13 years of relevance is something unheard of in the software world. XP was released for sale October 25 th 2001, and so XP has had an astonishing 13 year run. They want you to switch to a new OS so they make money, and eventually even the most stubborn will have to listen.
Again, they’ll just put up the Windows 8 sign, tell you to upgrade every time a bug appears, and just force a new operating system down your throat. New security breaches will appear and Microsoft won’t care one bit. If Microsoft doesn’t want you to use XP, you can bet they will force you to switch. In the future however XP is going to have quite a few issues, and major ones at that. XP works fine, it’s still used around the globe and people have grown very comfortable with it. The truth of the matter is they’re actually right… for now. The old, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” adage is always brought up when I speak to XP users.
XP does exactly what I need it to, I’m used to it, Microsoft will clearly patch any big problems and Windows 8 is trash. I know what all of this likely has you thinking, because I’ve heard it many, many times when this topic is discussed. Not exactly an easily ignored issue, and so Microsoft was forced to fix it. It all would have played out nicely for Microsoft, but instead there’s an easy way for hackers to gain equal user rights. They would have pointed to the flaw as a sign of the future of unsupported XP. Had this been a smaller vulnerability I have no doubt Microsoft would have put up the Windows 8.1 sign and said good luck with XP. The final reason is the severity of the issue. If they didn’t patch this flaw that plane would have crashed and burned with no survivors. They want the plane to glide for a while with no turbulence, eventually landing softly in a field or on a runway. Make no mistake Microsoft really wants XP to disappear, but they want the plane to go down slowly. A potentially disastrous flaw that could make using XP far too dangerous to use happened nearly instantly (in the grand scheme of things). Win XP and IE8 support was pulled on April 8, and within a month the zero-day vulnerability was discovered. The second reason is the timing of the security breach.
Not patching this major security vulnerability would have pushed many off of XP, and perhaps off PC’s entirely. Upsetting a quarter of your user base by not updating security on a web browser that is built into their operating system is not how you breed loyal customers.
The first being over a quarter of desktops still use Windows XP. Now there are a few reasons why Microsoft could have decided to patch older, unsupported systems.
This is obviously terrible for Microsoft so a fast update was expected. First and foremost the Zero-day vulnerability was a massive security breach that would have pushed many users to use browsers other than IE. There are multiple factors that contribute to the answer. If they ended support for Windows XP why did they release this patch? This patch brings up a few main questions that deserve some thought. So what does this all mean? That Microsoft is a compulsive liar about ending support for IE8 and Windows XP? Not exactly, although you could certainly make a case for it if any more patches are released for XP or IE8. IE 9 will have support until 2017 according to Microsoft. The update internet explorer for xp is remarkable because Microsoft officially stated that they ceased support for Windows XP and IE up to version 8. On May 1 st Microsoft released a patch for Internet Explorer that fixed the Zero-day vulnerability for all versions of Internet Explorer (IE6-IE11).