Imlisanen Jamir
The Internet's favorite browser patsy, Internet Explorer, or more creatively, "Internet Exploder," has finally received its death blow. After 27 years of service, Microsoft on June 15 finally sent the often slow but always meme-able Internet Explorer to the grave. A year ago, the company announced its intention to retire the application, and starting June 15, it has stopped supporting the nearly three decade old era-defining browser.
Not many are bound to mourn the browser’s demise. It was the unwanted U2 album of its era, stuffed into every Windows computer sold in the early aughts, whether you wanted it or not. Internet Explorer was a gold mine for hackers, fraught with countless security flaws. It didn’t help that Microsoft was slow to update the browser to address such threats.
Internet Explorer has long been the butt of jokes in the technology community, ridiculed for its speed issues and clunky user interface. The move to retire the browser, which first hit the scene in 1995, can be seen as an admission of its irrelevance to modern users.
Internet Explorer deserved the reputation it earned for security vulnerabilities. You could click on a URL in a Something Awful forum in the early 2000s and have your computer completely bricked, or worse, by someone who just delighted in watching the world's computers burn.
Next to Adobe Flash, there is nothing on your computer that you should avoid more than Internet Explorer. It was unnecessarily careless with security, something that internet security professionals were screaming.
Still, to give credit where credit is due — it walked with us through AIM chat sessions, MySpace, and LiveJournal, so we can’t discount it for good. Internet Explorer was where many of us first found out that we could find anything, and I do mean anything, on the internet. From obscure music albums and movies to CD-Key cracking sites to the entire wide world of emulators. Are game emulators illegal? We sure as hell didn't care. The entirety of the Internet was open to us in all its full-but-often-disgusting glory.
There are things we did with Internet Explorer that we would blanche at if we saw someone doing it today with even a secure browser like Edge, Chrome or Safari. We were all innocents abroad on the internet back then and Internet Explorer was built for a time when the internet was truly a frontier.
That time has passed, and so too must Internet Explorer.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
