Microsoft has announced that it will destroy its very infamous legacy Internet Explorer nearly 27 years after decorating desktops in 1995.
From June 15, the desktop application will be disabled and users will be redirected to Microsoft’s Edge browser instead.
Internet Explorer was the gateway to the Internet for people born before Generation Z, the era when Microsoft dominated the world of technology, before Google, Facebook and TikTok, and when the browser had to be installed on computers using CD-ROM.
Microsoft’s market dominance is due to software packaging as part of the Windows operating system. The experience was often slow, and when faster competition arrived with Mozilla’s Firefox and later Google Chrome, people jumped out of the ship in crowds.
Although the dominant Chrome market suffers from the same problems that plagued Internet Explorer, moving from the need to support legacy browsers will be a relief for web developers.
I haven’t done any web developers in a very long time, but the last time I did, the need to support IE6 in a world where Firefox existed was a source of constant frustration. IE’s glory days were 1998, dial-up connection, first experience on the Internet, learning to manually encode HTML for fun …
– Cameron Patrick (@camjpatrick) June 15, 2022
In a presentation by an Australian competition regulator to review the web browser market, Microsoft said its decision to abandon Internet Explorer was largely due to the fact that web developers were less likely to make their sites compatible with Internet Explorer.
The document says that “after years of trying to deal with incompatibilities with different websites – including some of the most popular on the Internet”, the company eventually decided that continuing to differentiate itself from Chrome with its own unique web platform “is no longer it makes sense. ”
There’s a good chance you haven’t used Internet Explorer in years – or never. Microsoft is pushing people away from it in favor of the Edge browser, which was launched in 2015 and is built on Google’s open source Chromium.
The company discontinued support for Internet Explorer in Teams in 2020 and announced plans to discontinue support for Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 web browsers in August 2020.
If there is a website that still requires Internet Explorer to open it, people using the Edge browser will be able to run it in “IE mode”.
Despite the phasing out of Internet Explorer, it still has strong brand recognition. A study by Roy Morgan, commissioned by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in September 2021, found that the browsers most familiar to people were Chrome (95%), followed by Internet Explorer (85%), Firefox 81%), Apple Safari (80%)) and Edge (69%).
The same study found that only 28% of people use Internet Explorer on their computers, compared to 81% who use Chrome – including 73% of Apple users. The main reason people use Internet Explorer is because it is pre-installed on their computer and there is no reason to use another browser.
While the Windows Packet Web Browser may have been an advantage for Microsoft in the past, the company said people are already aware of other options, and Microsoft Edge desktops have only a 9% market share.
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