Today marks the end of an era, Internet Explorer will enter the halls of internet history.

Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be supported by Microsoft as of today although the browser will still live on through Edge’s IE Mode.

The browser will also still receive support for Windows Server 2022 and earlier versions with long-term service extensions in place. This is for Windows 10 to be clear as Windows 11 doesn’t even include an Internet Explorer app out of the box.

While Microsoft is ending support, this feels more like a funeral than a wind up. As reported by Engadget, Microsoft will redirect users from IE to Edge over the next few months before disabling IE altogether through an update.

At its height, Internet Explorer was used by 95 percent of the online world in 2003. In our modern era according to StatCounter in May of 2022 Internet Explorer held just 0.64 percent of the browser market share. This is dwarfed by Edge’s 3.99 percent share and Chrome’s monstrous 64.95 percent of the global browser market share.

Of course, Internet Explorer was also the subject of many jokes given its poor performance in comparison to competitors such as Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

As somebody who grew up accessing the internet through Internet Explorer it’s a sad day. Although not really because you can emulate this browser version of Windows 95 and relive the good old days.

We’d say we’ll miss Internet Explorer, but if we’re honest, we didn’t even notice it was missing from Windows 11 until today.

[Image – CC BY SA 2.0 Christiaan Colen]