PSA: OldIE (almost) dies on January 12

via GIPHY

I’ve had January 12, 2016 marked on my calendar ever since I read the announcement from Microsoft in 2014. Ars made a (rare) mistake in its post - OldIE isn’t going away completely yet. Per Microsoft, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. That means Vista users will have supported IE9 until Vista support bites the dust in 2017.

Vista users are a tiny (1.6%) minority though; Windows 7, 8, and 10 are on IE11, with 10 users having the option of using Edge. That’s a big deal. Besides much better feature support in general, IE11 and Edge support WebGL, a prerequisite for those awesome vector tiles we’ve all been angling for.

It’s time to celebrate folks. I plan on spending the evening of the 12th downing a Chimay and firing my OldIE VM’s into the sun.