Internet Explorer RIP

On the 15th June 2022, Microsoft finally announced the end of life for Internet explorer 11. The last version of internet explorer.

Microsoft will now redirect all uses of internet explorer to its newer Edge browser. Edge is a chromium based browser, based on the same engine as Google’s Chrome browser.

Does this matter?

Since internet explorer 11 was released in 2013, the web has evolved heavily. There are so many features it doesn’t support that it created a great deal of extra work for web developers to use adapters, polyfills and work arounds to carry on supporting its archaic engine. This means over the last 9 or so years many of our websites ship code that they no longer need. Websites get bloated for all kinds of reasons, but backward compatibility with internet explorer now need not be one of them.

A Leaner Future

In addition to removing the code needed for compatibility with internet explorer, newer evergreen browsers engines (those like chrome which auto update every month), offer a range of newer technologies which allow us to remove libraries to make code lighter. We can also now split code into multiple smaller chunks, so we only load the code you need for the page you’re loading. I have already updated this site to use code splitting, only last week blog pages downloaded over 500kb of Javascript when first viewed, today this page only uses 12kb of our code.

We’re also in the process of updating the build tools of Duocms8 to get these improvements onto our latest generation of sites. Removing the extra bloat should hopefully make a big difference especially to mobile users when connections can get very slow.

There are a number of other technologies we’ve been working with for a while now that should now have less friction on live sites due to the end of Internet explorer. As someone who has worked in the web industry for over 20 years, I am very pleased to see the dawn of simpler, more unified web.

More information from microsoft here