On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer will be retired and will redirect users to Microsoft Edge after June 15, 2022. While the news is a little complicated in that certain versions of Windows won’t see this disabling happen June 15, 2022, this will mean the end of Internet Explorer for most users.

No More IE Means a Better Web

While you may not use Internet Explorer anymore, there are still people out there that continue to click on that IE logo on their Windows computer. Depending on the industry, particularly with our manufacturing websites, we continue to see strong usage of Internet Explorer 11. Because of this continual usage web development companies like ours and others continue to code with IE11 in mind. With this announcement from Microsoft, we fully expect those numbers to drop off to the point that being compatible with Internet Explorer won’t be something that we will put effort into anymore. Once Internet Explorer is out of the picture, expect to see websites become more and more engaging. There are a lot of technologies that enable things like transitions and animations that are not currently being used due to causing significant compatibility problems for Internet Explorer users.

Why has IE Stayed Around This Long?

Most consumers have moved on from Internet Explorer, but parts of the business world has still held onto the old browser. For businesses, IE enabled a range of options for web developers back in the early 90s to build robust “Intranet” or web applications for corporate environments. While they may look archaic today, they blaze the trail in allowing companies to build custom workflows and web applications without incurring expensive development costs to develop native applications. Things like Active Directory Group Policy and ActiveX were used extensively to control the user access and other security features.

What Will Take the Place of Corporate Intranets?

Web apps enabled by HTML5 web standards have already provided a sound replacement to most of what Internet Explorer provided to organizations. Modern web apps provide comparable alternatives to features found in the old IE powered Intranets and actually provide a more affordable development path. We expect to see that migration continue as organizations upgrade more aspects of their internal technologies. Here at McNair Media, we have built some pretty amazing web apps for our clients to replace previous systems that were in use. If you are one of those organizations that still uses a web application powered by Internet Explorer, you should contact us today for a free consultation!