Development against IE6, IE7, IE8 and soon IE9

Question

After about 6 months, when IE9 is released, web developers may have to support up to 4 versions of IE. This is likely to increase support, development and testing for many.

I know that Win7 has XP mode to run IE6. IE8 has IE7 compatibility mode (which is not ideal), what happens when IE9 is released?

Will there be IE7 / 8 mode for IE9, can we install IE9 together with IE8? Or what about Vista mode to run IE7 / 8? Or do you think that Microsoft will make the statement that IE6 has limited support, please do not use it anymore? What are your ideas / plans / strategies to ease / deal with this pain (simple, not supporting IE6)?

Cheers Nick

Answer 1

For testing, you should use IE-compatible VPC images for .

Answer 2

Microsoft's official support for IE6 will end in 2014 with Windows XP. This is already accepted. (in fact, it should have ended already, but the end-of-life date was extended by a couple of years when MS extended the end-of-sale date for XP after the Vista debacle)

So, after 2014, anyone working with XP or IE6 will be out of support. There will still be people who use it, but corporations that hold onto it will be forced to move on, as they tend to be more risky when it comes to having unsupported software on their systems.

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Answer 3

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Answer 4

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Answer 5

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