back to article How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

Internet Explorer breathed its last for many users this week, and netizens have observed its passing in their own special way. One joker chose to celebrate the passing of the former web bigwig with a tombstone where one could go and pay homage to the malign influence exerted by the browser. Someone built a real tombstone of …

  1. ShadowSystems

    It's not dead.

    It's just pining for the fjords. Ignore the nails in it's tiny little feet keeping it firmly atop the perch. He claims he's not dead, feels perfectly fine, & wants to go for walkies. I think I heard the thump of a heavy blunt object against a skull...

    1. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      Re: It's not dead.

      Definitely not dead where I work, because for reasons I've never been able to extract, we need Chrome, IE and edge to be able to use all of our corporate intranet. Many pages only work properly in one of those browsers and bizarrely only one of them can download files from links. And I thought web browsing was meant to be standardised?

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: It's not dead.

        "And I thought web browsing was meant to be standardised?"

        It is ... as long as you're not trying to adhere to a proprietary version of that standard.

        The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. —Andrew S. Tanenbaum

      2. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: It's not dead.

        Web browsing is. Downloading files isn't. You should use FTP for that.

        -A.

        1. Allan George Dyer
          Joke

          Re: It's not dead.

          I think you forgot this icon...

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: It's not dead.

          Thought that was Gopher's job?

        3. bombastic bob Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: It's not dead.

          At least I.E. *supported* FTP. "Modern" browsers, not so much (not any more). There are STILL FTP sites out there... downloaded data from one recently - using wget. [420,000 years' worth of ice core data]

          I guess it's like modern cars do not have ''wind wings' which (if you have no air conditioning) are VERY effective at directing air flow to keep you cool. (then again I drive with the top down nearly all of the time)

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: It's not dead.

            Wing windows weren't so much designed to bring fresh air in, as to exhaust cigarette smoke. It's a venturi effect thing. They also help with defogging the windscreen, and minimize buffeting when the main window is rolled down. All around lovely things, they should never have gotten rid of them.

          2. LionelB Silver badge

            Re: It's not dead.

            "There are STILL FTP sites out there"

            There sure are, especially in the scientific world. Routinely use FTP to share and download large neuroimaging datasets.

      3. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: It's not dead.

        And I thought web browsing was meant to be standardised?

        It should be, but many cockwombles thought they could single-handily re-create the wheel. I mean, have you SEEN the state of modern programming? It's a shambling, mountainous pile of shite fueled by egos at every level that could not pour piss out of their boots with the instructions written on the bottom of the heels.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: It's not dead.

          It's THAT good where you are? You lucky bastard.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: It's not dead.

          It's a shambling, mountainous pile of shite fueled by egos at every level that could not pour piss out of their boots with the instructions written on the bottom of the heels.

          oh you've seen my browser !

          i blame the browser tool in Visual Studio , i think it uses ie6

        3. bombastic bob Silver badge
          Mushroom

          Re: It's not dead.

          have you SEEN the state of modern programming? It's a shambling, mountainous pile of shite fueled by egos at every level that could not pour piss out of their boots with the instructions written on the bottom of the heels.

          Don't remind me. I'm waist deep in trying to re-write the UI code for a system that was "made to work well enough" [by me] based on the shotgunned and overlapping style sheet behaviors, use of 3rd party monolithic things (like 'materialize' and 'jquery') by the original author who was given the "your services are no longer required" once he finally had enough done to make it possible to copy/pasta and adapt what he HAD done into an actual functioning interface. Fortunately it looks nice and performs well.

          [I have a permanent bump on my forehead that matches an indentation in a concrete wall as a testimony to my own efforts to make customers happy and STILL meet deadlines.]

          NOW it is time to re-do it all so that it can work on multiple LCD screens with different resolutions and still look the same. The original was for a particular LCD screen and I admittedly did not help when I had to insert pixel sizes into 'style' values to fix it in various places. Overlapping definitions and shotgunned settings in multiple style sheets (thanks to the original author) made this necessary. Over time I had eliminated most of the jquery code [which greatly improved system stability] and re-did a few things WITHOUT any of "that style stuff" (but with a similar appearance). NOW I get to rip it up and re-do it and am mostly done with Phase I. Necessary to make it maintainable without constant 'fiddling'.

