Microsoft has taken another step towards the withdrawal of its emblematic and problematic Internet Explorer browser , pre-installed in old versions of Windows, and has announced through a statement on its official website that since August 2021 this program and also the old version Edge Legacy – not based on Chromium – will not be compatible with the applications and services of your Microsoft 365 ecosystem .
As a first measure, as of November 30, 2020 , Internet Explorer 11 -the last update of the browser, launched in 2013- will no longer be compatible with Microsoft’s worksharing app , Teams.
The technology has announced that support for Internet Explorer 11 will end on August 17, 2021 . This means that it will no longer be compatible with Microsoft online services such as Office 365 – now Microsoft 365 -, Outlook, OneDrive and more.
This will force users and companies to change their browser if they have it installed. In Spain, there are many public administrations that continue to use it to carry out the procedures of their respective businesses.
The browser wars
With this move, the company leaves behind the heavy slab that it had been carrying for 20 years. At the time, Internet Explorer became the most used ( and hated ) browser in the world thanks to the fact that it was included in Windows 95 . Following the browser war with Netscape in the late 1990s, Microsoft made a series of moves that led to an antitrust trial.
Despite the fact that the sentence that forced Microsoft to split in two was never carried out, the trial set a precedent. The arrival of new competitors such as Chrome, Firefox and Opera , added to the high number of security holes in Internet Explorer, started the second browser war that would eventually sink Microsoft’s option.
With Windows 10, Microsoft wanted to put all these setbacks behind. While Edge was an interesting proposition, the lack of options compared to Chrome was decisive to go unnoticed. Starting March 9, 2021, Edge Legacy will no longer receive security updates .
This means that users of the browser, although they will be able to continue using it, will have a “degraded experience or will not be able to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services,” as the company reported in a statement.
