Microsoft Announces Internet Explorer 11 Farewell Timeline
Microsoft will put more nails in the coffin of Internet Explorer 11, starting this November. The company has released a farewell timeline for the old web browser detailing how various Microsoft apps and services will drop IE support in the coming months.
As per the timeline, Microsoft Teams will be the first service to abandon IE 11 on November 30, 2020. Fast forward to next year, and the remaining Microsoft 365 apps will stop supporting Internet Explorer 11 from August 17, 2021.
While these MS services are scheduled to stop working on the IE browser immediately after the mentioned dates, if they do work for some users, they will at least have a degraded experience with some features not working.
On the other hand, Microsoft has also announced end-of-support for its other browser — Microsoft Edge Legacy. The Windows 10 default browser will stop receiving security updates after March 9, 2021. Microsoft has already chosen the new Edge Chromium as the new default browser on Windows 10, starting with the May 2020 Update.
We are slowly moving towards the end of a web browser that has been in existence for almost 25 years now. The last version of Internet Explorer, IE 11, came out in 2013 as part of a Windows 8.1 update.
Following the release of Windows 10, IE has lived a solitary life as one of the optional features of Microsoft’s modern operating system. Still, after all these years, the web browser hasn’t lost purpose and people still use it to browser websites built on older technologies.
It’s interesting as well as surprising that the announcement has come on Internet Explorer’s 25th birthday (it was released on August 16, 1995) and the support will end on its 26th birthday next year.
However, Redmond has also preserved the old browser in the form of the Internet Explorer Mode inside the Edge Chromium browser so that users don’t need to juggle between two browsers.