          And I think I ALSO just described why "web developers" should *NEVER* *WRITE* *CODE*, but kernel programmers SHOULD be involved in every aspect of web design - to REIGN IN THE CHAOS.

          (and fortunately customer is happy with what I am doing and the results I am getting, better, faster, more stable, re-sizeable, all of the things you would want from a system that should only need 'light touch' maintenance and be easy to do future development for it)

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: It's not dead.

            "but kernel programmers SHOULD be involved in every aspect of web design"

            Not going to happen. Most of us kernel coders are kernel coders partially because we don't want to be part of the corporate chaos.

            1. bombastic bob Silver badge
              Meh

              Re: It's not dead.

              yeah well at some point in the project it seemed that swiss cheese unmaintainable spaghetti code might actually kill the project (and I would have to find a different engineering gig). So the guy originally tasked with the device control side (me) ends up taking over the whole project so that it does not DIE (missing customer commitments is a good way to kill it, for sure). Had I been in on the design phase for the web interface I would have directed it AWAY from such things but "that guy" shmoozed everyone into believing he was competent and 'talked a good game' and *I* was busy making motors spin and lights blink (then writing my own 'test' web interface pages because the "real" ones were not even CLOSE to being done, and handing them off to the web guy with 'well here is what *I* did to test it' like a *HINT* but without being too blatant (i.e. presenting him as a FOOL to the boss and being insulting about it).

              Something like that, anyway.

              Small companies really cannot afford engineering projects to be killed by "THAT kind of web "developer".

              This swiss cheese spaghetti code was written using 3 things that need to be avoided: 1) JQuery, 2) Google "materialize" (bloatware, monolithic) style sheets, and 3) obvious copy/pasta from stack overflow and various 3rd party "solutions". And, "circling back" to I.E., this sort of 'thing' first became possible around 1997, and I.E. was right at the forefront of it, with the beginnings of DOM, script, and dynamic HTML (for good or ill). But I.E. had VBScript and ActiveX, whereas the others did NOT. Fortunately, neither of those two things survived the test of time. UNfortunately the use of bloatware javascript libraries and (later on) style sheets has NOT gone away... (and has unfortunately been given a new HIGHLY OVERRATED term to describe it, 'Material Design')

      4. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: It's not dead.

        The reason for "standardization" was to make it IE not work.

        In general, standards are a weapon small-market-share businesses use against large-market-share businesses

        1. Dave559 Silver badge

          Re: It's not dead.

          "In general, standards are a weapon small-market-share businesses use against large-market-share businesses"

          And just how do you think your message made it from your computer keyboard, across the internet, on to the web server, and then, across the internet again, on to our web browsers?

          Go on, go and make your own electrical plug by wrapping the inner wires from your kettle's power cable around three nails – no, make that two nails – and stick them in the nearest electrical socket in a random orientation, and then come back and tell us why standards are a bad thing…

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: It's not dead.

            Good idea ... he'd have a nice little fire to boil a pot of water on to make tea :-)

          2. david 12 Silver badge

            Re: It's not dead.

            I wasn't surprised to get a dozen down votes here on el-reg. Now I see that there are at least 24 contributors who don't know how standards work, and aren't afraid to say so.

        2. bombastic bob Silver badge
          WTF?

          Re: It's not dead.

          (see icon)

      5. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

        Re: It's not dead.

        That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

        1. ShadowSystems

          At Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch...

          *Yawns, stretches, scratches chest, & looks at you sideways*

          You rang? =-)p

          "Sometimes when you stare into the void, I stare back. Usually making funny faces, blowing feisty raspberries, & doing the Frenchman atop the castle walls taunting routine from Monty Python."

  2. gv

    "Engineers forced to work around the browser's many, many foibles"

    As one of these people, I'm grateful that it paid off a large chunk of my mortgage.

    1. captain veg Silver badge

      Re: "Engineers forced to work around the browser's many, many foibles"

      So I take it that you weren't active in the "interesting" time when it was necessary to support *both* IE *AND* real browsers.

