Today is a day for which web developers have long waited. It’s a day which, in their darkest moments, they feared might never come. But it’s here.
Today, as it indicated over a year ago that it would, Microsoft is retiring its long-obsolete Internet Explorer web browser. As of today, Microsoft considers IE to be “out of support.”
(However, there are some nuances to this change, especially for those using certain Windows installations — notably, the LTSC version that too many IT departments love to force upon their unwitting users.)
This comes over three years after Microsoft essentially told people and especially businesses, “Don’t use this outdated, junky browser anymore!” However, many businesses ignored this. They chose to defer spending money on updating their Windows setups to something more recent than, say, Windows 7. Given that this actually increased their costs, as vendors (including Microsoft) gradually charged more for supporting such legacy software, this was even dumber than it now seems in retrospect.
Well, starting today, most who continue to use IE do so at their own peril. Hey, malware-making script kiddies: they’re all yours. Bon appétit.
To paraphrase the old song: Internet Explorer, “I’m glad you’re dead, you rascal, you.” It just didn’t happen nearly soon enough. And, until/unless those aforementioned nuances cease to be relevant, IE can’t be nearly dead enough to suit the world’s web devs.
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2023-03-05 at 10:40:50 PM CST.
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