The End of Internet Explorer

Today, Microsoft made good on a promise they made in 2021; that they would be "sunsetting" their Internet Explorer browser after almost 30 years of operation. Depending on how much time you've spent in recent (or less recent) years developing for the browser that's been dragging years behind every other option on the market, you may be putting air quotes around "operation".

Sadly, Internet Explorer never managed to shake its IE6 legacy and has often been the subject of ridicule amongst developers over the years; often borne out of frustration from trying to work with it. It isn't just that it frustrated developers and designers by never quite keeping up with the latest CSS capabilities (at times, working with it felt more akin to developing an HTML email template than integrating specific browser compatibility), but it was also notoriously slow and insecure.

This was exemplified when, in early 2019, Microsoft's own Security Chief Chris Jackson called it a "compatibility solution" in a blog post that cautions against using it as a default browser and creating more technical debt for yourself.

A lot of agencies and SAAS products stopped supporting IE years ago, but for the unlucky few (particularly developers working on projects for big corporations) this day has been a long time coming. There were, as you might expect, celebrations around the internet from weathered veterans who have spent far too long debugging and retrofitting projects to work with Internet Explorer, and more than a few people feeling a little nostalgic for the browser.

I would count myself somewhere closer to the latter than the former; my career started when Netscape Navigator was still king. At the time of Internet Explorer 6's release, with its support for non‑standard filter options (something which many other browsers took years to catch up on with the introduction of CSS3), looked like a dream to work with. It's not necessarily hard to see why people who worked in the earlier tumultuous days of browser compatibility might feel nostalgic.

Internet Explorer absolutely dominated the market for well over a decade from around 1998, two years after its launch ‑ and while it was still battling Netscape Navigator ‑ up until 2012 (according to Wikimedia's analytics, W3Counter, and Statcounter) when Chrome came out and gradually swallowed the entire market.

That is an incredibly long run, and while the latter years were certainly painful from a development standpoint, IE having been such a large part of every web developer's career has definitely embedded it as a bit of a cultural touchstone online.

It's not just developers that it's caused headaches for, either. Microsoft had to deal with a court case on behalf of Internet Explorer back in the late 90s, as the browser wars between Netscape Navigator and IE raged on.

Microsoft, in their very own version of when U2 installed their new album on everybody's iPhones, had begun to pre‑install IE onto their Windows Operating System and were accused of making it difficult to uninstall, bumping up the users of their browser whilst choking Netscape Navigator out of the market. This raised more than a few eyebrows at the FTC, which launched an investigation, which was eventually picked up by the Department of Justice. In mid‑1998, they filed antitrust charges against Microsoft. Microsoft actually ended up losing that case but worked it out with the DoJ and the decision was overturned.

So! Farewell, Internet Explorer, the "Top Browser for Installing Other Browsers". Thank you, but also good riddance.

All of this said, it should be noted that Microsoft will support a "legacy" mode in Edge until around 2029 ‑ so the ghost of browsers past will likely still come back to haunt us all for a little while yet!