I run Vista and can’t upgrade past IE9.
I’m guessing that’s the primary reason MS is going this route, to force more users to ‘upgrade’ to a newer version of their ‘doze OS.
Note that you can probably still continue using your installed version of IE past that date, you simply will not be getting any more upgrade patches so security issues will begin going unresolved unless the ‘nix community finds a problem and fixes it.
Which, actually, they have been doing for quite some time.
Try Opera. What could it hurt? www.opera.com.