      -A.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: "Engineers forced to work around the browser's many, many foibles"

        I was quite active in that timeframe. I made sure that our pages rendered quite nicely in all browsers by making proprietary bits & bobs "illegal". Didn't seem to hurt our WWW uptake any ... and in fact, it helped in that we got far, far fewer support calls.

      2. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: "Engineers forced to work around the browser's many, many foibles"

        Ah, Frontpage vs the rest of the world.

        "Would you also like the Frontpage extension installed on your web server as well?"

        Me: "No thanks, they piss right off in front of a train."

  3. Alumoi Silver badge

    OK, now please tell the router/DVRs/specialized software manufacturers they need to ditch the ActiveX controls.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      If they're anything like our end clients, they emailed yesterday saying it doesn't work in Edge and asking what could be done about it.

      As they ignored our CR proposals about this time last year, very little.

      1. ecofeco Silver badge

        Bwahahahaaha.

        WHOCOULDKNOWED?! WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US?!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Oh, I had all the joys of that when we released a new version of some software with new system requirements. Despite giving a year's notice, during which time we could have reduced the requirements if anyone had complained. They waited until after we'd released it to complain.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "Well we did out an email to *all* last year about the death of IE and asking you to let us know if you are accessing a site that doesn't work with Edge, so we can add an compatibility exception to Edge"

          Our stock control now works <joke>perfectly</joke> with Edge running in IE5 mode... and looking at the xml file that drives this there are sites listed as needing IE4 mode!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        But, but, why?

        Yes, the old “we won’t change our legacy browser”, you should just fix the Internet!

        Retired now, just imagining the chaos back at the digital ranch right now….

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: But, but, why?

          Also retired but I remember all the shite forced upon R&D that only worked with IE when R&D ran on Unix/Linux.

      3. Evil Auditor Silver badge

        ...and we thought that the millennium bug had been a problem.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Even my retired, non-technical mother knew about it!

    2. Altrux

      Silverlight

      Our real-time control system platform still depends on IE and Silverlight. Which is tricky to even install in Win11 now, whereas it was a couple of clicks under Win10. Yes, I know. We're working on it, but dependent on the upstream proprietary provider to move into the 2020s, one day...

  4. chivo243 Silver badge
    Pint

    Toasting it's demise as we speak

    Or just having one of these--->

    Na, just having one and then another... I kissed IE good bye long ago... v6 or v7...

  5. Greybearded old scrote Silver badge

    Where did they bury it?

    I'm in a dancing mood.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Where did they bury it?

      "I'm in a dancing pissing mood."

      FTFY

  6. 45RPM Silver badge

    Last version of IE that I used was IE5. Its been dead to me for a very long time.

    1. Updraft102

      I never did use IE, except to perform Windows Updates when that required IE. For browsing purposes, I went from Netscape (from the beginning through 4.x), then to Mozilla (now Seamonkey) 1.1, then to Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox once it was released, which I have used for the next couple of decades. Chrome and IE need not apply... no room for browsers from the corporate giants attempting to own the web.

      1. jake Silver badge

        I don't remember ever really using IE for anything important, other than showing newbies how to get online with the tools available on their computer (after installing the "Plus! package for Win95). And then promptly offering to show them how easy it was to download and install NCSA Mosaic, IBM's WebExplorer and Netscape as better alternatives. (The IBM version didn't last long, but it was a handy "authority figure" lever to pry people away from Microsoft in 1995 & 1996. Yes, even that early on when all browsers were primitive, the Microsoft version stood out in its abysmalness.)

    2. captain veg Silver badge

      If you already had IE5 as part of the OS then there wasn't much reason to install Netscape (though I did), even if you no longer had to pay for it (which I didn't).

      IE5.5 was an improvement.

      Then I jumped to Opera, and paid cash money for it.

      To me IE6 was a step backwards, unless you consider cookie tracking a good thing.

      Yet that's where they left us for the next umpteen years. 7 was pitiful, but a mild statement of intent, 8 also, 9 fixed some horrible pain points. 10 and 11 were increments, not nearly enough.

