I broke up with IE11 today
Monday, January 25, 2021I broke up with IE11 today.
Do you remember when Internet Explorer 8 came out? Even though IE's market share was being eviscerated by Firefox, it was just that much better than what we had before. As any web developer of the time could attest, IE was prevalent. Businesses relied on it. Internet Explorer was preinstalled on every Windows machine.
I had the same excitement for future Internet Explorer releases: IE9 (useful devtools, and HTML5!), IE10 (a half-working flexbox, CSS gradients!), and IE11 (actually somewhat has modern web technologies!). But in the end, IE11 has well worn out its welcome.
And yet, companies still have Internet Explorer 11 installed. Microsoft indirectly revealed their intentions with the long term support:
- IE11 support for the mainstream public - ended October 2020
- IE11 support for Microsoft Teams - ended November 2020
- IE11 support for Office 365 - ends August 17 2021
- IE11 support for enterprise customers - ends 2025
There are manners in which IE11 is supported. Firstly, browsers themselves have to be supported by their vendors (e.g. Microsoft). This means security and bugfixes. Secondly, sites have to support browsers (this is entirely up to web developers).
IE11 is on life support. I have spoken on the phone with their extended support teams, dealing with bad memory leaks. They can't help. They will only fix IE11 if there is a severe security bug.
But Microsoft is ending support in their products from IE11. This means that customers of those Microsoft products will have to use a newer browser. They don't expect any environment to have only IE11 installed. Anyone with IE11 in their environment has an old application that cannot be changed or upgraded. They'll still have to have another browser around for the non-legacy apps.
So that's where I ended up. Crossing my fingers nobody makes me support it again.