Internet Explorer has been retired

Today, after 27 years of service, Microsoft has finally retired Internet Explorer. Somewhere, a web developer is opening a bottle of champagne.

Internet Explorer is the ancient, unloved beast that somehow survived several geological eras of the web. When I stopped using it in 2003, Internet Explorer was sitting comfortably on roughly 95 percent of the browser market. It had won. Completely. And, as so often happens when something achieves absolute power, it promptly stopped giving a damn.

Twenty-seven years is an absurdly long lifespan in software. Entire technologies have been born, declared revolutionary, acquired for obscene amounts of money, quietly abandoned and forgotten in less time. Internet Explorer is older than some of my colleagues. Possibly wiser, although the evidence is inconclusive.

For millions of people, Internet Explorer simply was the internet. The naming department at Microsoft deserves some credit here. You clicked the little blue e when you wanted to “go on the internet”. Since it came bundled with Windows, many users had no idea alternatives even existed. Why would they? It was right there, staring at you from the desktop. This was also an innocent age when nobody seriously considered using a telephone to browse the web.

Another extinct thing I found at American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Then came Internet Explorer 6. For web developers, IE6 occupies a special circle of hell. Its casual disregard for web standards meant that perfectly reasonable websites often required an assortment of hacks, workarounds and whispered incantations just to behave properly. You wrote clean HTML and CSS, tested it in other browsers, admired your work, and then opened IE6. And everything was on fire.

Security became an even bigger problem. Internet Explorer had become the browser equivalent of an aging nightclub with a broken lock on the back door and absolutely no interest in checking who wandered inside.

An early incarnation of Firefox appeared about twenty years ago, showing that browsers could actually be fast, secure and pleasant to use. Then came Firebug, which was revolutionary for web development. Suddenly you could inspect and debug a page directly in the browser instead of staring at your CSS wondering which minor transgression had offended the gods.

Google Chrome followed, bringing its own developer tools and eventually taking over the world. By June 2022, Chrome controls roughly 64 percent of the browser market, followed by Safari at around 19 percent (sigh) while Firefox and Microsoft Edge fight over considerably smaller pieces of the carcass.

Time to close the shop.

And now Internet Explorer is gone. Not “gone” in the sense that nobody will ever encounter it again, of course. Somewhere there will always be an ancient corporate application running on a forgotten Windows machine in the basement of an insurance company, dependent on IE and maintained by a single nervous consultant named Steve.

But officially, the shop is closed. Which raises the more interesting question: where will we be another 27 years from now? Will browsers still exist as recognizable applications? Will Chrome become the next Internet Explorer, the victorious empire that grew old and complacent? Will we browse the web through glasses, implants or whatever operating system happens to be installed in our autonomous cars?

Twenty-seven years is a very long time in technology. Long enough, apparently, for even Internet Explorer to finally finish loading.