      As a developer I've been waiting for ES6 support for years. ES6 was renamed ES2015 in, er, 2015. IE11 still doesn't have it.

      In its prime it was OK. Since about 2001 IE has been making web development unnecessarily difficult. This was a choice by Microsoft. As penance they should be forced to update Trident to support -- at the very least -- all those standards which Microsoft representatives had a hand in penning, but somehow never intended to deliver.

      Chromium is great. Gecko too. Is that really it? We urgently need Trident and Presto to be open-sourced.

      -A.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Angel

    Gates's conspiracy

    The real reason Internet Explorer died per Twitter. Note this was actually The Daily Show and Bill Gates on the thread.

    The Daily Show: "Wow, Bill Gates encourages everyone to get vaccinated, then a year later Internet Explorer dies. Coincidence???"

    Bill Gates: "I guess we finally ran out of microchips"

  8. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Amiga 1000 showing an IE logo

    That's just... wrong... like some alternative reality TV series where the US is occupied by Nazis or something.

    1. mark l 2 Silver badge

      Re: Amiga 1000 showing an IE logo

      Fairly sure that is an Amiga as that appears to be a Commodore 1081 or 1084 monitor, which i spends many an hours looking at when I had one connected to my Amiga in my youth.

      Check this photo as it looks like a very similar setup https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/download_photos/a1000_1_big.jpg

      I guess it could be running IE on Windows 95 through an x86 bridge board or emulation so could have seen IE on it all be running very slowly.

      1. sebacoustic

        Re: Amiga 1000 showing an IE logo

        nice to see that for omparison. Also shows that there's some skill in a photographer choosing an angle to make the picture speak to the beholder.

    2. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

      Re: Amiga 1000 showing an IE logo

      And where were you between 2016 and 2020?

  9. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    Flame

    IE has died

    I demand the right to download the only copy of the source code, stick it in an old oil barrel, pile wood and other flammables on it and set fire to it

    Only way to be sure..... right?

    1. David 132 Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: IE has died

      You missed off “…at a crossroads, at midnight.”

    2. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: IE has died

      Garlic, silver bullet, holy water, cross and a wooden stake.

      Then nuke it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: IE has died

        ..then nuke it…

        This is happening on the Moon,right?

    3. eldakka
      Mushroom

      Re: IE has died

      Nuking it from orbit is the only way to be sure.

      1. Dave559 Silver badge

        Re: IE has died

        "Get away from HTML, you bitch!"

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Make it open source

    If you're no longer going to 'support' it, How about making it open source, and Let others 'support' it for you?

    1. TeeCee Gold badge
      Meh

      Re: Make it open source

      Help Wanted:

      10+ Absolute f***ing rocket scientist "C++" programmers to support a monumental POS of labyrinthine complexity that nobody wants.

      Salary: None.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Make it open source

        Can we add blockchain?

        1. ecofeco Silver badge

          Re: Make it open source

          ROFL!

          Well played!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @AC - Re: Make it open source

      Even better, how about allowing me to uninstall it from Windows 7 ?

  11. Joe Gurman

    How to mourn?

    Party like it’s 1995.

  12. David 132 Silver badge

    “How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?”

    Well, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: one must have a heart of stone to read of the death of IE without laughing.

  13. General Purpose

    Outlook 2019 still loves IE11

    Outlook 2019 sometimes offers "if there are problems with how this message is displayed, click here to view it in a we browser" That produces an .mht file.

    Set those to open in Edge and I see plain text only – even the links are plain and nonfunctional. Set IE11 as the default (in W10 21H2 fully updated) and IE11 springs to life and opens it very nicely, thank you.

  14. ecofeco Silver badge

    Do what?

    I'll wait until the stake is driven though its heart of a million seats at moribund companies.

  15. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
    Holmes

    Confused (Icon)? You won't be, after this week's episode of Slurp.

    Had a situation yesterday, where I had replaced the PC & the required page (Citrix portal) for a work process wouldn't open (User reported it as Chrome default) - Turned out Edge was in use & displaying a Chrome error message (& had to explain that to the user).

