Microsoft has already called time on the once-popular internet browser Internet Explorer. Come June 15, 2022, and Internet Explorer will be removed from all versions of Windows 10. In fact, it was a surprise that Microsoft was still shipping Explorer in some form or the other.

Google has gone one step further than Microsoft and has announced that it is pulling the plug on Internet Explorer. According to a report by 9to5 Google:

“Google has confirmed that Internet Explorer 11 is no longer officially supported by the search engine.”

The official reason given is that Internet Explorer makes up only a very small percentage of searches worldwide. However, a Google software engineer took to Twitter and explained that it was actually ‘time’ to call it quits on Internet Explorer. The engineer tweeted:

“As a web developer this is one of the happiest announcements in a while: Google Search ended support for IE11 in its main product (you can still search but will get a fallback experience). I’m mostly posting this so you can send it to your boss. We did the Math. It is time.”

Internet Explorer 11 was released by Microsoft in 2013 along with Windows 8.1. It was ultimately the last version of the browser that Microsoft released as it was replaced by Microsoft Edge in 2015. Interestingly, Edge is built on Google’s Chromium engine. And Microsoft didn’t make Edge available to older versions of Windows. So the default browser on devices running Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 was Internet Explorer.

However, Internet Explorer has been on its last legs for a while now. Still, Internet Explorer had a 1% share in the desktop browser market in September 2021. This is perhaps down to the older devices still retaining Internet Explorer as their default browser. For those users, Google Search will not work or get a very scaled-down version, which won’t give them the best of Google.