The browser will be gone forever. What to do if you need to run it.
Microsoft It has been dedicating a long goodbye to Internet Explorer: since it announced that it would cease to exist, to be permanently replaced by Edge, it has been leaving it aside in different ways. And this February 14, 2023 is the day that completely disappears from Windows 10.
The latest version of the operating system, Windows 11, had completely eliminated the old browser by replacing it upon installation. But still the app could be found in Windows 10.
The elimination will take place through an update that will “step” on the program, eliminating Internet Explorer and leaving Edge as the default browser, unless the user has chosen another as Chrome o Firefox so that it is the one that opens by default.
Visual references to the browser, including icons within the system, are scheduled to be removed by a Windows security update scheduled to roll out on June 13.
Still, while you might see Internet Explorer icons scattered inside your computer for a few more months, they won’t be able to open after you the update is now implemented.
What to do if IE is needed
Some old tasks may require Internet Explorer as the browser, although this is increasingly rare. If that were the case, anyway, what can be done is activate an Edge mode that integrates Internet Explorerthat is, it uses the old engine.
The truth is that, beyond this detail, Internet Explorer had actually stopped being used a long time ago. In 2015, when Edge was released, Microsoft started pushing really hard to discourage its use.
Unless the user has an older, unsupported version of Windows, such as Windows 8.1 or Windows 7, it’s arguably not really a game changer at all.
The step by step to activate the IE mode, here.
Internet Explorer: 1995 – 2021
IE was released on August 16, 1995, under the Windows 95 environment. At that time, it was a plugin that could be additionally installed in the operating system (which was actually part of a package called “Microsoft Plus!”).
From that first version onwards, many others followed: 2.0, the first to be compatible with Mac OS, 3.0, which began to reproduce MIDI sounds (a great advance for the time), the 4.0 that was already integrated in Windows 98.
One of the most popular was 6.0, which was integrated into Windows XP (2001) but had serious security problems, which were fixed with the Service Pack 2 at the end of 2004.
7.0 included tabs for browsing for the first time, something that its open source competitor Mozilla Firefox had implemented for some time.
As Windows has evolved, IE has also changed. The last version was 11, until January 21, 2015, when Microsoft introduced Edge to definitively replace it as a browser. Default in Windows 10.
Currently, Google Chrome is the most used browser in the world: 68.81% of users use it, the second is Firefox with 7.83% and Edge is third with 7.04%, according to Net Market Share.
In fact, if we want to choose Chrome as the default browser, Windows asks us if we don’t want to “give Edge a chance” before making the transfer.
