Fellow Web 2.0 browsers, today we have gathered here to say goodbye to a browser that was loved and hated to the same extent.
On Wednesday, June 15, 2022, Microsoft will formally withdraw Internet Explorer (pejorative: Internet Exploder) at the mature age of 27 years. He was preceded in death by MS Paint.
Presumably, the browser will be sent to a farm in the north of the state, where it can spend the rest of its days running security vulnerabilities and filtering all the memory it wants.
“If you’re a web developer working on a modern website or application, we know you’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post last spring announcing the change. “Internet Explorer has become increasingly difficult to support alongside modern browsers.”
The browser was born in 1995 and, to the great concern of rival Netscape Navigator, it soon became an integral part of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The package gave Microsoft a huge advantage as it sought to steal market share from its oldest and most established rival.
In 1997, with the browser war in full swing, Microsoft engineers celebrated the release of Internet Explorer 4.0 by placing a version of the program’s logo the size of a car, a giant “e”. on the front lawn of Netscape headquarters. Netscape retaliated by knocking down the structure and placing its pet, a six-foot dinosaur named Mozilla, on top of it.
A Netscape spokesman at the time told the San Francisco Chronicle that they were surprised that the world’s largest software company was resorting to “immature fraternity tactics.”
In 1999, thanks to its mandatory inclusion in Windows, Internet Explorer had 99% of the market and the attention of antitrust regulators around the world. A European commission ordered Microsoft to offer other web browser options, and then fined the company 561 million euros for non-compliance.
The Internet has changed dramatically in recent years; Undoubtedly, much of this innovation comes from antitrust action that prevented Microsoft from fully controlling its development.
Netscape lives in a reincarnated form through Mozilla Firefox, an open source nonprofit project that released its 100th release in May.
Internet Explorer is survived by Microsoft Edge, a younger brother born in 2015.