With the withdrawal of support by Microsoft, the final bell is tolling for Internet Explorer. Most of us have realised that Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) has not been the king pin in browsers for many years!

The speed of web site responsiveness in Chrome, Safari and Edge has long been better than we see in Internet Explorer. Even IE11 can’t keep up with the pace of browser advancements and Microsoft wants us all to use Edge instead.

Microsoft has made attempts to limit the technical debt accrued when using IE. However, the best way to ensure you're not falling behind is by switching to a modern browser. Especially as Microsoft killed support for IE 8, 9 and 10 in 2016.

Upgrading wide-scale user communities when there are still older technology end user apps that run in IE may be challenging, but it's safer, smarter and better long term to move end users to a modern browser and provide a better experience to the end users as well.

Microsoft senior cybersecurity architect Chris Jackson said in a blog post, continuing to use Internet Explorer, companies are racking up a ton of "technical debt."

Essentially, by continuing to use IE, additional costs are created down the line for organisations by selecting the most convenient solution now rather than the approach that is best for the long term. Jackson laid out a scenario in which a company, choosing the easiest possible route since Internet Explorer 6, goes to make a webpage today and ends up using a 1999 implementation of web standards by default.

Now, as we all know, the INPHASE Enterprise mode was created 3 years ago to enable INPHASE users to make use of the faster browser technologies as they had them available. But we have also however appreciated that for some of our large customers, there may be a significant portion of the estate where IE was the only browser option and so we continued to support it. We carried the workload of developing for both old and new browser technologies so that different customer approaches were supported.

As a customer focused supplier, we will still continue supporting IE for a further 12 months alongside our support for more modern browsers across all devices, to ensure that all of our users in any customer can continue to get the benefits of the INPHASE decision making platform without interruption.

The future is bright... but the IE light is growing ever dimmer.

Aden Maine

Head of Marketing

Aden has been at InPhase for 7 years. With a background in digital marketing and web design, it's Aden's job to keep the marketing team moving forward.