Microsoft to pull the plug on Internet Explorer 8,9 and 10 support early next week

Come January 12, 2016 only the most current version of Internet Explorer (IE) - i.e. Internet Explorer 11 will receive technical supports and security updates. IE 11 will continue to receive security updates, compatibility fixes and technical support on Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. For users and enterprises, no security updates mean that vulnerabilities may be exploited by malware. Microsoft has issued instructions for its enterprise customers, SMB customers and home PC users on the website on how to upgrade. Citing the potential risks of using older versions of IE after the aforementioned date, Microsoft lists out businesses not being able to meet compliance requirements and lack of independent software vendor support. Of course, security can take the biggest hit. Looking at the bigger picture, IE 11 is the last version of Microsoft’s old browser that is supported. The company seems to be making that transition to Edge – the browser on Windows 10. At Build 2015, Microsoft unveiled the new name of its latest browser that will be seen from Windows 10 OS onwards. So far known as Project Spartan, the new browser will be called Microsoft Edge. The idea behind naming it as Edge is the fact that the new rendering engine that Microsoft is using for the Windows 10 browser is called EdgeHTML. Soon after, Microsoft’s Gaurav Seth and Adalberto Foresti introduced the open source ChakraCore, which is basically an open source version of Chakra; one that does not expose the COM based diagnostic APIs that are currently available in Chakra. This is so, because Microsoft wants to keep ChakraCore and its open source development truly open and also keep Chakra (one that is tied down to Windows 10) away from the risks. Still then, Microsoft has promised to update the built-in Chakra from time to time, as new developments arise in its open source sibling. While Microsoft’s Edge browser that comes with the Chakra JavaScript engine is not exactly on top of the browser chart (even with Windows 10) things may improve as developers begin to support ChakraCore in more ways than one.