Starting next week Microsoft will no longer offer security updates for millions of Internet Explorer users. The technology giant will stop support for several versions of its browser. Users that want to continue to receive updates for Internet Explorer will have to upgrade to a newer version.
In case of Vista, users have to update to IE9 while on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 the only supported Internet Explorer version is 11. IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE10 hold a market share of 14% worldwide, according to numbers of research company Net Applications. In these numbers also Windows XP users are included, which haven't received security updates since support for that OS stopped.
Internet Explorer 9 is used by 6.7% of the internet but but only on Vista and no longer on Windows 7, so the impact is hard to determine. Just the number of Internet Explorer 10 users is in the millions.
To warn users about the end of support for the browsers Microsoft will release an update that starts showing a warning starting January 12th 2016. The update will be released to Windows 7 users that are still on IE8, IE9 or IE10.
