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    Internet Explorer is finally, truly dying, and Microsoft wants you ready by 2029
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    Internet Explorer is finally, truly dying, and Microsoft wants you ready by 2029

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    31 Comments

    1. 1I1III1I1I111I1I1 on

      Former Microsoft employee & vendor here.

      Have been told IE was really truly, absolutely, totally, being sun-setted every year since 2016, and no, I’m not exaggerating.

      **EDIT:** So, got some DM’s asking me why this is. Long story short, Microsoft has the slowest adopting user base for a couple of reasons.

      1. **Less tech savvy users:** Microsoft has a lot of users who go buy $300 laptops at best buy, and solely use the installed software. So there’s many people who still have older devices that came installed with IE who don’t want to change their buttons & bookmarks. If you go to the [Microsoft Casual Games website](https://www.microsoftcasualgames.com/), it looks like it’s from 20 years ago, and that’s by design. They re-designed the site years ago to make it more current, and got tons of complaints from users who thought Microsoft broke their page.
      2. **Global support:** Similar to the above, Microsoft supports the entire global market, and in a lot of emerging countries, they’re making due with second hand or very low powered computers/devices. So Microsoft needs to keep very very very legacy versions of their software compatible.

      There’s certainly more reasons, but these were, by far, the biggest two when I was there.

    7. McCool303 on

      I’ve been ready since 95 Microsoft, this ain’t an airport. You don’t need to announce your departure. Just take it off my PC, thanks.

    10. random20190826 on

      I always thought IE died when Microsoft replaced it with Edge. The biggest thing was that Chinese banks refused to support anything other than IE for a long time. Now they finally support Chrome based browsers (including Edge).

    11. TransporterAccident_ on

      I joined healthcare in an administrative capacity last year and was shocked by the number of websites using IE mode in Edge. I was under the impression that was killed years ago.

    17. ChrisCopp on

      Some banks still use it. A cheque cashing machine we use requires IE mode for login that is getting harder to use and keep setup.

    19. 30InchSpare on

      I just switched to Firefox yesterday to get ahead of Edge killing off mv2 extensions (ublock origin.) I like it a lot, very fast and clean once I customized it and turned off all the fluff and ai. The only thing, it definitely uses more ram than edge, which doesn’t matter to me personally with 32GB of ddr5.

    23. notPabst404 on

      People shouldn’t be using corporate web browsers like Edge or Chrome anyway: the entire purpose is data harvesting. Firefox or Brave are significantly better alternatives.

    27. dgb631 on

      I love internet explorer! I just opened it up on my laptop. Did you guys know there’s some virus in china that causes a cold called covid 19???

    30. happyscrappy on

      I would like to announce a project to use AI to reverse engineer source code from IE. We will then update it and preserve it and port it to modern OSes so people can continue to use this terrible example of a browser until the end of time.

    31. Booty_Bumping on

      Part of the problem is that if they remove IE, there’s no longer any API to install Internet Explorer toolbars, so any bundled toolbar crap in ancient software installers may just crash before it can install the thing the user actually wants. Considering they’ve kept the ability to install and manage toolbars for a browser that is nominally hidden from view and only possible to open from the command line, I suspect when they do a full removal they’ll still have to emulate that API to give success codes so that crapware installers think they’ve won.

      The other part of the problem is ActiveX crap being used on internal websites in many organizations.