Microsoft’s 26-year-old web browser Internet Explorer is finally reaching end of life and will no longer be available after June next year.
Seen as a market leader when first introduced, over time it was felt that Internet Explorer failed to keep pace with the competition, and it gained a reputation of being sluggish and less secure than alternative browsers.
The successor to Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, was introduced in 2015 and Microsoft has been stepping away from Internet Explorer since then. Edge is billed as being faster and more secure .
Microsoft 365 will no longer use Internet Explorer in August this year. Its video-conferencing platform, Microsoft Teams, dropped it last November.
Worldwide, Google Chrome is currently the most popular internet browser – accounting for over half of web traffic. Apple’s Safari is in second place.
Microsoft therefore has a lot of catching up to do, although Edge does have the advantage of having a built-in Internet Explorer mode, meaning users can access older Internet Explorer-based websites and legacy applications.
In addition, the original version of Edge has been rebuilt using Chromium (the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser), making Edge faster than before and giving users an experience which feels familiar.
If you are still using Internet Explorer, try out other browsers to get prepared for it being withdrawn!