Microsoft has announced that it will kill its infamous Internet browser, Internet Explorer, so slandered nearly 27 years after desktop computers appeared in 1995.
Starting June 15, the desktop application will be turned off and users will be redirected to the Microsoft Edge browser.
Internet Explorer was the gateway to the Internet for people born before Generation Z, at a time when Microsoft dominated the tech world, before Google, Facebook, and TikTok, and when the browser had to install on computers using a CD-ROM.
Microsoft’s market dominance occurred due to the bundling of software as part of the Windows operating system. The experience was often slow, and when competition came faster with Mozilla Firefox and later Google Chrome, people jumped in.
While Chrome, which dominates the market, suffers from the same problems that plagued Internet Explorer, abandoning the need to support the legacy browser will be a relief for web developers.
I haven’t done any web development in a long time, but the last time I did it, having to support IE6 in a world where Firefox existed was a constant source of frustration. The glory days of IE were in 1998, the telephone connection, the first Internet experience, learning to manually encode HTML for fun …
– Cameron Patrick (@camjpatrick) June 15, 2022
In a presentation to a review of a regulator of the Australian competition in the web browser market, Microsoft said that its decision to abandon Internet Explorer was largely due to the fact that web developers were less likely to do so. your Internet Explorer compatible sites.
The submission said that “after years of trying to fix the incompatibilities that arose with different websites, including some of the most popular on the Internet,” the company finally decided to continue to differentiate itself from Chrome with an exclusive web platform. “it wasn’t done anymore.” sense”.
Chances are you haven’t used Internet Explorer for many years, or never. Microsoft has been pushing people away from it in favor of the Edge browser, which was launched in 2015 and is based on open source Google Chromium.
The company ended support for Internet Explorer to Teams in 2020 and announced plans to stop supporting Internet Explorer 11 in web browsers in Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 in August 2020.
If there is a relic website that still requires Internet Explorer to open, people using the Edge browser will be able to run it in “IE mode”.
Despite the gradual demise of Internet Explorer, it still has strong brand recognition. A survey by Roy Morgan commissioned by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in September 2021 found that the most popular browsers were Chrome (95%), followed by Internet Explorer (85%), Firefox (81%), Apple Safari (80%). ) and Edge (69%).
The same survey found that only 28% of people used Internet Explorer on their computers, compared to 81% who used Chrome, including 73% of Apple users. The main reason people used Internet Explorer was that it was pre-installed on their computer and there was no reason to use another browser.
While the web browser included with Windows may have been an advantage for Microsoft in the past, the company said that people now know other options, and on desktop computers, Microsoft Edge only has a market share of 9 %.