Edging Out of IE Support

Having to support a minority of users on IE11 is painful. It's a browser that is still officially supported by Microsoft, until 2025, but active development has stopped, or at least slowed right down, so the gap between it and other browsers is growing wider with every update.

The growing feature gap means either not using newer features if we're working to the lowest common denominator or else having to provide polyfills or fallbacks so IE11 can still be used.

But there could be a light at the end of the tunnel, and before 2025. Microsoft Edge is moving from using the EdgeHTML engine to open source Chromium, which will bring it in line with Chrome, Opera and Safari. That's nice for compatibility but the big deal is that it will be available on older Windows operating systems. Up until now Edge was only available on Windows 10 but it will soon be available on 7, 8 and 8.1 too so more users can drop IE and use Edge as their official Microsoft browser.

The Edge team are going one better than that though. One of the big reasons for clinging on to IE is the use of legacy software which only works on that browser. Edge is introducing an IE11 mode, so users can seamlessly (hmm - I can already hear the massive crash) switch over to IE for specific sites. Very clever.

It looks like we might have a way out of IE11 support in the next 12 months or so. Just need to convince the large corporations to make the switch now but I'm sure Microsoft will be pushing hard on this too. Good news.