Internet Explorer was Microsoft’s web browser, bundled with Windows for over two decades before Microsoft officially retired it in June 2022. It is the program many people simply called “the internet” in the early 2000s. Today it is gone, replaced by Microsoft Edge, and it receives no further updates.
Think of it like an old car that was once on every driveway but no longer passes inspection. It might still start, yet it lacks the safety features newer models have, and parts are no longer made. For years Internet Explorer was the headache of web development: it interpreted code differently from every other web browser, so teams burned hours on workarounds and extra browser compatibility testing just to make one program behave.
For new websites, that chapter is closed. Usage has fallen to a sliver, and modern browsers like Edge and Chrome all follow shared standards, so code written once tends to behave the same everywhere. The main place IE still lingers is inside some large organisations running old internal tools that were built specifically for it, often a banking or government system that nobody has dared rewrite. If you do have to support such a system, the usual route is a polyfill, a small piece of code that teaches an old browser a modern trick it never learned. But for a public-facing marketing site or webshop, supporting IE today means spending real money to please almost nobody, while slowing the experience for everyone else. The honest advice is to let it go.
At TopDevs we build for current browsers and skip the dead weight of Internet Explorer, unless a client has a legacy internal system that genuinely still depends on it.
