San Francisco Officials Urge Browser Upgrades

- Microsoft officially ended support for the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application on June 15, 2022, for most versions of Windows 10, transitioning users to Microsoft Edge which offers a legacy IE Mode supported through at least 2029. - As of early 2024, Internet Explorer's global desktop browser market share is negligible, while Chrome dominates with approximately 65%, followed by Safari and Edge, making dedicated support for IE an inefficient allocation of resources for public-facing digital platforms. - The city's move mirrors a broader trend in enterprise and public sector IT to shed technical debt from legacy systems; this is increasingly addressed using agentic AI architectures that act as an intelligent overlay, modernizing user-facing components without requiring a complete backend rewrite. - For complex government workflows, this modernization often involves multi-agent systems (MAS), where specialized AI agents collaborate to handle tasks like data validation, policy checks, and routing, using frameworks like LangChain's LangGraph or Microsoft's AutoGen to orchestrate the process. - This approach is parallel to trends in insurtech, where multi-agent systems are used to automate underwriting and claims processing; agents ingest unstructured data from broker emails, de-duplicate records in a CRM, check for missing information, and pass structured data to pricing and risk models. - Decommissioning legacy browser support is often a prerequisite for adopting an API-first architecture, which allows government entities to securely and efficiently share public data, a key goal of San Francisco's Department of Technology (DT) and its Digital Services team. - This type of platform lifecycle decision reflects the growing need for technical leadership in the public sector, where an understanding of the engineering costs of supporting outdated technology is crucial for preventing large-scale IT project failures. -