Internet Explorer End of Life

Wednesday, June 15, 2022 · 2 min read · Internet Explorer Microsoft Windows ·

Internet Explorer 11 has officially gone end of life and it had a good run despite the issues associated with it. The first version of Internet Explorer was released on August 16, 1995 and it had a 26+ year run as one of the most well known Web Browsers in the world. Unfortunately, with the widespread adoption of modern Web Browsers, there was no longer a need for IE and it is time to move on. I won’t get into the whole architecture differences about IE/Trident and more modern browsers, there is definitely enough information available for that already.

The first time that I ever used the Internet was on Windows 95 using Internet Explorer 3, so there is a bit of a nostalgia feeling for me.

Internet Explorer 11 End of Life

On Wednesday June 15, 2022, Internet Explorer 11 has officially gone end of life and is no longer supported by Microsoft. There are a few exceptions where it is still supported to some degree by Microsoft, such as on Windows Server and on certain LTSC versions of Windows 10.

Internet Explorer will live on to a degree with the IE mode functionality that is available in Microsoft Edge. I haven’t really tested this feature since I can’t think of a service that I use that even requires Internet Explorer anymore, but the feature is there regardless. I am sure that there are multiple business related applications that will utilize this functionality.

Internet Explorer Legacy

Supporting the browser and all of the legacy functionality for Internet Explorer over the last 10 years has certainly been challenging. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get legacy ActiveX or Java plugins working in very outdated environments, and it has certainly been a best effort approach.

At the end of the day, I am glad that Microsoft has finally sunset Internet Explorer, as it was definitely a relic from another time and by keeping it around they were just holding everyone back. It also allows Administrators to go their higher-ups and tell them that they can’t support extremely old and outdated technology anymore, as they are losing a primary method of accessing those applications.

Microsoft Edge has become considerably more usable since adopting Chromium as the rendering engine, and it is my daily browser on every device that I use. While I think that Edge was perfectly usable prior to the conversion, dumping the legacy Trident engine was definitely for the best.