Goodbye, Internet Explorer. I first learned about it in the mid-1990s, when the Internet had not yet exploded. But now, two and a half decades later, Microsoft ironically plans to intentionally break IE's functionality and push users to Edge instead.

The early appeal of IE was its compatibility with the Web in general, as by the late 1990s IE had overtaken Netscape Navigator as the dominant browser, and at its peak it held over 90% of the browser market (see this (see this excellent animation highlighting the rise and fall of IE). Early versions of IE paid little attention to web standards, and because of its dominant market share (and the fact that it was bundled with Windows), many web developers built their sites and services around IE. In essence, Microsoft sort of broke the Web for other browsers.

And now, Microsoft is ending support for IE and relegating IE to pasture. Microsoft is now focusing all its efforts on its Edge browser, which is based on Chromium, the same engine as Google's competing Chrome browser. Starting with Edge 84, released this summer, Microsoft has been testing forced migration from IE for some users and will migrate all IE users with Edge 87, which will be released next month (via ZDNet).

Microsoft does this through a new DLL (dynamic link library) file (basically a plugin) injected into Edge; IE references this file, which currently contains a list of 1,156 websites (see list here (the list can be found here). When a user accesses one of these sites (e.g. Asana) in IE, an error message appears saying "This website does not work in Internet Explorer! Microsoft recommends continuing the browser session in Microsoft Edge to avoid interruption! You will receive an error message "This website does not work in Internet Explorer! Click the "Continue Browsing" button on the pop-up to open Edge.

For some users, this can go from a minor annoyance to a major headache for system administrators. Fortunately, administrators can set group policies to prevent IE from moving users to Edge.

In any case, IE is a dying browser; Microsoft recently announced that it will end support for IE 11 on August 17, 2021. Meanwhile, according to data collected by Net Applications, IE clings to a 5.37% share of the overall browser market, compared to 7.48% for Edge, 7.60% for Firefox, and 69.19% for Chrome.