Microsoft ending support for Internet Explorer in Office 365

It has been a mainstay and a source of controversy for 25 years, but pretty soon not even its creator Microsoft is going to use Internet Explorer.

You probably learned to surf the internet on it and might even still be forced to use it at work, but not even Microsoft wants to keep using its outdated Internet Explorer web browser.

The software giant has announced that by this time next year, you won’t be able to use Internet Explorer (IE) to read your Outlook emails or edit Word documents in the Cloud as the company drops support for the browser in its Office 365 applications.

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In 2010, Internet Explorer 9 tried to stave off Google Chrome with a faster, minimalist look. Picture: Microsoft Corp/AP

Internet Explorer used to dominate the browser market. Picture: Paul Sakuma/AP

Google Chrome is now by far the most used web browser. Picture: Paul Sakuma/AP

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Microsoft Teams, the company’s answer to Slack, will stop being usable in Explorer by the end of November while the other apps will stop supporting it in August 2021.

The company replaced IE with its new Edge browser in 2015 and now considers Internet Explorer a “compatibility tool” rather than an actual web browser.

The Edge browser also features a “legacy” version which will stop receiving security updates from March.

A web page is shown on Microsoft’s Edge browser.

Opening Internet Explorer on a modern Windows 10 computer will take you to a web page prompting you to use Edge instead.

As of earlier this year, Edge uses Chromium, an open source software project from Google that powers its market dominating Chrome browser, as well as competitors like Opera and the privacy-focused Brave browser.

Internet Explorer first came along in Windows 95, making it older than the entire company of Google, which now has the browser used by more people than any other (around 70 per cent of people access the internet through Google Chrome).

The browser was also the source of one of Microsoft’s biggest problems.

Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, but placed restrictions on the abilities of users to uninstall it and use a different browser.

Additionally, browsers cost money at the time (all of the most used ones are now free) and also took a long time to download due to slower internet speeds.

This helped Internet Explorer gain market dominance – because it came with the computer.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in 1997 promoting Internet Explorer software.

Internet Explorer’s web page in 1998, seen on the competing Netscape browser.

The United States Department of Justice later argued Microsoft created a market monopoly on the Windows operating system and used that to win the “Browser Wars”.

A judgment ruled for the break-up of Microsoft, which the company immediately appealed and eventually had overturned.

Last month, Microsoft was not asked to send any of its key executives to testify in front of a US Congressional hearing into suspected or alleged antitrust behaviour at other companies, namely Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.