Microsoft will stop supporting older versions of Internet Explorer by 2016

Microsoft plans to get Windows users to upgrade to the latest versions of Internet Explorer, writes The Verge. The changes will take effect January 12, 2016: users of Windows 7 and Windows 8 will have to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 to continue to receive updates.

If the version of Internet Explorer 12 or even 13 is released before January 12, 2016 and it will support Windows 7 and Windows 8, then their users will need to upgrade to the latest version. The changes mean that after January 12, 2016, Internet Explorer 8 and 10 will no longer be supported on custom versions of Windows.

"Only the latest version of Internet Explorer for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates" after January 12, 2016,explains Internet Explorer Marketing Director Roger Capriotti. Along with IE automatic updates, it looks like Microsoft is finally moving on to the Chrome update model when only the latest version is fully supported.

This is a positive step for consumers, but it can cause problems for corporate users, whose administrators will have to deal with updating IE more often. Microsoft encourages enterprises to use Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer 11 for backward compatibility and support for legacy web applications. In turn, web developers can rejoice: one day in the future they will no longer have to support several versions of Internet Explorer if Microsoft manages to optimize the update process in future versions of Windows.