For many years, Internet Explorer has been the butt of many jokes. Due to performance issues at its onset, it was never able to recover and become a widely loved browser, such as the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Microsoft will now officially pull the plug, as they will stop providing support for IE11 across its Microsoft 365 apps and services next year on August 17th.
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Furthermore, Microsoft will stop supporting Internet Explorer with the Microsoft Teams web app as of November 20th this year.
The only major users of Internet Explorer these days are enterprise users, which Microsoft will attempt to migrate to their new Edge browser as seamlessly as possible. Ending support for the browser within Windows 10 will make this migration swift.
Alongside the support changes, Microsoft is also planning to drop support for its existing legacy version of Microsoft Edge on March 9th, 2021. After the end of support date, the legacy version of Edge will no longer receive security updates.
The new Edge browser is Chromium-based, making it a lot easier to work with for many developers. This has led to the take-up of the new Edge browser to be much quicker than previous versions of the software. According to Microsoft, new devices and future Windows feature updates will all include the new Edge browser.
The original Edge browser was launched back in 2015, signalling the end for Internet Explorer. The brand has been with us for decades, so it is a stark reminder that it was never really the product that Microsoft had envisioned.
Earlier this year we also saw Microsoft dropped support for Windows XP, a much-loved version of the desktop operating system.
While some may miss the “good old days” of Microsoft, it is good to see them embrace new services and technologies.
