Microsoft is taking another step towards the death of Internet Explorer

Microsoft 365 apps will end support for Internet Explorer 11 by the end of 2021, Microsoft announced in a business blog post this week. It’s a big step for the company, which is looking to move customers to its modern Edge browser, even if some companies are stuck on legacy systems using Internet Explorer (IE).

The change will begin with Microsoft Teams Web application, which ends IE support on November 30 this year. Microsoft 365 applications will follow through August 17, 2021. Here is how Microsoft explained the 365 changes in its blog post:

Customers will have a degraded experience or will not be able to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11. For degraded experiences, new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may stop working while accessing the app or service through IE 11.

That said, Redmond was careful to clarify that IE 11 is not going away. Many companies have proprietary web applications that only work on that browser and are unlikely to fail completely in the near future.

Sometimes employees in those organizations use two browsers – IE for those apps and something other than Chrome for everything. The blog post announcing these changes made the case that Edge’s “Internet Explorer mode” would allow Edge to work with some of those apps, although Microsoft obviously can not guarantee that this will always be the case with every app.

In addition to the IE 11 announcements, Microsoft also announced that the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app (pre-Chromium Edge) “will not receive any new security updates after March 9, 2021”.

Internet Explorer 11 was introduced in 2013 as a core component of Windows operating systems. It continues to receive support in line with the end-of-life policies of the operating systems from which it was shipped – in Windows’ case, this means that support and security upgrades will end in October 2025.

Listing image by Samuel Axon