By Aziz A. Shariff
It’s curtains down for Internet Explorer, as Microsoft Corp is retiring it today (June 15).
With the demise, the company has put an end to a quarter-century-old app, triggering some panic among users in the business community and government agencies that built internal systems around the unpopular browser.
According to Bloomberg, the most affected county is Japan, as a survey in March found that 49% of companies in Asia still use the browser, for tasks such as in-house management, data exchange and accounting systems.
Despite Microsoft announcing the take down a year ago, most companies may have migrated to other software, but according to Nikkei quite a few have not done so.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, once the world’s dominant browser from the word go, which became the de-facto web standard, began to decline in popularity with the rollout of its IE6 version, which received lots of brickbats from users for its lethargic performance.
The Internet soon found better players coming into the browser market, the likes of the faster and better Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox taking over IE’s share of the global market, reports Statcounter.
But Microsoft later came up with its Chrome-based browser, Microsoft Edge, which is compatible with Chrome extensions and offers similar functionality.
Microsoft has integrated an IE mode inside Edge, which it will provide support for some time after today.
-BTS Media
