There is a good selection of browsers to choose from. We all have our favourites alongside those we try to avoid at all costs. At Proactively we test widely, so it is interesting to know which our customers use. Market share in 2021 looks like:

Source: Stat counter, Global Stats

You can see that Google Chrome dominates.

So what? I hear you ask.

Well, these are not the browsers that prompted me to write this blog post. I am interested in Internet Explorer (IE).

IE continues to have millions of users worldwide, despite Microsoft actively trying to wean customers off the software. It is undergoing a slow death. Microsoft is pushing users to upgrade from IE to Edge where they will get a faster and more effective service. They even automatically divert IE users to Edge.

How does the phased close of IE look? Microsoft started this process in 2015 when the successor, Edge, was launched. Already users can’t log into Microsoft accounts using IE, and no Microsoft 365 App is compatible with the browser. Microsoft is officially pulling the plug on Internet Explorer next summer on June 15th 2022. (Microsoft will support an ‘Internet Explorer mode’ in Edge until 2029)

Internet Explorer is 25 years old. It once dominated the internet with it’s blue ‘e’ icon. However, it has long been thought of as obsolete: slow, very buggy, and with data security issues. Do you remember the Microsoft campaign in 2012 “Internet Explorer: the browser you love to hate”? By then users were flocking to superior browsers.

Many websites, including Proactively, are incompatible with Internet Explorer. When you try to use one of these sites with IE a message appears reading “This website doesn’t work in Internet Explorer”

The thought behind this post is please prepare. If you are still using Internet Explorer, please make the jump soon to move away and enjoy the difference a modern browser offers.