After years of decline and eventual shutdown over the past 13 months, Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed the retirement of Internet Explorer, the company’s long-running and increasingly popular web browser. Launched in 1995, IE came pre-installed on Windows PCs for nearly two decades, and like Windows XP, Internet Explorer became a mainstay—so much so that when it came time for users to upgrade and move on, they often they didn’t. And while last week’s milestone will push even more users away from the historic browser, security researchers stress that IE and its many security vulnerabilities are far from gone.
In the coming months, Microsoft will disable the IE app on Windows 10 devices, directing users instead to the next-generation Edge browser, first released in 2015. However, the IE icon will still remain on users’ desktops, and Edge includes a service called “IE Mode” to preserve access to old websites built for Internet Explorer. Microsoft says it will support IE mode until at least 2029. Additionally, IE will still work for now on all supported versions of Windows 8.1, Windows 7 with Microsoft’s Advanced Security Updates, and Windows Server, although the company says it will eventually remove IE on those as well.
Seven years after Edge’s debut, industry analysis shows that Internet Explorer can still hold more than half a percent of the total global browser market share. And in the United States, that share may be closer to 2 percent.
“I really think we’ve made progress and we probably won’t see as many exploits against IE in the future, but we’ll still have remnants of Internet Explorer for a long time that scammers can take advantage of,” said Ronnie Tokazowski, a longtime independent researcher at malware and chief threat advisor at cybersecurity firm Cofense. “Internet Explorer as a browser is going away, but there are still parts that exist.”
For something that’s been around as long as IE, backwards compatibility is hard to balance with the desire for a clean slate. “We haven’t forgotten that some parts of the web still rely on the specific behavior and features of Internet Explorer,” Sean Lindersay, general manager of Microsoft Edge Enterprise, wrote in an IE retrospective on Wednesday, referring to the IE mode.
But he added that there was a real need to start over with Edge instead of trying to save IE. “The web has evolved and so have browsers,” he wrote last week. “Internet Explorer’s incremental improvements couldn’t match the general improvements of the web as a whole, so we started over.”
