If you are not in the Internet world you may not know, but Microsoft has finally killed Internet Explorer. Yes, it took 27 years for it to happen, but it is finally done.
At the beginning, I think we all were so new to the Internet that we thought that IE was an improvement over the then dominant browser: Netscape.
Over time however, at least for us website designers, IE became synonymous with problems. For a good 15 years, you had to design your websites and then create workarounds so that IE would work properly with them. Yeah, it was a lot of work: especially the infamous IE6.
I remember thinking at one point: I honestly won’t check the websites anymore in ie6. Anybody using ie6 should be the one doing the heavy lifting of downloading another free browser.
And I wasn’t the only one that thought that way. The Internet as a whole was against ie6. So much so, that even Microsoft ended up creating a completely new browser: Edge.
Today, Microsoft has finally said, enough is enough. We have put people through enough and the Internet is a new place. A new place with mobile browsers, 4k TVs that browse the Internet and VR headsets that, well, maybe the Metaverse will become something someday…
Check out this interview about the end of Internet Explorer.
What Browser to use now?
I would like to end this post with a suggestion for what browser to use. If you like Google and Google products, I suggest you use Chrome and Firefox – yes both.
If you are a designer, I suggest you download pretty much all of them – you are going to need them.
If you don’t use the Internet except for the occasional article reading or search, I recommend you stick with Safari on your phone.
Finally, if you are a business owner, who wants to use the Internet as a channel to grow your business, what I recommend is for you to not worry about your browser, pick any of the contemporary browsers. Merkados develops websites that are standard compliant and work well with all major releases of all browsers, even those on a mobile device. For more information, contact Merkados today.
