In June of 2022, it was announced that Internet Explorer was being retired. We even wrote an obituary. As of February 14th, 2023, Internet Explorer has finally stopped working on its final platform, the desktop computer.
It took eight months for Explorer to catch up to its retirement announcement.
You could still use the application, but as of Valentine’s Day, it has been permanently disabled. There are also plans to retire the icon in an update due out on June 13th, 2023.
Explorer was born in 1995. It wasn’t the best, but it’s what we had. It created a bunch of talented web developers who were constantly trying to fix it. Internet Explorer lived long enough for 11 versions, with the last being released in 2013.
In 2015, Edge moved in, becoming the default browser for Windows computers.
“The change to use Microsoft Edge update to disable IE is intended to provide a better user experience and help organizations transition their last remaining IE11 (Internet Explorer 11) users to Microsoft Edge,” Microsoft said.
As of today, any device that tries to access Internet Explorer will get redirected to an Edge browser. Internet Explorer was once the go-to, shadowed by current options such as Google Chrome (with a user base of 65%), and Apple’s Safari (with 19%). Edge is still not a widely preferred browser, with only a 4% user base which is just a head of Mozilla’s Firefox.
