Internet Explorer, the preloaded Web browser that for a generation was the bridge between AOL pages and the Internet we know today, was pronounced dead this week at the age of 20. While several factors contributed to its demise, sources say it was last seen starving to death while waiting 45 minutes to get a single menu page on Seamless to load.
Internet Explorer has been in poor health lately, lying in a hospital bed in the Seattle mountains for years. It sat in isolation as the very people who once made it so popular fled to other, flashier (a k a “functional”) browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Its few friends witnessed its deterioration in many ways: its late adoption of tabs, its attempts to force you to use something called “Bing” (a Google search reveals Bing is a kind of Google) and its creaky load time. For some discerning Internet users, it was considered the Internet version of carrying a Wal-Mart tote bag into your local farmers’ market.
The death was mourned by your grandparents, who affectionately referred to the program as “the Internet,” and your high school’s public computers, which were last seen at the hospital visiting Word Perfect.
The actual cause of death, as Microsoft revealed this week, was a fatal disease known as “rebranding.” Some versions of Windows will continue to carry Internet Explorer as sort of a permanent “throwback Thursday,” but the company is unveiling a new browser, currently codenamed Project Spartan, a name that will probably elicit no ridicule on its own.
“Microsoft has tried, unsuccessfully, to shake off the negative image of Internet Explorer over the past several years with a series of amusing campaigns mocking Internet Explorer 6,” the Verge wrote yesterday. “The ads didn’t improve the situation, and Microsoft’s former Internet Explorer chief left the company in December, signaling a new era for the browser.”
But the cries of pain loomed large even before the announcement this week: The Daily Dot last week dubbed IE the source of the “saddest corporate Twitter account,” full of desperate cries for attention, moping and compliment grubbing.
Internet Explorer reminded Internet users of a simpler time, when computer programs were named for the literal things they did before they got trendy monikers like “Chrome” or “Skype”: exploring the Internet, sweeping for mines, media playing, paint.
It was preceded in death by AOL Keywords, Prodigy, Netscape Navigator and just-typing-commands-into-ms-dos. It is survived by Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and lots of millennials who’ve never owned a computer bigger than their pocket.
Explorer, seen here with its last known user.Clay McLachlan/ReutersIt is also somehow survived by Microsoft Word — the lumbering, maladroit typing program on which an original draft of this obituary was written before the program froze up and failed to auto-save.
Mostly, Internet Explorer will be most remembered for being the best browser to download other browsers with.
