Raise a glass, kiss your wife, hug your children. It’s finally gone.
It’s dead.
Internet Explorer has been dying for an age. 15 years ago IE6 finally bit it, 8 years ago I was calling for webdevs to hasten the death of IE8 and today is the day that Microsoft has finally pulled regular support for “retired” Internet Explorer 11, last of its name.
Its successor, Edge, uses Chrome’s renderer. While I’m sure we’ll have a long chat about the problems of monocultures one day, this means —for now— we can really focus on modern standards without having to worry about what this 9 year old renderer thinks. And I mean that at a commercial, enterprise level. Use display: grid without fallback code. Use ES6 features without Babel transpiling everything. Go, create something and expect it to just work.
Here’s to never having to download the multi-gigabyte, 90 day Internet Explorer test machine images. Here’s to kicking out swathes of compat code. Here’s to being able to [fairly] rigourously test a website locally without a third party running a dozen versions of Windows.
The web is more free for this. Rejoice! while it lasts.