Internet Explorer

~ the rise ~

Internet Explorer 1.0 shipped on August 16, 1995 as part of the Windows 95 Plus! pack. It changed through eleven major versions over twenty-seven years. On June 15, 2022, Microsoft officially retired Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 and most other consumer platforms, while the browser stayed alive on a few enterprise compatibility configurations and Windows Server but the consumer death was complete.

For roughly the period 2003 to 2009, Internet Explorer 6 had over 80% of the global browser market. There has been no comparable monoculture before or since. The web at the time was, in major ways, designed around IE6's bugs and idiosyncrasies. Whole generations of front-end developer pain are catalogued in those years.

~ the war it won ~

IE won the first browser war by being free, bundled with the OS, and engineered to integrate with Windows. The 1998 antitrust case against Microsoft (United States v. Microsoft) was largely about this strategy. Microsoft was found to have abused its OS monopoly to crush Netscape, though the remedy fell short of breaking up the company, and IE continued to ship by default on every Windows machine for another decade.

By 2003 Internet Explorer 6 was the de facto standard. Most websites were built and tested for it. Many websites only worked in IE. A widespread industry assumption was that IE would simply be the web forever. The team at Microsoft, victorious, more or less stopped developing the browser between IE6 (2001) and IE7 (2006).

~ the war it lost ~

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 launched November 9, 2004. It was faster, more standards-compliant, less crash-prone, and had tabbed browsing. A feature IE6 lacked. Within two years Firefox had 15% market share. By 2008 it had over 25%. The web development community had largely moved over for development purposes by then; IE compatibility became a chore, not a default.

Google Chrome arrived in September 2008 and accelerated the decline. Chrome was faster than Firefox, had a better JavaScript engine, and was backed by the search company everyone visited daily. By 2012 Chrome had passed IE in usage. Microsoft's responses (IE 8, 9, 10, 11) were technically reasonable but the brand was poisoned. The web development community's hatred of IE6 had become institutional. Even when IE got better, developers continued to treat the brand as a punchline.

In 2015 Microsoft tried to start over with the Edge brand, shipping it alongside IE in Windows 10. The original Edge (using Microsoft's EdgeHTML rendering engine) had decent reception but small market share, and in 2020, Microsoft replaced their own engine with Chromium and shipped a new Chrome-based Edge. The transition was an admission of defeat. The browser war that started with IE versus Netscape ended with Edge being a wrapper around Google's engine.

~ what ie was actually good at ~

IE shipped several real innovations:

• XMLHttpRequest. Microsoft invented the API that became AJAX in IE5 (1999). The whole modern web (Gmail, Google Maps, every dynamic web app) descends from this Microsoft contribution. Fact unappreciated by the developer community that mocked IE.
• iframe. Microsoft introduced iframes in IE3 (1996). Every embeddable widget on the modern web uses them.
• contenteditable. The attribute that makes any HTML element editable. Microsoft invented it in IE5.5. Every rich text editor in every browser uses it.
• The DOM. Microsoft's "DHTML" model in IE4 was a major influence on what eventually became the W3C DOM standard.

A surprising amount of what we now think of as "web standards" originated as IE-specific extensions. The history has been forgotten because the Microsoft brand was so culturally damaged by 2010 that giving them credit felt wrong.

~ the cultural artefacts ~

Internet Explorer accumulated cultural artefacts the way old buildings accumulate paint:

The Blue E: The blue lowercase "e" with the gold ring was, for a generation, the iconic symbol of "the internet." Many older relatives, well into the 2010s, would say "click on the internet" and point to the IE icon on their desktop. The metaphor had completely subsumed the thing. "Internet Explorer is downloading Chrome.": The single most-shared joke about software in computing history. People used IE for one thing only by 2010: to download a real browser. The joke was true and remained true for years.

The web developer's hate: An entire creative industry openly resented IE6 from about 2007 to 2016. There were t-shirts. There were funeral parodies. There was a 2010 "IE6 Funeral" event in Denver, Colorado that was widely reported in tech press. Microsoft's PR department actually sent a wreath. It was a mature company response to its own cultural moment of failure.

~ what's gone ~

The deep OS-browser integration. IE was, perhaps too much, a Windows feature. You could browse a folder of files in the same window as a webpage. The integration was creepy, security-fragile, and buggy - but it was also a vision of computing that has not really returned. Modern browsers are isolated apps. IE was an OS extension.

The browser monoculture as a target for innovation. When 96% of users used the same browser, you could safely build features that only worked there. Microsoft did this to a fault. But the modern web's compatibility hell. "tested in Chrome, broken in Safari, fails on Firefox", is the inverse problem. Neither extreme has been ideal.

~ from the comments below ~

"my grandmother thought 'internet explorer' was the name of the internet itself. when microsoft retired it she asked if the internet was being shut down. i had to spend forty minutes explaining what a browser was. she still doesn't quite trust google chrome."; o.ö. 38

"i was an enterprise web developer in 2008. our company's intranet only worked in ie6. it took eleven years and three CIO turnovers to migrate. by the time we did, ie6 was a meme and ie itself was nearly retired.", m.k. 51

"the moment i realised the browser war was over was when i opened ie 11 on a colleague's machine in 2015 and the toolbar said 'internet explorer is downloading chrome.' the joke was no longer a joke.". a.t. 44