Internet Explorer is entering the software graveyard this week. It’s a bit strange to write, as this wish took so long to come true.
On Wednesday, June 15, Microsoft’s browser will permanently stop working on all Windows PCs.
“We are announcing that the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is Microsoft Edge,” Microsoft recalled again on May 19, but this time urgently, in a blog post.
Internet users have turned massively to Chrome for a long time
Concretely, this does not change the daily life of Internet users, who for a long time have turned massively to Chrome.
Last April, Internet Explorer’s market share was 0.39%, for 64.34% accredited to Google Chrome.
Microsoft itself, as early as August 2021, announced that its in-house products, such as Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams, would no longer work with Internet Explorer.
An IE mode survives in Microsoft Edge
Note, however, that the Microsoft Edge browser has an Internet Explorer (IE) mode designed to ensure compatibility with sites and applications based on the old Microsoft browser.
IE mode is supported until at least 2029. It gives web developers eight years to modernize their existing applications, and possibly remove the need for IE mode.
The history of Internet Explorer obviously marks the arrival of the Internet on users’ PCs in the 1990s. This Microsoft-signed software was then offered as a pack with the Windows operating system.
A turbulent history
A profitable strategy, since Internet Explorer quickly became the most widely used browser (95% market share in 2004), to the detriment of competitors who did not benefit from this principle of tied selling (Netscape Navigator, then Mozilla Firefox).
But the explosion of smartphones, driven by the rise of the iPhone from 2007, will undermine this domination.
On the desktop side, Google is the winner, with its Chrome browser. So much so that Microsoft’s own browser, Edge, will adopt Google’s Chromium engine in 2020, ditching Microsoft technology inherited from Internet Explorer.
A failure, since Edge only has a 4.05% market share to date.