It had been a while, but now the bullet has gone through the church. Microsoft has announced that support for Internet Explorer 11 will disappear from the Microsoft Office 365 package from August next year. Support for the Microsoft Teams web apps will end later this year, in November.
Although it will be a while before the Internet Explorer browser has completely disappeared from the digital street scene, Microsoft hopes that Microsoft Edge’s Explorer legacy mode will provide enough reasons for old users to switch. The Edge browser, like Chrome, runs on Chromium, is a lot more secure and a lot more versatile than Internet Explorer 11.
This is mainly intended for the business market, but there will certainly still be some consumers who cannot distance themselves from perhaps their first browser. Via the legacy mode within Edge, all websites still work as they did in Internet Explorer. That’s useful for the companies that are still optimizing their sites for that browser. Companies will probably have to stop doing that (the sooner, the better), as the browser is about to die. Now many companies are optimizing all their sites for Chrome and, by extension, Edge too (because of the same foundation).
Internet Explorer disappears completely
The legacy mode within the Microsoft Edge browser is no longer an argument for switching to Edge. Microsoft has also announced that support for that function will disappear in 2021, namely in March. That is a few months before the plug is pulled from Internet Explorer 11. You can still use the mode, but it will simply stop receiving updates.
Microsoft has been aggressive lately when it comes to pushing the Edge browser. Not only is this the default browser that comes with Windows 10 when you buy a new device, future versions of Windows 10 also come with Edge as standard. As a Windows user, you can hardly avoid it, unless you have already made a browser choice.
Microsoft has been working for years to get people to switch from Internet Explorer to, for example, Edge. Support has gradually disappeared in recent years. In 2015, the company finally officially unveiled Edge and that should have pushed Internet Explorer over the edge. That didn’t happen then, but it was the beginning of the end of the browser. At least next year around this time it will be completely over: Internet Explorer is no longer there.
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