Technology: Microsoft ‘retires’ Internet Explorer after 27 years

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: After 27 years, Microsoft Corp finally retired its web browser, Internet Explorer (IE), once the planet’s dominant browser and the de-factor setter of web standards, whose decline plummeted with its IE6 version.

Launched on August 16, 1995, IE was available in 95 languages. Internet Explorer was a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included in the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year.

But its closure, a year after Microsoft’s announcement, has also panicked some users among governments and businesses in Japan and Southeast Asian countries, which still used IE. The closure has forced them to swiftly move to ensure the smooth running of operations that previously relied on apps built atop Microsoft’s long-tenured browser.

Among the leading economies, Japan was the most affected nation by this Microsoft move, as nearly half of its companies still used IE, mostly for in-house management, data exchange, and accounting systems. Many of its users procrastinated to update or transition to different software in time.

Now Japan and some Southeast Asian countries are rushing to ensure a smooth transition to run their operations that earlier relied on apps built atop IE.

Internet Explorer fell out of favor with its IE6 version, which was marred by feature bloat and frustrating performance. Faster and better browsers like Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox took over and IE’s share of the worldwide market was a negligible 0.64 percent last month, the media reported.

Microsoft’s successor to IE, called Edge, is a browser built on the same basic platform as Chrome, called Chromium, and is thus compatible with Chrome extensions and supports much of the same functionality.

Microsoft has integrated an IE mode inside Edge, which it will support for an additional period beyond today.