It won’t be unfair to say that Internet Explorer has become the ‘step’ child for Microsoft. Ever since with inception of Windows 10, Microsoft has been betting big on the Edge browser and Internet Explorer was kind of neglected. But it hadn’t been spelt out in clear terms. That is until now.

Last week, Microsoft put a post titled “The perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser” on its blog. First of all – and it won’t come as a surprise to Microsoft – that not many people actually use Explorer as their default browser. That ship sailed a few years ago and not many got on board.

Still, it’s an interesting blog post where Microsoft talks about something called “technical debt”. Chris Jackson of Microsoft writes in the blog, “In the past, Internet Explorer was optimized for simplicity at the expense of technical debt. Looking all the way back to Internet Explorer 6, the very concept of “standards mode” vs. “quirks mode” comes from this “easy button” approach. All existing content (which had no DOCTYPE) would get quirks mode; you got standards mode by adding a specific DOCTYPE.” In other words, while websites and the tech that goes behind it has advanced with the changing times, Internet Explorer hasn’t.

While the blog does highlight why and how Microsoft decided to deal with this issue, the main point remains that the Explorer just doesn’t have what users and developers are looking for. The blog post further says that Explorer is a “compatibility solution”. “We’re not supporting new web standards for it and, while many sites work fine, developers by and large just aren’t testing for Internet Explorer these days. They’re testing on modern browsers.” Microsoft is saying that if you continue to use Explorer you would actually miss out a lot on the Internet. “As new apps are coming out with greater frequency, what we want to help you do is avoid having to miss out on a progressively larger portion of the web!”

As mentioned earlier Microsoft wants to up its game in the browser space with Edge and is working towards to make it more like Google Chrome. But one thing is clear, the Internet Explorer may well soon become a relic of the past.

Source: gadgetsnow.com