Microsoft announced that they will start phasing out their old browsers, which is a long time coming.
The company described a timeline of when Microsoft 365 apps will stop supporting Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge Legacy.
Slowly phasing out Internet Explorer 11
Beginning November 30, 2020, Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support Internet Explorer 11. They also said beginning August 17th 2021, the remaining Microsoft Teams apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11.
“This means that after the above dates, customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11,” Microsoft says. “For degraded experiences, new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may cease to work when accessing the app or service via IE 11.”
The company also talked about respecting companies investments in Internet Explorer web apps. “We want to be clear that IE 11 isn’t going away and that our customers’ own legacy IE 11 apps and investments will continue to work,” they said.
Internet Explorer was once the most popular browser until Chrome came into the picture. However, it got outpaced in terms of features and functionality and Chrome came to dominate the scenes. Microsoft decided to try again with Microsoft Edge but they failed miserably. This led them to completely change Microsoft Edge’s engine by basing it on Chromium, which powers Chrome.
Old Edge browser makes way for the new Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft started working on the new Chromium based Microsoft Edge nearly two years ago and I absolutely love it. Microsoft started rolling out this browser starting with Windows `10 20H2 and will be standard in future Windows updates.
Due to this change, the company said that they are ending support for Microsoft Edge Legacy on March 9th 2021.
You can’t uninstall the new Edge
Microsoft made an interesting change a while ago where they added a support page informing that you can’t uninstall the new Microsoft Edge. “The new version of Microsoft Edge is included in a Windows system update, so the option to uninstall it or use the legacy version of Microsoft Edge will no longer be available,” they said in the post.
