This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday (opens in new tab)

Because it will break eventually. That decrepit PC full of metal dust running XP that controls this here multimillion CNC mill will, given enough time, fail. Some part or other will fail, and eventually you won't be able to find new parts anymore that work with it. Granted, for an XP PC it's far in the future but still.

Besides, a Win 3.11 or XP PC won't have a 15 year uptime, it will probably have a sticker on it reminding users to reboot it daily.

The same argument that corporate world doesn't allow Python 3 or has a hard time to migrate to Python 3 because machines are running on some ancient RHEL servers or because of some security requirement. I get it and I don't get it. First, let's ditch RHLE. Fuck that. I really don't see reason to use RHLE; fine, YMMV. But it is people's job to do work. Some pieces can die, and some pieces will have to evolve, either from scratch, or slowly. No one said software development and operation support are easy, see https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWC74tOVAAAsls0.jpg:large.

Our entire ethos is that software is never finished.

You aren't forced. But you will be exploited for it, any security vulnerability will destroy your entire operation, and your customers should distrust you for being so stupid.

Its not that you made a mistake trying to keep the system running. Your mistake was using a proprietary foundation with no commitment from the provider it will be supported forever. So of course you have no option when the rug is pulled out from under you - but that was your mistake. If you were built on top of Linux 2.4 like the superposter said, you could just pay the developer costs to maintain it yourself.

Because by choosing that system in the first place you implicitly chose to tie yourself closely to their support. Both the buyer and the seller have a responsibility to plan for following these support decisions. Scenarios like this should inform future purchase decisions, including whether or not to buy again from the company who failed to keep up.

For example look at speedtest.com in a windows browser, when you really meant speedtest.net ... This is only a single example, it happens and bad people are out there.

Plenty of hardware components that can probably keep running for a long time without maintenance, but you wouldn't do that would you?

I mourn those stuck on XP, destined to be exploited for eternity by the thousands of malware payloads targeting them now, but you are right in nothing can be done about them really. But the real injustice is every person without the time to learn new systems (and that is a barrier on Windows and Linux - try switching someone from XP to 10 and it as massive a leap, or even more massive, than going from XP to Lubuntu).

The reason why is that the fixed cost of a business are that: fixed. The profit is usually over-represented in the last few percentage points of the people using the service or buying the products so if you lop off some arbitrary percentage at the top that 15% of your users might be 80% of your profits. That's a very quick way to die.

It's pretty clear you're not a developer (or wouldn't be for long).

There are two really bad decisions here:

1) You are driving away up to 15% of people who actually use your product. How much would you spend to acquire that many active users? It's easier to keep existing users than acquire new users.

2) Sending users through a ticket system for errors you could have prevented with a simple warning is a bad experience for them and far more work for you. And most users will silently disappear instead.

Are you really willing to take a 10% hit on sales?

You can announce EOLs until the cows come home (Microsoft has and look how well it has done them). If your product stops working, they'll complain at you and then cancel their contract and find another provider who will support them.

I'm speaking from a gruelling 15 years experience developing enterprise SaaS. We've only just dropped IE6. It'll be years before IE8 goes away.

> I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade

People using your product are discussing it on review sites, on social media, with friends/family, etc.. If you silently give some of them a broken product, a few will contact support; but I imagine most will assume your product is just low quality. So that's the word they'll spread.

For corporate users: well, you'd need to talk with your customers. They might be facing a seriously expensive upgrade process, and could be extremely unhappy to hear you're setting an arbitrary deadline for them.

So, you'd succeed in angering a lot of customers. Much better to try and inform all of your customers (not just corporate) of the upcoming changes, and provide support materials for them to follow while giving them a reasonable timeframe to do so.

There are lots of intermediate steps like warning about an inferior experience, but at this point it's necessary to test most websites on at least a few versions of IE9.

I've found that using react I've had very easy compatibility with older IE, etc. The only thing I've had to do is install a polyfill or two.

I don't want to be overly negative, though. I foresee a future in which there is a split between completely walled gardens and completely open systems, so those who really want the latter will still be catered for.

If you want this kind of choice, the only way is free and open source software. That's the reality, and it's been that way for a very long time, just read the EULA. It isn't yours. They're not doing things "to you" by preventing it from working, they're protecting themselves. Free software could decline to work by default, with something like an about:config opt out feature. That's because free software belongs to everyone.

Next, hardware. Apple, the most among all the companies making hardware, explicitly reserves the right to modify the hardware after sale. There is in effect a hardware EULA. Your rights are fairly limited to turning it off or disposing of the phone. You don't have a right to modify it, you don't have a right to jail break it, you don't have a right to run software that Apple doesn't, through its license that you've agreed to, approve of. Not only is the software not yours, there is tacit residual hardware right reserved by Apple. I don't like it, you don't have to like it, that's how the agreement effectively works though. So if you really don't like it, then you shouldn't buy those kinds of products.

Android, it's fairly similar license wise, but there is at least in most implementations the option to enable 3rd party software installation. So you could install some ancient unpatched web browser if that's what you wanted to do. And of course Cyanogenmod and other free OS's you have a lot more control because the software is yours by virtue of you having possession of it. You have a legal right to modify it if you don't like how it behaves.

I do some work with various embedded extension APIs in different office and collaboration tools, and it's quite a mess trying to figure out what those web browsers actually are

This is a strategy tax, for a strategy that stopped being reasonable a decade ago. Numerous alternate browsers have had no problems competing with an "integrated" IE, for many years now. The DOJ case was settled by a completely different set of executives, so the current bunch don't have to pretend that OS integration is somehow vital to the function of a browser. Someone should draft a memo to the browser department: that stupid shit you were supposed to do 15 years ago? stop doing that. An organization that continues with such a farce for so many years is puzzling.

They could do the equivalent of static linking and include the necessary components in the browser instead of the OS.

That's more or less what the Utilu IE Collection does I think.

I never understood why users stuck on XP don't just install a different browser (Chrome or Firefox). You don't have to use IE, especially not in the version is so old it barely works with modern sites.

That's probably why you can't get anything done (Mythical Man-Month passim)

I only wrote about it would be great if you could configure Chrome's process spawning logic. IE does it in an more intelligent way to consume less memory by spawning a bit less processes (a trade off, as if one tab crashes more tabs have to be reloaded). But giving a power user (who have 100+ tabs open) a choice would be great.