The iconic Internet Explorer that let millions browse the Web for nearly 27 years and was touted as the star of Windows retired on Wednesday as Microsoft now promotes its Chromium-based Edge browser.
In 2015, Microsoft for the first time confirmed to shun Internet Explorer and said it will use a new name for its upcoming browser successor, codenamed ‘Project Spartan’.
“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing,” then Microsoft’s marketing chief Chris Capossela had said.
On March 17, 2015, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Edge would replace Internet Explorer as the default browser “for certain versions of Windows 10”.
Internet Explorer is now dead as Microsoft officially withdraws support for the latest IE 11 version.
The users will still receive IE 11 support if they are using Windows Server 2022 or an earlier OS release with a long-term service extension, but this marks the effective end of software updates for most people.
The use of Internet Explorer plummeted in recent years, with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge replacing it.
Microsoft will start rolling out a new prompt over the coming months that redirect those still using Internet Explorer over to Microsoft Edge.
Eventually, Internet Explorer will be permanently disabled as part of a future Windows update.
Microsoft 365 ended support for Internet Explorer on August 17, 2021 and Microsoft Teams ended support for IE on November 30, 2020.
Internet Explorer was first released in 1995, and was included in the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems.
Internet Explorer was once the most widely used web browser, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share by 2003.
The estimates for Internet Explorer’s market share in 2022 are about 0.38 per cent across all platforms, or by StatCounter’s numbers ranked 10th.
Microsoft spent over $100 million per year on Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people involved in the project by 1999.
