Internet Explorer is dying - but you can decide when to say goodbye
What do you wear to a web browser’s funeral?
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Internet Explorer has one foot in the grave, butMicrosofthas decided to allow customers to choose when the last scraps of its old (and mostly unloved) web browser will be removed from their devices and final goodbyes can be had.This comes after Internet Explorer wasdisabled on some Windows 10 deviceswhen users installed aMicrosoft Edge(the new default web browser for Windows) update released in mid-February. Microsoft warned from June to December last year that the legacy browser would be permanently disabled via a Windows update.According to abrief announcementfrom Microsoft, “Organizations will continue to maintain control over determining the timing to remove Internet Explorer visual references from their device, if they haven’t already done so, by using theDisable IE policy.”
Despite the reference to ‘organizations’, individual users can also make use of this option.
Time’s up
Since the February Edge update removed Internet Explorer 11, users have been told that “the future of Internet Explorer is on Microsoft Edge. Internet Explorer has been retired and is no longer supported.”Internet Explorer has been automatically launching Microsoft Edge when visiting incompatible sites since October of 2020. Thecomplete list of incompatible sitescurrently contains 7,604 sites and includes Microsoft Teams, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram andGoogleDrive.Microsoft is urging users to make the switch to Microsoft Edge, so if you’ve been clinging to Internet Explorer it may betime to say goodbye. At least you’ll be able to decide exactly when you hold the funeral
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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison.
Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she’s joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you’ve got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you’re in the right place.
Muskaan also somehow managed to install a game on her work MacBook’s Touch Bar, without the IT department finding out (yet).
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