Here's why WordPress could soon stop working on this outdated browser

The company has hinted that it might soon drop support for Internet Explorer 11, which was first released nearly a decade ago in October 2013.

WordPress could drop support for Internet Explorer 11 (Stephen Phillips/Hostreviews)

WordPress has become one of the most widely used platforms for blogging or hosting small websites thanks to its generous free plan. The platform is accessible across a wide range of browsers, but the company is reportedly looking to drop support the very outdated Internet Explorer 11 browser in the future.

In a recent blog post, WordPress stated that it was planning on removing support for Microsoft's older browser, as its market share had dropped to a very low number. The company said it was relying on statistics from multiple websites that track users browsers, said Bleeping Computer, which first spotted the announcement.

The company said that according to StatCounter's GlobalStats, the market share of Internet Explorer 11 was 0.71 percent of the global web browsers, while W3 Counter put the figure at 1.2 percent. Meanwhile, WordPress said that it's own statistics showed that only 0.46 percent of users were on the now outdated browser.

If the company goes ahead with the decision to drop support for Internet Explorer 11, users on that browser will now be able to access any WordPress site and will simply be shown an error page asking them to switch to a more modern browser. The company says the usage numbers for the browser “are very close to the data used to make a decision in 2017 to drop support for IE versions 8, 9, and 10.”

WordPress wouldn't be the first company to drop support for the old browser, as the company notes even Microsoft made it obsolete for its Teams app and Microsoft 365 services. While it will still receive security updates, those services will require a modern browser like Microsoft's new Edge browser or Google Chrome, which are both based on the open-source Chromium browser engine.

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“Most” users will already be aware, the company stated in the blog post, as it had added a flag to “not recommend” Internet Explorer just over a year ago. It also said that “the experience overall is not optimal in IE11” and that it came at the expense of a high cost of maintenance for developers, which is why support would be dropped.