer

The end of support for older versions of Internet Explorer has been known about for some time now. Despite the fact that there has been plenty of time to prepare for a move away from Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10, many businesses are simply not ready and security experts warn that this could lead to a spate of attacks from hackers.

Microsoft has been encouraging people to move to Internet Explorer 11, or Edge in Windows 10 for a while, and the countdown comes to an end tomorrow -- 12 January. From this point forward, there will be no more patches or security fixes issued. Security analysts fear that with Internet Explorer 9 and 10 accounting for 36 percent of IE and Edge use, and with more than 160 vulnerabilities discovered in Internet Explorer in the last three years, there are risky times ahead.

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All good things must come to an end. But the same can be said about bad things, and many people will be pleased to hear the death knell sound for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10. While Microsoft may be keen for people to use Edge or -- if they must -- Internet Explorer 11, not everyone feels the same.

With the likes of Firefox, Opera, and Chrome available, it might seem like madness that anyone would like to stick with an ancient version of Internet Explorer instead, but choice is everything. A patch that is due to be delivered to Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, and Internet Explorer 10 in the coming day will introduce a nag screen that will pester users into upgrading. If you're happy with your decision to stick with an older version of IE, here's a hack to banish the pestering.

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In less than a week, Microsoft will only offer support for Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge. As of Tuesday 12 January, Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 will die. The aging browsers will receive one more update, and then will be consigned to the trash.

Tuesday is the day that older versions of IE reach the end of their support cycles, and Microsoft is keen for everyone to move to either Microsoft Edge or -- for the diehards -- Internet Explorer 11. If you have not already made the switch (or jumped to Chrome or Firefox), one more patch, KB3123303, will pester you into upgrading.

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Microsoft must have hoped that in walking away from Internet Explorer and moving towards Edge it could successfully shake off its reputation for producing terrible web browsers. There's a joke that everyone has used Internet Explorer at some point, even if it's just once to download Firefox or Chrome; sadly for Microsoft, it seems the trend continues.

The launch of Windows 10 provided an opportunity to attract a new audience to Microsoft Edge -- but people are still jumping ship. It's likely that Edge's continued lack of extension support is partly to blame, but usage stats from numerous analysts paint the same picture: Edge is tanking.

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There we are: the last Patch Tuesday of 2015. It turns out to be about average, with maybe a bit more severity in the bulletins than usually. We have eight critical bulletins in the total 12, including one that fixes a 0-day vulnerability, currently in use by attackers to escalate privileges in Windows. 0-days used to be very rare occasions, but this year they have become almost mainstream.

After all the year started off with a string of 0-days in Adobe Flash and since then we have seen almost every month a patch for a vulnerability that is already under attack. Definitely a sign of the increasing technical capabilities that attackers are wielding and a reminder that IT Managers should not only patch their systems promptly, but also look for additional robustness.

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Launching a new web browser was always going to be a risk. Microsoft used Windows 10 as a launch pad for Edge, shedding the shackles of Internet Explorer in a bid to take on the likes of Chrome and Firefox.

Sadly for Microsoft, new figures show that Edge is failing to make inroads into Google's and Mozilla's market shares. Analysis performed by Quantcast shows that in the US just 12 percent of Windows 10 users are using Edge, while Chrome is sitting pretty with a greater than 70 percent share.

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Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the launch of Internet Explorer. First making an appearance in the Windows 95 era via the Microsoft Plus! Add-on pack which featured the excitingly-named Internet Jumpstart Kit and version 1.0 of the browser people love to hate and hate to love.

Two full decades later we have slowly but surely worked up to Internet Explorer 11 -- Chrome, for comparison has hit the 40s in less than half the time -- and now IE has been all but retired. With the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft Edge is the new kid on the block. Twenty years is a long gestation period. Was it worth the wait?

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Believe it or not, a year has passed since Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP. And even though the 13 year-old operating system no longer receives security updates -- at least not officially -- it is still being used by roughly 17 percent of Windows users. For some companies it is reason enough to continue to support Windows XP today, even though its maker has long left it for dead. And Google is one of them.

