The old market leading browser will no longer be compatible with the applications and services of its Microsoft 365 ecosystem and will not be supported as of next year.
Microsoft has taken another step towards the withdrawal of its Internet Explorer browser, pre-installed in old versions of Windows. Microsoft 365 applications and services will no longer be compatible with the old browser on August 17, 2021. Before that date arrives, on November 30, Microsoft Teams will give the starting signal by ceasing to be compatible with IE11, which was the last browser update in 2013.

Starting next summer, Internet Explorer will continue to work. However, those who use it will have, according to the company, a “degraded experience or will not be able to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services,” as the company reported in a statement.

This situation also affects the old version of Edge – prior to the launch this January of Microsoft’s current browser based on Chromium – which will also no longer have support with Microsoft 365 apps from the same date and with Teams from the 30th. November 2020.

What does it mean to be based on Chromium? Chromium is an open source version of Google’s browser, Chrome. Three months after launching Chrome in 2008, the company released its source code along with a project they called Chromium. Its objective was to improve the browser engine with the community, and that whoever wanted could use it to launch their own browser. Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi or Yandex work on this basis. But its big leap came this January, when Microsoft announced that the new version of Edge would work on this open source.

The old leader

During the 90s, Explorer was the standard browser, after dethroning Netscape, the great king of the first software explosion in Silicon Valley. The inclusion of Explorer as the default browser on Windows computers was key to its expansion. This competitive advantage, however, earned him not only criticism from competitors, but also fines from Brussels, which considered it a clear form of abuse of a dominant position in the market .

Its decline has been gradual, but without brake. First with the take off of Mac computers, which mimicked his technique using Safari as the default browser. Then with the advent of Firefox, created by a non-profit foundation and very scrupulous to industry standards. Its great innovation came in the form of tabs, a method to have several pages open without having to have several sessions that consumed a large number of computer resources. The last to join was Google, with Chrome, on September 2, 2008. Light, with a minimal menu and fast loading, but also controversial. Its unique bar served both to type web addresses and to search its service without a clear distinction for less advanced users.