2 min

Microsoft is going to end the support for their failed browsers from the past. In 2021 the Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support their legacy browsers. Finally the tech giant will kill their failed browsers and make the life of web developers a lot better.

Starting on November 30th of 2020, Internet Explorer 11 support will be dropped from the Microsoft Teams web application. Then on March 9th of 2021 the support of the Edge legacy browser will be suspended, they won’t release any new security updates to that browser. Instead users should update their Windows-installation to the latest May 2020 update, where Edge legacy will be replaced by Edge Chromium. The new Edge-brower will run on the same engine as the Chrome-browser of Google.

For companies who are not ready to drop Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) or don’t want to update to the latest Windows 10 May 2020 update, it is possible to manually install the Edge Chromium in every Windows 10 version. Included in Edge Chromium is a compatibility mode for IE11. So if you company has proprietary applications that are build for IE11 they can switch to Edge Chromium as well.

Then, finally on August 17 2021, all Microsoft 365 apps and services will completely drop support for IE11. Services like Office 365, OneDrive, Outlook will not longer work with IE11.

For web developers it means, one less browser engine to support. With Chromium they will support the majority of Internet users. The browserengine from Apple’s Safari, WebKit, comes very close to Chromium, since Chromium was once based on WebKit. The differences between those engines are easily covered. Last but not least, there is Mozilla Firefox, which has an alternative browserengine. It also follows a lot of the same web standard as Chromium, but it’s different on some fronts. The market share is getting smaller every year though. Looks like Chromium will be the web standard for years to come.

Tip: Are browser extensions still safe to use?