Microsoft IE8 End Of Life

Microsoft recommends customers plan to migrate to one of the above supported operating systems and browser combinations by January 12, 2016.

IE8 Issues

HTML5 CSS3 Incompatibilities

Remember having to insert the following into your head tag to help fix the lack of support IE8 has for html5 tags and CSS3 properties? (or using Modernizer)

<!--[if lt IE 8]>
      <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/libs/html5shiv/3.7.0/html5shiv.js"></script>
      <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/libs/respond.js/1.4.2/respond.min.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Missing functions

Remember having to use es5-shim because IE8 did not implement lastIndexOf, map, filter, every, forEach, etc. functions?

Security Vulnerabilities

Did you know the IE8 has over 500 known security vulnerabilities? (that will never get fixed)

IE8's continued reliance on ActiveX makes it vulnerable to the core.

Unforgiving Parser

Back in the days of IE5, IE was very forgiving when it came to HTML syntax.

IE8 is unforgiving in regards to HTML syntax and javascript.

I'm not saying that I approve of a lax enforcement of standards, but I do recall how quickly a web developer could crank out a web application when the user base were all IE users. Not so for IE8.

In many cases, IE8 would make your site break, even if it were coded perfectly.

Good bye, IE8. (and good riddance!)

p.s. Unbelievably, IE8 was actually somewhat better than IE7.

References

https://github.com/es-shims/es5-shim
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-explorer
http://www.zdnet.com/article/australian-retailer-charges-customers-ie-7-tax/

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

We're doing emergency maintenance to recover the site (github.com)

How many companies depend on github.com?

What is your mitigation strategy when things go wrong?

Today, github had a major outage.

Granted, github was only down for under 30 minutes or less, but that can still wreak havoc for scripts that depend on github and don't have 30 minute+ retries built in.

Between approx. 7:40 a.m. and 7:54 a.m. EST, if you were to try to reach any resource with github.com in the url this is what you'd see:

GitHub Status

References

https://status.github.com/messages
https://twitter.com/githubstatus

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.