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Is Internet Explorer (IE) a browser? According to Microsoft, no. Today, it's a 'compatibility solution' for enterprise customers to deal with legacy sites that should be updated for modern browsers.

Chris Jackson, Microsoft's worldwide lead for cybersecurity, really doesn't want enterprise customers to use IE for all web traffic, even though for some organizations that would be the easiest option.

Companies in that situation are willing to take on 'technical debt', such as paying for extended support for a legacy software, but that habit needs to stop in the case of IE, argues Jackson in a new blog post, 'The perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser'.

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The main gist of Jackson's argument is you should only use IE selectively for internal sites that need it, pointing to tools like Enterprise Mode Site List in IE 11 that help customers make the transition and limit IE use to where it's needed.

Jackson doesn't mention anywhere that customers should use Edge, the soon-to-be Chromium-based browser. Nor does he suggest using Chrome or Firefox, only that most developers aren't testing sites for IE.

"I'm not here to enforce any browser on anyone. Windows gives you a choice in your browser, and you should choose the one that best meets your needs," he replied to one commenter.

Jackson doesn't even consider IE to be a browser, at least in the modern, standards-based sense.

"You see, Internet Explorer is a compatibility solution," wrote Jackson in the blog. "We're not supporting new web standards for it and, while many sites work fine, developers by and large just aren't testing for Internet Explorer these days. They're testing on modern browsers.

"So, if we continued our previous approach, you would end up in a scenario where, by optimizing for the things you have, you end up not being able to use new apps as they come out. As new apps are coming out with greater frequency, what we want to help you do is avoid having to miss out on a progressively larger portion of the web."

Jackson admits that Microsoft is partly to blame for customers' willingness to take on technical debt. In particular, he singles out Internet Explorer 6, released in 2001, the year of Microsoft's IE-Windows antitrust settlement in the US.

In a section called 'Creating technical debt by default', Jackson notes: "In the past, Internet Explorer was optimized for simplicity at the expense of technical debt. Looking all the way back to Internet Explorer 6, the very concept of 'standards mode' vs 'quirks mode' comes from this 'easy button' approach."

More effort on the part of IT teams was required to get to standards mode, which made "getting modern" an opt-in choice.

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Jackson explains that as IE began to support more standards, Microsoft also realized it risked breaking applications written for an older interpretation of the standards.

"So, with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), we added IE8 standards, but also kept Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) standards. That meant, for sites in the internet zone, it would default to IE8 standards, but, for sites in the local intranet zone, it would default to IE7 standards," explains Jackson, noting this was also an 'easy button' solution.

"As you can see, by going with the 'technical debt by default' approach, we ended up in a scenario whereby if you create a brand-new webpage today, run it in the local intranet zone, and don't add any additional markup, you will end up using a 1999 implementation of web standards by default. Yikes."

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