It had been coming for a while, but now the bullet is through the church. Microsoft has announced that support for Internet Explorer 11 will disappear from the Microsoft Office 365 package from August next year. Later this year, in November, support for the Microsoft Teams web apps will end.
Although it will take a while before the Internet Explorer browser completely disappears from the digital streetscape, Microsoft hopes that Microsoft Edge's Explorer legacy mode offers enough reasons for long-time users to switch. The Edge browser, like Chrome, runs on Chromium, is a lot more secure and a lot more versatile than Internet Explorer 11.
This is mainly intended for the business market, but there will certainly be some consumers who can't get away from perhaps their first browser. Through legacy mode within Edge, all websites still work as they did in Internet Explorer. That's useful for the companies that are still optimizing their sites for that browser. Companies should probably stop doing that (the sooner, the better), since the browser is about to die. Now many companies are optimizing all their sites for Chrome and by extension Edge (because of the same foundation).
Internet Explorer completely disappears
The legacy mode within the Microsoft Edge browser is no longer an argument for switching to Edge. Microsoft has also announced that support for that feature will disappear in 2021, namely in March. That is a few months before the plug is pulled from Internet Explorer 11. You can still use the mode, but it will simply stop receiving updates.
Microsoft has been aggressive lately when it comes to pushing the Edge browser. Not only is this the default browser that comes with Windows 10 when you buy a new device, future versions of Windows 10 will also come with Edge by default. As a Windows user, you can hardly avoid it, unless you have already made a browser choice.
Microsoft has been working for years now to let people switch from Internet Explorer to, for example, Edge. The support has gradually disappeared in recent years. In 2015, the company finally officially unveiled Edge, which should have pushed Internet Explorer over the edge. That didn't happen then, but it was the beginning of the end of the browser. In any case, next year around this time it will all be over: then Internet Explorer will no longer be available.