Six months after Windows XP support ended, Google announced that its Chrome browser would continue to be supported on the OS with "regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015". That was done in order to give its users more time to finish migrating to a newer Windows release, one that would, hopefully, be officially supported by Microsoft for many more years to come. Obviously, that hasn't gone as expected. But instead of pulling the plug, Google is now giving Chrome users on Windows XP another reprieve.

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In 1999, South Korea pushed a law that forced online vendors to adopt Microsoft ActiveX, in order to utilize the SEED cipher developed by the Korea Information Security Agency (KISA) for online transactions.

Even though at the time it seemed like a good decision, the government is now looking to scrap the system and create new online encryption that works with all browsers and supports SSL.

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Do Not Track will not be enabled by default in future versions of Microsoft web browsers, the company says. The decision comes in response to the latest draft of the World Wide Web Consortium's DNT standard which states "in the absence of user choice, there is no tracking preference expressed".

Microsoft is concerned that if the setting is enabled by default in Internet Explorer or Project Spartan, sites would have a loophole permitting them to ignore a DNT signal. In the future users will need to manually enable the feature, and Microsoft says that clear information will be provided about how to do this.

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After all of the talk, some action. Microsoft has been gentling building the hype about Spartan for some time now, but it's only with the release of Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10049 that we get to, officially, go hands on. This is the web browser that's replacing Internet Explorer, the default web browser in Windows 10, so it has quite a role to perform.

It's a browser that's "built for the modern web" -- whatever that means -- and it sees Microsoft trying to shed the shackles of IE and move forward. Microsoft has been talking the talking for months, but does Spartan walk the walk? No. Spartan, at the moment, appears to be a joke. Let me elaborate.

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It is now a couple of months since Microsoft started talking about Project Spartan, the Internet Explorer successor that's set to become Windows 10's default web browser. Some have suggested that this will lead to the death of Internet Explorer, but today Microsoft confirmed that the two browsers will live on side by side in Windows 10.

At the Project Spartan Developer Workshop, Microsoft went into more detail about the future of the two web browsers. In particular, there is the revelation that previous plans to use a new rendering engine in both Internet Explorer 11 and Project Spartan have been ditched. Internet Explorer will live on in Windows 10, providing legacy support for those who need it, and it will be virtually identical to the version found in Windows 8.1.

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You shouldn't believe everything you read online -- no, really, you shouldn't. Just the other day we heard from John Gruber who made the baseless suggestion that Apple invented USB-C (hint: it didn't). Now it's the turn of Tom Warren from the Verge. Yesterday he wrote an article with the headline "Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand". Gosh!

He goes on to talk about Project Spartan (the new default web browser in Windows 10 that we learned about weeks ago) but also immediately contradicts himself in a sub-heading: "IE will live on...". Hang on... I thought it was being killed off? There then followed confusion, back-pedalling, and playing with semantics from Warren that did nothing to clarify the matter and served to rile many on Twitter.

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At the Windows 10 event today, Microsoft had a lot to talk about -- not least that Windows 10 itself will be free. But Windows 10 is all about the details, and on top of the likes of Cortana and the new notification center, Corporate Vice President of Operating Systems at Microsoft, Joe Belfiore, also revealed Spartan, the web browser that will replace Internet Explorer in Windows 10.

That's not to say that Internet Explorer is dead and buried. You'll still find the famous blue e icon waiting to be clicked if you want, but Spartan will be the new default browser. So what does Spartan have to offer that will act as a lure away from Chrome and Firefox? To kick things off, there's Cortana support.

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After last month's blizzard of patches tomorrow's last round of Windows updates for the year looks set to be rather quieter.

Only seven bulletins have been announced, of which three are rated Critical and four Important. Of the Critical patches one is for Internet Explorer, one for Office and one for Windows itself -- likely to be for a remote code execution vulnerability.

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