[emn13]

But if they don't, ironically, google may be helping microsoft by encouraging users to upgrade their PC.

And there's no sign that MS will ship new browsers to old platforms.

[louthy]

XP has 6 months life left, after that I suspect most 'enterprise' web app developers will drop support for IE9, I know we certainly will be.

[bradleyjg]

I'd love to be able to stop supporting IE 8, the gap between 8 and 9 is almost as big a jump as 6 to 7, but I don't see that happening until Windows 7 support is no longer offered. Windows 7 came with IE 8 preinstalled and no automatic updates from that to higher versions. People are still buying Windows 7 machines.

Dropping IE 9 support isn't even on the horizon for me.

N.B. The company I work for sells to US k-12 schools.

[giovannibajo1]

Windows 7 automatic updates include Internet Explorer updates by default: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg615599.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/jj898508.aspx

IE9 was optional (users were presented with a dialog and they could decline installing it), while IE10 was automatic, no questions asked.

Alas, numbers of browser share say that this process is not working as smooth as MS would hope.

[jol]

I think the thing is that there is forgotten and hated windows vista, that can update only to IE9, thus leaving it as smallest common denominator after XP end of life.

[angularly]

Do you mean you'll drop support for IE8? XP never supported IE9 as far as I know.

[louthy]

Sorry, yes. I am going mad! A long day in front of the screen.

[angularly]

I was hoping you'd come up with some reasonable explanation why it would be ok to drop support for IE9 as well ;)

[eli]

I think (hope) most people are making those decisions based on actual analytics data and customer needs versus maintenance cost. I still get a fair bit of IE7 traffic, and there hasn't been a "good" reason to run that for quite a while.

[teisman]

Of course, users can also simple adopt a modern browser, rather than updating their system. Additionally, if Microsoft doesn't support modern browsers for old operating systems this may deteriorate the Windows experience, which may lead to desktop/laptop conversions to Ubuntu.