Microsoft To End Support For Internet Explorer in 2021

Microsoft will no longer support Internet Explorer effective August 17, 2021. In a blog post, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Teams web app would no longer support Internet Explorer 11, which is the most recent version of the browser, from November 30 , 2020.

Microsoft 365 apps and all other Microsoft services will end support for the browser by next year.

Microsoft will replace Internet explorer with Microsoft Edge, which is the company’s new browser relying on chromium open-source software that was developed by Google for Google Chrome. That means that Microsoft Edge will definitely have more features compared to Internet Explorer.

Before that, Microsoft had developed an Edge version that does not use chromium; that too will be phased out on March 9, 2021.

Microsoft is trying to avoid having two active users at once since there are many websites and applications still using internet explorer. The computer giant says that with Microsoft Edge’s Internet Explorer Legacy mode, users can have one browser and “seamlessly experience the best of the modern web in one tab while accessing a business critical legacy 1E II app in another tab”.

Read: Microsoft Launches Power African Community for Tech Developers

Microsoft has been planning to discontinue its support for Internet Explorer and its non-chromium browsers for a while now. Internet explorer 8,9 and 10 were discontinued in 2016. Microsoft Edge was launched just a year earlier, in 2015.

Chromium is the preferred basis for Google chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Avast Secure Browser and Opera. This points at Google’s influence over new features in development, accepted practices and which usability concerns are considered important.

However, the new Microsoft edge browser will have a few features different from Google Chrome. This include the ability to turn on tracking protection by default effectively blocking advertisements and third party tracking codes.

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