My Two Cents: Good news for developers! IE8 is
finally coming to an end. It’s indeed good news for them, because they use some kind of hacking and tedious technique to make a responsive website compatible
with IE8. By default, IE8 does not support media query. There are clients who
want to see a responsive website compatible with IE 8 that poses a challenge for
a developer. Now, Microsoft has officially announced
that IE8 is going off, and the deadline for extending support to this older browser is until
Jan. 12, 2016, which is a year and a couple of months from now.
Having been a headache for developers for at least a couple of years, IE8 is
finally set for departure. The browser was released almost five years
ago in March 2009. So the life span of this browser one may possibly write as:
DOB: March 2009
· Death: Jan
2016
 |
| Image Credit: Apterainc |
If you try downloading IE 8 on your system, you
will get a message/notification on downloading higher versions which Microsoft
supports, as older browser like IE8 is no longer being supported for security
updates. But, why Microsoft has finally decided to end IE8? The reason is
obvious – the web is going beyond desktops and modern browsers are much more advanced
to support fancy features, but not an outdated website component like Flash. The biggest
reason that I see for this official announcement is – WEB SECURITY. Internet
Explorer Director, Roger Capriotti, said in a blog post, “Outdated browsers represent a major challenge in keeping the Web ecosystem
safer and more secure.”
You guessed it right, the web is going secure,
and IE 8 does not support HTTPS version of a website. Google’s recent
encouragement on HTTPS version with their ‘lightweight ranking reward’ is
nothing but a good initiative to expedite the HTTPS switch among a big chunk
of websites. And, very recently Bing has also launched a secure search and
implemented HTTPS. Giving support to IE 8 per se does not make sense for MS due
to compatibility concerns with the newly launched HTTPS search. Therefore, it’s important for all stakeholders
to switch from IE 8 to higher versions, because IE 8 and Windows XP both pose a
greater risk in terms of security. So, convince your clients to drop the
legacy browser and OS on their desktops if they are too adamant to change due to cost involved.
The global outlook towards web is changing. The whole
web community is going to embrace HTTPS. Kudos to Google and Bing for taking a
holistic initiative in this regard, basically to expedite the HTTPS adoption
among a big chunk of virtual communities! Whether or not, you will get ranking benefit,
an initiative like HTTPS (encrypted version of website) deserves all credit to
make our wonderful virtual world SAFE & SECURE. After all, users’ trust of
browsing a site is more important. We should ideally get ready to support this
initiative in whatever capacity we can. It’s unfortunate that many of us incorrectly deemed Google's initiative being so PUSHY. There is a plethora of articles on reputed websites, including SEJ, SEO.com, Search Engine Marketing, etc., that unfortunately
may not have noticed the holistic motive of Google behind the ‘lightweight ranking’ signal,
and thus they hell bent on criticizing the search engine for not delivering to
what they promised for an HTTPS site. It’s very unfortunate though!
There are questions on page load or performance
issues for an encrypted version of a website. Well, this should not be an
excuse now, nor should be a bottleneck when technology is advanced enough to
work around without compromising with the page load performance. The way I look
at it is – it’s a myth that SSL/TLS impacts server and thereby slowing down the
page load. My experience ceases to believe this, because server typically has a
lot many extra CPU cycles to spare, and we are entering into 2015, both servers
and clients alike may not notice such a small extra overhead of SSL. With SPDY
enabled, your clients will probably notice a relatively faster website. Thus, Google’s
recent work on SPDY in
fact negates the myth of the speed issue, provided your hosting vendor
should support it. You can refer a wonderful presentation on SPDY here.
Let’s join
the initiative of the SAFE & SECURE web. Let’s lend OUR SINCERE support
to HTTPS!
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