Adieu Internet Explorer! Drupal Will Not Miss You

Sebin A Jacob

Editor-in-Chief, TDT

The ubiquitous crappy browser Internet Explorer will meet the dust starting today. A year ago, Microsoft announced that they would put IE to rest on June 15, 2022, and that day has come.

Internet Explorer debuted on Windows desktop computers in 1995 and, by 2004, had cornered 95% of the market. It was the default browser in Windows 95, 98 and XP. It was also Microsoft’s choice in Windows ME, 7 and 8 and they pushed it even in some versions of Windows 10.

By the sheer force of vendor partiality, the Internet Explorer dethroned Netscape Navigator while the Internet was transferring to Web 2.0. Though the legal tangle at last held neutrality atop, Navigator had breathed its last by the time the judgement came.

Then from its ashes came Mozilla Firefox, supported heavily in cash by Google and other players. Constant freezing of IE and the infamous blue screen of death that accompanied IE freezes in Windows assured that people went straight to download Firefox if at all they knew a little bit of technology. Still, IE loomed amongst the technologically challenged.

Later, Google released the Chrome browser and open-sourced its core as Chromium. With sandboxing abilities in each tab, this new browser experience was par excellence. So Chromium became the new base on which many modern browsers evolved, including Amazon’s fireTV browser and the modern Edge Browser, which succeeds IE in the Microsoft Windows landscape.

With the advent of smartphones, Microsoft lost the browser game as Safari in iOs and Chrome in Android started to rule the roost. It was said that Internet Explorer turned out to be the most used browser to download other browsers! Once you download and set up Firefox or Chrome, IE would sit idle as a remnant of the past for the rest of that PC’s life.

Arguably, the most used feature in websites while IE was the de-facto king was the marquee tool in HTML where a text would scroll in a loop through your website as a ticker. It would only work in IE.

Mobile and tablet internet usage overtook desktops worldwide for the first time in October 2016, according to independent web analytics company StatCounter. Earlier that year, StatCounter saw Google Chrome account for more than 60% of desktop internet usage worldwide, with Internet Explorer and Edge’s combined share of the desktop market narrowly falling behind that of Firefox for the first time. - BBC | Microsoft retires Internet Explorer after 27 years

Until Drupal 9.x, the Drupal community maintained support for the legacy browser, which was getting harder by the day. Starting from Drupal 10, scheduled to be released on December 15, 2022, Drupal websites would no longer support Internet Explorer.

So this is a goodbye note from an IE hater. Adieu IE. Let us meet in technology heaven (or hell)!

Drupal will not miss you.

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