Microsoft is ready to finally ditch its 25-year-old Internet Explorer web browser next year so it can focus all its attention on the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser. In a blog post on its website, Microsoft states that "Internet Explorer 11 desktop app will be retired and no longer supported on June 15, 2022 for certain versions of Windows 10." These certain versions of Windows 10 appear to be those without a long-term service contract, which are popular with many commercial and industrial customers who need a consistent and compatible system for years to come. What had apparently kept Internet Explorer alive in recent years was the way some old and legacy websites could only be accessed using Internet Explorer. But now that Microsoft Edge can display these sites just fine thanks to its built-in "Internet Explorer mode", there's no reason to continue supporting Internet Explorer. The main beneficiaries of this announcement will be web developers who will no longer have to code websites to support outdated and increasingly incompatible Internet Explorer, which Microsoft acknowledges in its announcement as an ongoing problem.
RIP Internet Explorer, you won't miss it
The announced retirement of Internet Explorer has been a long time coming. The once-ubiquitous browser has gradually lost ground to rivals like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome over the past 15 years, with users turning to safer, faster, and feature-rich browsing experiences. As 9to5Google points out, Google Chrome surpassed Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in the United States in 2013. Last year, Microsoft announced that it would withdraw support for Internet Explorer from Microsoft 365 Apps on August 21, 2021. That sounded the death knell for the browser, so today's announcement comes as no surprise. That the end has finally come is a real cause for celebration. Not only was it a relic of an almost entirely different Internet, but even then, it wasn't a very good browser. Its widespread use was more a matter of Microsoft's deliberate efforts to keep rival browsers out of its operating systems, earning them an incredibly rare antitrust lawsuit in the modern day of the Clinton and Bush administrations. Also extremely foldable in the early from the 2000s. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Internet Explorer, aside from its massive security vulnerabilities, is the fact that its widespread use as the default browser by millions of users over the years has slowed browser development. for about a decade, as rival browsers like Netscape have been unceremonious. deaf. It's finally time for him to go, and his end couldn't have come soon enough.