To continue the shift to a faster, more secure browsing experience, starting in the spring of 2019, commercial customers running Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard can begin using IE11 in their test environments or pilot rings. To simplify deployment, you will be able to download IE11 via the Microsoft Update Catalog. We will also publish the IE11 upgrade through Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) for all versions of Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard later this year.
I understand that embedded and server users aren’t the kinds of users to just upgrade to the bleeding edge all the time, but the fact they didn’t even have the option of moving to IE11 (Internet Explorer!) seems crazy to me.
Well that’s rather sudden. It means that support for *all* pre-11 versions of IE ends in a year. 3.5 years after that and *no* version of IE will be the main browser in any supported Windows product, but of course that’s no change – it’s just that IE 10 dies 3.5 years early.
Presumably the non-Modern thing was the reason for not doing this years ago, but they no longer care enough for that to matter.
Why bother? I just install Chrome on any server that needs a web browser in the first place and be done with it.
In those _extremely rare_ cases where you actually need browser on a server, you just use Chrome or Firefox. Out of those extremely rare cases, there is a subset of even rarer cases when Chrome/FF won’t do and you actually need IE: ActiveX controls or native .Net in-browser applications. So really, the availability of a particular version of IE (or even IE in general) on server version of Windows is mostly not a concern at all.