Microsoft to Discontinue Old Internet Explorer Versions in January

Night Hawk said:

You will find that was only recently updated from what it had been showing a few years back! The 2014 report was based on the only then latest revision MS was making by extending support for Vista an extra year over what had been seen back when 7 was new. Originally January 2016 was the deadline prior to XP's demise a year ago April. Not that XP will ever be missed here of course!

Hmmm - I moved to Vista in February 2014 knowing that extended phase support was to last until April 2017. This is the only thread (much less forum) that has EVER EVER said that support was to expire on January 2016 (we are talking Vista right? Not some IE revision? Just checking) :) No matter - that's OK.

Night Hawk said:

WRONG! I am presently running IE 11 on 7! showing it will run on 8 and 8.1 as well those being the two newer versions proceeding 10. The total end of support comes for IE 8 on Vista and IE 9 and 10 for 7, 8, 8.1, and now 10 bringing in Edge while you can still manually pin IE 11 32bit or 64bit to the Start as well as task bar.

Right - so what am I wrong about? Once Microsoft deprecates support for earlier versions, Windows 7 will only be supported for IE 11. IE 8 and 9 will be dropped. So what am I missing? I wrote in that thread as below:

If you run Vista or Server 2008 Classic, you MUST upgrade to IE 9
If you run Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, you must upgrade to IE 11
If you run Windows 8 Classic or Server 2012 Classic, we have a special case. Both systems only support IE 10. In most cases you can upgrade Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and receive IE 11 updates. However, last spring, it was decided that IE 10 on Server 2012 would not be supported for two reasons: (a) Server 2012 cannot be upgraded to 2012 R2, and (b) browsing is not a priority in server environments.
If you run Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2, you already have IE 11. Similarly is the case with Windows 10 and Server 2016.

Anyway, no biggie. :)

By the way Night Hawk, IE 10 never ran on Windows 8.1 (just Windows 7 and 8) :)

I didn't even stay with the 8 CP long after finding it was dual boot unfriendly with 7 causing both versions to crash when first seeing 8 added into the 7 BCD and later following the PC Refresh on 8 seeing 7 added in there both time resulting in both versions kicking the dust! I passed over 8.1 in the interim to look over 10 at the start of the year by way of the Insider program and didn't see any reason to pass up on the 10240 build.

As for extended support ending in 2016 for Vista that was discussed on the Seven Forums years back long before MS decided to extend support for both Vista and 7 an additional 5yrs. as reported back in 2012 not in 2009-11 when people were asking about how long 7 would be supported and was first looked up showing support would end in 2016 for Vista while still being unchanged extended support for 7 until 2020. MS later revised their own data base apparently to correct the goof they made on that. 2017 however makes a lot more sense being the 10yr. mark for the older version there while 7 gets an 11yr. stretch! Microsoft doubles support lifespan for consumer Windows 7, Vista | Computerworld

I posted that news back in 2012 which did come as a rather pleasant surprise since 7 not Vista was also seeing the additional 5yrs. of extended support while previously the word had been 2016. And as far as IE 10 is concerned that was a general not specific statement simply mentioning the need for the latest version of IE for the version of Windows you are running. IE 11 is still going to be the last IE release however since MS is now pushing Edge onto everybody.

Microsoft Edge has got the edge at the moment.

Essentially it fits into the US Federal mandate required of all US manufacturers to provide a full 10yrs. of support from the date first available on the market. There's nothing new about seeing that while MS had been seeing their bulk of business over the years from the Corporate world not so much as people think from the consumer side of the equation. But MS had eventually reached into the Private sector further by grabbing hold of the education area as well depriving what had been primarily a certain Fruit company's domain! You can no longer have a "Big Mac Attack"! as they say!