If you have legacy web apps that still won’t work on the latest Internet Explorer – and IE 11 has already been around for six months longer than XP has been retired – then please don’t blame Microsoft.īlame the web app vendor, especially if they’re still charging you licensing fees for software that hasn’t kept up with security improvements in the web world.
We urge you not to go down the home-made patch route, at least not for real-world use, no matter how cool it might feel if you can pull it off. This is a bit like the “patches” for XP that determined holdout users liked to repurpose from Windows Server 2003, until Server 2003 fell off the edge of the world as well. There may – indeed, there probably will be – hacks published that let you scrape IE updates from the Windows versions where older IEs are still supported, such as latest builds of Windows Server 2008 R2, and bodge them onto your laptop. There won’t be any patches unless you are on IE 11, and that means any security holes in earlier versions of IE that become known to cybercrooks will be exploitable for ever. Until the app developer has fixed the problem, try using an older version of the app. Sometimes newer versions of apps may not work with your device due to system incompatibilities. Those versions, plus IE 7, are still supported on some legacy server and embedded platforms, and will therefore continue to get updates on those platforms.īut desktop users who insist on sticking with older versions of IE will, loosely speaking, have a browser that contains zero-days for ever. Older versions of Internet Explorer 11 (Windows 7) Its not uncommon for the latest version of an app to cause problems when installed on older devices.
The problem, for desktop Windows users at any rate, is that the Internet Explorer cumulative update that was published by Microsoft on Tuesday 12 January 2016 ( MS16-001) is the last ever update for Windows 7 that will patch IE 8, 9 and 10. Our concern, given that as many as 10% of users in the world still seem to be running Windows XP, which hasn’t been patched against security holes (privately or publicly known) since mid-2014, is that equally many people on Windows 7 may take a similar attitude and resist upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, on the grounds that “the old one still works, so why risk changing anything?” Last week we warned you about the impending end of Internet Explorer versions earlier than 11.