Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer, and legacy Edge in 2021

(Image credit: Microsoft)

 Microsoft has announced that support for Internet Explorer 11 will end August 17, 2021. At that time, all products under the Microsoft umbrella which may currently still use Internet Explorer, such as Outlook, OneDrive or Office 365 will stop supporting the browser.Support for Internet Explorer within the Microsoft Teams web app ends November 30 of this year. Meanwhile, the legacy edition of Microsoft Edge is set to end March 9, 2021.

Since its release in July 2015 for PC, and following a rebuilt as a Chromium-based browser in 2019, Microsoft Edge has been praised as a great alternative to Internet Explorer, but seeing as private users already have had an alternative to Internet Explorer for years, not a lot of people actually seem to use it—and that's not necessarily because it uses Blink as its engine. 

The market share for the browser is low overall, behind Firefox and even several older versions of Chrome, which is the most frequently used browser overall.  As recently as June 2020, updates to Windows 7, 8.1 and Windows 10 automatically install Edge and import user data from other browsers before obtaining permission to do so.

The people actually still using Internet Explorer are enterprise customers whose digital infrastructure depends on the browser. Those customers can still access pages built for IE11 using an Internet Explorer legacy mode within Microsoft Edge.