Internet Explorer Mobile

~ the goodbye ~

Pocket PCs were corporate issue. Across the whole 2003 to 2008 window in Turkey a smartphone meant a Nokia, and anybody carrying a Windows Mobile device was carrying it because a company had handed it over along with an Exchange account. I was not in that group. Internet Explorer Mobile is a browser I know the way you know something that was always on other people's phones.

It is far older than the phones. Pocket Internet Explorer shipped with Windows CE 1.0 in november 1996, on clamshell handhelds that ran off AA batteries. It shared a name with the desktop browser and almost nothing else, because the desktop engine could not fit. This one was written from scratch against whatever memory a 1996 palmtop had, which was measured in single digits of megabytes.

From there it moved forward one concession at a time, picking up cookies and SSL in version 1.1 and then frames and tables in september 1997. JScript arrived the following july. By Pocket PC 2002 it handled CSS and ActiveX and could also speak WAP, because in 2002 nobody knew yet which of the two mobile webs was going to turn out to be the real one.

The part I understand professionally is why it lasted so long after the phones were gone. A browser welded into an embedded operating system stops being an app and becomes a component with a support contract behind it, and the hardware it sits inside gets replaced on a fifteen year cycle rather than a two year one. That is the actual reason something released in the Windows CE era was still under support in 2023.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the reputation ~

For most of its life it was the thing people worked around. Windows Mobile 6.5 shipped Internet Explorer Mobile 6 in 2008 with the MSHTML engine and IE8's JavaScript underneath, plus Flash Lite 3.1 for good measure, and reviewers set it next to Opera Mobile and Opera Mini and found it slower at rendering the same pages. Owners who cared installed Opera on top of it. The Microsoft browser stayed where it was, because it could not be removed.

That reputation outlived the reason for it. Version 9 arrived with Windows Phone 7.5 in 2011, hardware accelerated, with the address bar moved down to the bottom of the screen a decade before Safari decided that was where a thumb lives. Version 10 shared its core with desktop Windows 8 in 2012, and version 11 on Windows Phone 8.1 did WebGL and lifted the tab limit off six. The engine was fine by then. Nobody was checking anymore.

~ the webkit problem ~

The strangest chapter came at the end and was not Microsoft's fault. By 2014 an enormous share of the mobile web had been written and tested against WebKit and nothing else. Sites read the user agent string, saw something that was not Safari and was not Android, and served either a desktop layout or a stripped-down 2005-era page to a phone that could have handled anything.

So with the Windows Phone 8.1 Update, Microsoft gave in. Internet Explorer Mobile began reporting itself in a way that made those sites hand over the WebKit path, and Microsoft implemented specific WebKit-prefixed behaviors so the pages it was now being served would actually work. A browser with a genuinely competent engine had to impersonate a different browser in order to be allowed to use its own.

~ where it actually died ~

Windows 10 Mobile replaced it with Edge in 2015, and that is the date most people would give if you asked. It is not the date. Internet Explorer Mobile kept shipping inside Windows Embedded Compact, the direct descendant of the same Windows CE it started on, in barcode scanners and point-of-sale terminals that nobody thinks of as having a browser at all.

Support for Windows Embedded Compact 2013 ended on 10 october 2023, and support for Internet Explorer Mobile ended with it, on every Microsoft operating system, everywhere. Version 11 was the last, released 15 july 2014. It outlived the phone line it is remembered for by eight years, in warehouses, on devices whose owners never once loaded a web page on purpose.

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