It’s the End of an Era

There’s no denying Bill Gates made a fortune in his days building Microsoft. One of the biggest driving factors in his dominance was the production of not just the Windows operating system, but the browser that came with it. With the general world population unaware of the nuances of web surfing and the tools available to do it way back in the day, Gates was able to make the Internet Explorer web engine ubiquitous with going online.

At one point in the late 90s, IE was virtually the only browser anyone had on their desktop, except of course for the super sweet AOL. However, through a series of lawsuits, poor performance and a enormous amount of bad press, Microsoft’s browser fell out of favor over time – in a big way. This is what led the Kings from Redmond to re-develop and re-package the web browsing tool, hoping to turn around skeptical public opinion. Edge is simply their re-boot of IE.

“Customers are encouraged to move to Microsoft Edge, which provides support for legacy and modern apps and websites. For organizations with a dependency on legacy IE-based platforms, websites will need to be configured to open in Microsoft Edge using Internet Explorer (IE) mode.”

Don’t totally freak out yet, though – this IE Mode will still have support through 2029 and beyond (for now), so businesses won’t be stuck if they need compatibility with the archaic web engine. Keep in mind though, there definitely will be a push for organizations to make the move towards the newer tool. MS says they will “progressively” redirect users from IE to Edge in the coming months, and will disable the old software permanently through a Windows update at a future time.

This marks a true sunsetting of an online icon. And while there are some cheers heard around the virtual world, for the makers of Windows, this does not in any way guarantee more market share or dominance. That 80% majority share from Google will most definitely be hard to unseat quickly.