The passing of Internet Explorer (1995-2022)

Requiescat in pace.

RIP Internet Explorer, fallen in battle on Wednesday at 26 years of age. The last version of Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer 11, will no longer be supported or see any security updates, and will be gradually uninstalled from Windows 10 PCs via a Windows Update. To ease the transition, Microsoft says that users who open Internet Explorer in the coming months will be redirected to Microsoft Edge and will have the option of importing all their bookmarks and saved passwords. For those who absolutely must have IE for compatibility reasons, for very old enterprise web apps for example, Edge’s IE mode, which uses IE11’s old Trident rendering engine, will be supported until "at least 2029," according to Microsoft.

IE’s domination is but a distant memory. The software lost the early 2010s’ browser wars to Google Chrome, which now rules the world. Read Ars Technica’s article, linked below, that tells of the browser’s story, from its 1995 beginnings as a fork of Mosaic, one of the first graphical browsers and developed by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), to its fall, beset on one side by Apple/Webkit/Safari and on the other by Google/Chromium/Chrome. IE leaves more than sweet memories in its wake. Its storied past bears the marks of countless incompatibilities with web standards, which made it the enemy of many web developers and integrators. Chromium is now ubiquitous, but for how long? IE’s saga teaches us that all hegemonies eventually collapse.

⇨ Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham, “Internet Explorer was once synonymous with the Internet, but today it’s gone for good.”

2022-06-15