It’s (Officially) Time to Kiss Microsoft Internet Explorer Goodbye. Hooray!

Internet Explorer is not quite dead... yet.

But if you're a member of IE's rapidly shrinking user base, you have just a few days to upgrade to version 11, lest you risk being vulnerable to malware and security issues. 

Microsoft has been dropping hints for years that it intends to do away with IE altogether, and has announced that on January 12, 2016 it will end support for all but the current version of its once dominant web browser, now reduced to a minor player and the butt of endless jokes. 

Web designers and developers are rejoicing at the long-awaited announcement, because making modern websites work properly with those outdated browsers adds hours and hours to our testing and QA processes. So many new features and functions (things as simple and commonplace as rounded corners and transparent graphics) can’t be parsed by older versions of IE. 

It's not just backwards compatability that developers strongly dislike about IE.

Back in 2001, when Internet Explorer had a 95% market share because it was the default browser on all PCs, Microsoft made it hard to install any other browser and refused to follow web standards. For half a decade, the browser remained virtually unchanged. Other browsers continued to innovate, and as of this December IE only has 15% of the global market share. Well over half of today's web page views happen through Google Chrome.

Because IE long refused to follow web standards, developers were forced to build and debug once for all other browsers (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera), and a second time for the Microsoft ones. After getting everything to look great an work perfectly in the others, it would often take twice as long to resolve our code for various iterations of Internet Explorer. 

So now, you officially have a great reason to upgrade to an alternate browser. You could go with IE 11 (which is mostly standards-compliant), or be even more proactive and move to Firefox or Chrome!