Microsoft officially retired Internet Explorer 11 today, June 15, 2022. After nearly 27 years, support ends across most versions of Windows 10. No more security patches, no more updates. IE keeps running for now, but it stops being maintained.
I have complicated feelings about this. IE was the first browser I ever used. It was the first thing that made the web feel real to me, a window that actually opened somewhere. That counts for something, even if the later years were not kind to it.
The arc is pretty well understood at this point. IE shipped in 1995 as part of Windows 95, grew into a near-monopoly in the early 2000s, and then slowly collapsed under the weight of its own inertia as Firefox and then Chrome took everything it had. The problem was not just that competitors were faster. IE had accumulated so many proprietary extensions and so much divergence from emerging standards that the web started building around it rather than for it, and then eventually stopped caring about it at all. By the time Microsoft tried to fix things, the trust was gone.
Microsoft moved away from the IE brand with the release of Windows 10 in 2015, shipping Edge as the default. IE 11 continued to exist alongside it for enterprise compatibility reasons.
The honest version of IE’s legacy is that it built the early web and then became the thing everyone had to work around. Web developers who were writing CSS in the mid-2000s have a particular kind of relationship with IE6 that does not need to be explained to anyone who lived through it. Conditional comments, vendor prefixes, box model bugs: a whole vocabulary of workarounds that existed only to make things work in one specific browser. That browser was IE.
Still. It was first. For a lot of people who grew up on Windows, it was the only browser they knew for years. That is not nothing. The browser that opened the internet for an entire generation of users deserves at least a moment of acknowledgment before it gets redirected to Edge.
#is Internet Explorer ever truly dead? #twitter @tomwarren_
Goodbye, Internet Explorer. The web you helped build outgrew you. That was always how this was supposed to go.