Internet Explorer 8,9,10 End-Of-Life Approaching. Are Your Customers Ready?

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Headshot 4Garrett Bundy IE_rgb_Cyan_1_D_rgb

Hello Everyone – As you hopefully are aware of by now, Internet Explorer versions less than 11 will go out of support from Microsoft as of January 12th 2016. This means that on January 13th the only supported Microsoft browsers will be Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge.  In addition you will no longer be able to get support from Microsoft and what’s more of a risk to your customers is that you will no longer be able to get security patches for these versions of Internet Explorer.  As you know the browser is typically one of the most targeted items for malicious use by hackers, so upgrading your customers should be a high priority for your practice.

Two other things that will potentially affect your customers are -

  • O365 Users running IE 8 or IE 9 will experience the light version of Outlook on the web; IE 10 users will not be affected
  • Users running IE 8, IE 9, or IE 10 will receive a “end of support” notification when they launch the browser; this can be suppressed by deploying registry key as described below

Last month, Microsoft published KB3123303 with details of the new "End of Life" upgrade notification for Internet Explorer, which will be shipped as an update next week on January 12th.

The update will apply to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 for users who have not upgraded to Internet Explorer 11 (i.e. IE8, IE9, and IE10 users). The update includes a new “end of support” notification feature when the browser is launched. This will automatically open a new tab with the appropriate Internet Explorer download page for their OS.

Environments in which the migration to Internet Explorer 11 is incomplete may disabled the notification feature by deploying a registry key. See KB3123303 for details and this blog article for step-by-step instructions. 

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are not affected by this update. IE9 is the latest version of Internet Explorer supported by these operating systems. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 are also unaffected (support for Windows 8 ends on January 12th and Windows 8.1 comes with IE11).

The notification tab will not appear on every launch of the browser. After the tab is closed it will be 72 hours before it is shown again and only when launching IE (i.e. not during a browsing session).

For more information about the end of support for old versions of Internet Explorer see the Windows for Business summary and the Microsoft Support Lifecycle for Internet Explorer page. For technical information about how to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge see the Browser TechCenter pages on TechNet.

Till Next Time,

Garrett

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