(When Lyndersay referred to 'the future of Internet Explorer is in Microsoft Edge' ( emphasis added, he was referring to IE mode.)īusinesses still wedded to aged internal sites and too-expensive-to-rewrite apps are to be pushed toward Edge and its baked-in IE mode. What's most important to enterprises is that the June 2022 support deadline can be sidestepped by using Edge and its IE mode that last calls up designated sites using IE's Trident rather than Edge's now-native Chromium.

Commercial customers who pay for the third year of Extended Security Updates (ESUs) will receive support for IE through the end of that contract, or until Jan. (WindLTSC, for instance, has support until January 2029, while 2015 LTSB and 2016 LTSB will be supported until October 2025 and October 2026, respectively.) Microsoft alluded to as much when it said that the LTSB/LSTC versions were 'out of scope at the time of this announcement' ( emphasis added) of the June 15, 2022, date.Įven IE11 running on Windows 7 will be supported longer than next June. That's not to say the separate IE11 application will survive that long. J12 months and change away - won't be the end of the browser by any means.īecause Microsoft had previously promised customers that IE11 would be supported as part of the three Windows 10 LTSC versions released so far (the first two, 2105 LTSB and 2106 LTSB, went by Long-term Support Branch) the end-of-support order won't be applied to them. And once Microsoft released a reworked Edge, the one built atop technologies from the Google-dominated Chromium project, it was only a matter of time before the company pulled that support plug.Įven so, IE11 will suffer a long, lingering death. developer put IE on life support more than five years ago, when it halted development of the browser in early 2016. If it seems Microsoft has been killing IE for years, well, it has. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to secure IE's Trident rendering engine, which is embedded in Windows and crucial to the running of Edge's IE mode. The forced retirement of IE11 - the only version still supported - will not be all-inclusive, as several editions of Windows, including 10's Long-term Support Channel (LTSC) and Windows Server, will be spared from the directive. the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10.' 'With Microsoft Edge capable of assuming this responsibility.

'The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge,' asserted Sean Lyndersay, an Edge program manager, asserted in a May 19 post to a company blog.

Microsoft has spelled out its plans to retire the venerable Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) browser from widespread use in a little over a year.

Open internet explorer in windows 10