Microsoft to officially put Internet Explorer to rest and concentrate on Edge

On January 12th, support for Internet Explorer versions 8, 9 and 10 will come to an end and IE11 will be the last version of Internet Explorer.

Instead, Microsoft intends to concentrate on it's new browser, Microsoft Edge, which has already been seen as a huge step up from previous versions of Internet Explorer, despite it looking very familiar. The new browser comes packed with Windows 10 and is poised to become the default Microsoft browser as, finally putting IE to rest after 20 years of service.

Internet Explorer has always been one of the most popular web browsers on the market, although this is partly due to it being the default internet application on Windows. Despite the emergence of browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari becoming the preferred alternatives for a lot of people, IE11 still takes up the highest share of the browser market today. However, that share has decreased in recent years which can be attributed to people switching to different browsers, including businesses who may have upgraded their IT systems to encourage the use of Chrome.

Older versions of Internet Explorer were also a nightmare for web designers and developers who endured problems and compatibility issues due to IE's limited support for rendering certain elements of HTML and CSS. This was fixed in later versions but it was still an ever present problem for many years, with IE6 and IE7 still taking up a large percentage of the browser market share.

Despite some of its criticism and flaws, Internet Explorer still played a very important role when it came to browsing the web and although it's spirit will live on in Microsoft Edge, the impending demise of Internet Explorer just shows how quickly the internet can quickly change and evolve.