In the coming year, Microsoft will gradually discontinue Internet Explorer 11. The browser will remain, but the light will gradually dim.
On August 17, 2021, IE11 will no longer be supported by Microsoft 365 apps. This includes Outlook, OneDrive, Word or Excel. Support in Teams will end on November 30 of this year.
The company does point to the existence of an IE11 compatibility mode in Edge, and old, often very explicitly developed, applications for companies will still continue to work in Internet Explorer 11.
Microsoft does not explicitly say whether the browser will receive additional security updates within a year or not.
But presumably, that will still be the case. However, the signal is that Internet Explorer is a lot less useful in combination with other Microsoft applications.
At the same time, the company also proclaimed that the older version of Edge, specifically the version that does not run on Chromium, will be discontinued on March 9, 2021. It will not receive any security updates afterwards and is therefore unsafe to use in the long term.
In principle, the latter makes little difference to most users. Unless you’ve been delaying updates for a long time, users now have a newer version of Edge, with Chromium, which will be supported for a long time to come.