I thought this was interesting, yesterday – October 25th 2021, was Windows XP’s 20th birthday. And here we are on the cusp of Windows 11 rolling out to workstations across the country.
What I really found interesting about this article was that it mentions a significant amount of people continue to use Windows XP to this day. (Significant is pretty relative.) Mainstream support for Windows XP ended on April 14, 2009, with extended support lasting another five years. This means that anyone still running Windows XP has not received support from Microsoft for roughly 7.5 years now, including almost all security updates and fixes for vulnerabilities that may have been discovered.
Think of all the vulnerabilities, viruses, exploits that have occurred in the last 8 years. Think of all the technology changes on the web. These old systems are very vulnerable to abuse and modern secure systems cannot support these legacy devices.
It’s important to keep your systems patched for the latest security updates to protect your members data and your corporate infrastructure. Members need to remain current to keep their own systems safe. CU*Answers Web Services updates your WordPress website core and plugins weekly (and as needed for immediate vulnerabilities) and partnering with CU*Answers Network Services, we update the host servers monthly (or as needed for immediate concerns.) In addition, we regularly sunset older technology that we can no longer support, usually because the manufacture stopped maintaining it, like Microsoft did with Windows XP. The Internet Explorer web browser is another example.
In short, keep your systems current. Technology changes and systems get patched to make them more secure. Staying up to date keeps your systems more secure too.
Web Browser are constantly changing and last week we had a big change from Microsoft. The new version of Microsoft Edge uses the same rendering engine as Google’s Chrome. That means that websites viewed in the newest Microsoft Edge browser will look more like they are viewed in Google Chrome versus how they look in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11.
You may not notice that your website actually looks a little different in each browser, but our web developers do. We spend a fair amount of time creating websites that are as close to standard compliant as possible because it is our belief that all web browsers are working towards the standards. Long term, this reduces maintenance. It also helps with conforming to WCAG accessibility guidelines.
Our developer’s spend time checking your website in the major browsers, notably during new website builds, but also when making larger maintenance updates to your site. In general, we only support the last 2 major versions of the major browsers, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer 11 (that counts as 2). For what it’s worth, Microsoft doesn’t even want you to use Internet Explorer anymore if you don’t have to.
We’ve already been looking at your sites in the new Microsoft Edge browser, so as it rolls out to everyone’s workstations over the next few weeks your site is already set.
Read more about what to expect with Microsoft Edge
Internet Explorer had been the most widely used browser for a long time. Then, other browsers like Firefox and Chrome came along and took away some of the popularity of IE.
Steadily, the number of IE users has been reduced to a mere 13.38% of the entire population of internet users. For the first time, Internet Explorer usage has dipped below Firefox in popularity. Firefox currently stands at a fairly steady 14.68%.
The reigning champion? Google Chrome! The Chrome browser currently holds the title as most popular browser as 55.3% of all internet users have chosen Chrome as their browser of choice.
It has been reported that IE may indeed fall off the face of the digital earth as soon as May 2016 unless something drastic changes.
While Firefox and Chrome embraced technology-forward ideas like auto-updates, evolving but consistent web standards and an open-source concept that allowed for users to develop addons, themes and other features to enhance the browsing experience, Internet Explorer stood staunch in it’s stance to only release new versions with each Windows release up until much recently.
For more information, check out this article on Gizmodo and the current browser-usage stats for February, 2016.
When I started at CU*Answers nearly 10 years ago, our web site designs targeted an 800×600 browser size. This was considered the standard at the time. This meant that we considered the viewable space on any monitor with the web browser at full screen as 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall.
Over the years, the best practice moved to 1024×768 resolution and many sites were designed with this in mind. If you can picture these dimensions in your head, and relate them to TVs, you’ll notice they are the older square shape of TVs. It’s nearly impossible to find these now. TVs, and likewise computer monitors have moved to the wider letterbox, rectangular shape like cinema movie screens. Read More »
Do you know everything that goes into browsing to a web page? It’s amazingly complex with all the different pieces involved – hardware, software, operating system, network connections, wire and wireless infrastructure and transmission protocols – the list goes on.
This document on GitHub is a collaborative attempt at documenting the entire process. It’s really technical, and really interesting. And its currently being updated by many contributors.
When developing websites, Web Services has to consider the vast majority of this process. It affects speed and accessibility of the browsing experience. But the main web development components don’t even kick in until the bottom part of the process when you get to the web server and the HTML processing. And this document is just sketching out the process, hopefully it gets filled in with deeper detail.
Read the whole thing on GitHub and check back as its continually updated to be more and more complete.
Recently Google has decided that they will attempt to pressure users to upgrade their browsers. Google is doing this by showing old versions of the Google home page if users are using outdated browsers. Google hopes that users will choose to upgrade their browser to avoid the old home page which lacks modern search features seen in the latest release.
Read the BBC article about Google here.
