Crazy Browser

» see crazybrowser.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Internet Explorer 6 was on every machine I touched between 2002 and 2005, at home on the TTNet line and on the row of identical boxes in the internet cafes. It had no tabs. If that bothered you, the fix was to download a shell: a small free program that used the copy of Internet Explorer already sitting on your disk and put a better window around it. Crazy Browser was one of maybe five of those in circulation. I could not tell you which of them ended up on my own machine, because they behaved closely enough that the choice usually came down to which download mirror was not timing out.

The first release is dated 15 January 2002 on the site's own What's New page, followed by 1.01 twelve days later and 1.05 in April. Version 2.0 arrived on 21 June 2005, and the 3.0 line crawled through two betas in early 2006 and two release candidates in 2008 and 2009 before shipping properly in February 2010. Version 3.10, on 20 September 2011, was the last thing the project ever published.

It was written in Delphi against the Borland VCL, it was free, and nobody's name appears anywhere on the site. Downloads listed the publisher as CrazyBrowser.com and left it there. That was not unusual for the shell category, where the software was small enough that one person could maintain it in evenings and had no reason to want the attention.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a shell actually bought you ~

Tabs are the headline, but the feature list underneath was longer and stranger than people remember. Crazy Browser had Groups, which opened an entire named set of sites into tabs with one click, and it had mouse gestures with a documentation page full of little animated GIFs showing you which direction to drag. It handled multiple monitors, it showed load status per tab, and it had a plug-in system that would run a COM object or a plain script.

The ad and pop-up blocking mattered more than any of that in 2002. Pop-ups were an actual epidemic on the Turkish web of the period, particularly on the download and lyrics sites everyone was using, and a browser that silently ate them was worth the eight-hundred-kilobyte download on its own.

~ the shelf ~

Crazy Browser sat on a crowded shelf. NetCaptor had been doing the same trick since 1998, MyIE2 became Maxthon, Avant Browser came out of the same impulse, and there were half a dozen more with worse names. All of them were competing on window management, because none of them could compete on rendering. The engine belonged to Microsoft and was pre-installed on every Windows machine in a way you could not remove.

That was a fine business right up to the moment Microsoft shipped tabs itself. Internet Explorer 7 came out in October 2006 with tabs and a pop-up blocker built in, and the reason to install a shell dropped by most of its value overnight. Firefox had already normalized the idea for anyone willing to leave the Microsoft engine entirely. Crazy Browser kept releasing for another five years after that, but the whole 3.0 line took four years to get from its first beta in January 2006 to a final build in February 2010.

~ the last build and the long quiet ~

After 20 September 2011 the site simply stopped changing. The Internet Archive holds the same homepage byte-for-byte from October 2011 through 27 January 2016, which is more than four years of a page nobody edited. The download links still worked. The What's New page still ended at 3.10.

The next capture, on 6 June 2017, is the Apache2 Ubuntu default page. By April 2019 it was an nginx welcome screen, by that October the server was refusing connections, and from 2021 the domain has answered with a few hundred bytes of nothing. Today crazybrowser.com returns a page that says "Domain not configured." The software outlived its own reason to exist by a decade and then the hosting bill outlived the software by five years.

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