Microsoft begins phasing out Internet Explorer

My dad had a nice nickname for Internet Explorer: “Internet Exploder”, an expression of contempt for the browser he refused to use, even though it was the preferred option for the vast majority of people in the late 90s and early 2000s. He liked the MSN Explorer browser, but I never understandd why. Maybe it’s the bubbly icons that took up unnecessary space at the top. (No, it sure wasn’t that.) Or maybe he just liked the ease of surfing the web thanks to the same program you used to connect to the internet.

Either way, he might have been happy to hear that Microsoft has started to end support for its old nemesis, Internet Explorer 11.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced its timeline for this, with support for Internet Explorer ending first in Microsoft teams on November 30, 2020. After that, Microsoft Edge Legacy expires on March 9, 2021 and all Microsoft 365 applications will cease altogether to support Internet Explorer on August 17, 2021. After these dates, “customers will have a degraded experience or will not be able to connect to Microsoft 365 applications and services on IE 11. For degraded experiences, new features in Microsoft 365 will not will not be available or some features may stop working when accessing the application or service through IE 11, ”Microsoft said in its blog.

Microsoft has made it clear that Internet Explorer will not be phased out altogether, because “IE 11 applications and investments that our customers inherit will continue to work.” Edge has a Internet Explorer mode that allows you to use Internet Explorer from the Edge browser. Essentially, Edge has the ability to run two different engines, Chromium and Trident, which could be of benefit to anyone still using Internet Explorer – a whopping 2.76% worldwide according to Statistics counter.

Trident has technically been discontinued since Microsoft used its source code to create EdgeHTML, which powers Edge Legacy, but Internet Explorer 11 still uses Trident, and as I mentioned earlier, Edge uses Chromium. If this all sounds unnecessarily confusing, it’s probably a good thing Microsoft is starting to simplify and consolidate its browsers around Edge.

All of its browsers still support modern web standards such as HTML5, but as Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows, said when the company announced that it is making a browser based on Chromium, Edge would “create better web compatibility” for customers and “less web fragmentation for all web developers”. Today, Edge looks a lot like Google Chrome because they both use the same engine. Edge can also support Chrome browser extensions. Edge is now installed automatically with Windows 10, which replaces Edge Legacy.

Overall, this move is a bigger push by Microsoft to integrate its Chromium-based Edge browser into M365 apps – and I’m not entirely sure how my dad would feel about it today. My dad was the type of guy who wanted things to be as simple as possible, so he probably loved MSN Explorer because he could access his emails and everything that was by tapping an icon at the top of the browser. In principle, it would probably encourage the simplification of browsers around a single framework. Most importantly, I think he would be happy to know that the days of Internet Exploder are numbered.