    The (WTF!) solution was to open the URL in Chrome, which then opened without error back in Edge.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gone would be something else, which was never backported...

    It will lurk in the dark corners of the earth till the next age of man.

    For what terrible things simply disappear in the night? No, they lurk alone, growing hungry, perhaps forgotten, but not gone, not lost,

    Waiting. Only waiting.

    It may be many a year, but I will see this cursed wretched thing again, and misery will be it's company, then, as it was before. I will see it's bared fangs and feel it's claws and know it was always there, waiting, for when I had the chance, I merely put it out of mind.

    Gone is what this thing deserved, erased, purged from all of it's refuges, it's uninstaller back ported to every platform, it's install media listed as malware and flagged, _silent deletion_. The piles of old installers not buried, but burned with a cleansing flame.

    But back porting is tiresome, and it is the bane of man that we forget.

    So it sits with a silvery disk in the inky and lightness dark, waiting, waiting for the light, waiting to be free. Waiting to speak to other things that lurked in the old dark, waiting to hear the response of the waking old ones, and the old queues spew pages of it's dark words till the forests weep and rivers of black ink turn to dust.

    1. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

      Re: Gone would be something else, which was never backported...

      Funny you should say that. A few weeks ago my work Win10 PC did one of its forced updates. Ever since then, when I log into the VPN I get a box asking if I want to update Internet Explorer.

    2. d2

      Re: Gone would be something else, which was never backported...

      ye gods! mercy buckets, AC ...a dirge for dreck, indeed...

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Mourn it?

    Fuck, I'm still using it. Got a couple of old device admin pages that don't render properly in "modern" browsers and only IE will do. It's a sad life, but somebody's got to do it...

  18. TrueNull

    No one here could correctly guess who the creator of the browser and the code that would later be known as "Internet Explorer" was,

    What's your guess??

    Did you correctly say IBM?

    This whole thing started as a project at IBM Glendale (Endicott) back in 1983, then IBM entered into a "joint-study" with the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana around 1985 (I can't remember the exact year) to have students in the computer science department write the bulk of the code. Yes, IBM created HTML and all of the rest. The code from this student project was a prototype, no one had ever done anything like that before, IBM and the university knew that prototype code could never be good enough to ship as any sort of product. It's a long story how that student project eventually ended up at Microsoft. Why wasn't IBM involved in browsers? Of course, IBM management at the absolute highest level decided to kill the browser project and all associated projects at a meeting on October 31, 1987 (the Halloween meeting) Great strategy IBM Management Council!

    1. jake Silver badge

      I regret to inform you ...

      ... that you are not even wrong.

      This one is so far off it's not even trolling, nor an attempt at a joke.

      1. TrueNull

        Re: I regret to inform you ...

        See my post below.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So how was all that Spyglass Code in there then?..

      Had too many beers (or intoxicant of choice) last night? Because that rambling drivel, is well, utter drivel. For a start HTML was created in 1990..

      Last time I looked, admittedly the IE6 codebase, pretty much all the original Spyglass code was still in there. With lots of random crap stuck on in that inimitable MS way. Which is why the IE Mac team in MV did not know that the Spyglass code had full full AppleScript support, for example. Just adding to someone else s code that they really did not understand.

      Is it true that the Spyglass lawyers thought they had pulled off the Deal of the Century in the source code licensing deal when they demanded from MS a relatively small upfront sum and a very juicy per copy royalty on selling price?

      So what's a 25% royalty on $0?

      1. TrueNull

        Re: So how was all that Spyglass Code in there then?..

        Nope what I posted about the Browser and IBM is true.

        IBM Department G19 and Department G3 in Endicott New York designed it in the early 1980s - IBM threw everything away in November and abandon the joint study with the University of Illinois in early 1988. At IBM Endicott in the late 1980s if you said 'browser', 'internet', 'TCP/IP' or 'website' you had better have already found another job. Anyone could all of the IP for the browser and HTML, etc. for $1, the problem was you had to know what it was and where to find it, very few people knew about the project.

        HTML is modeled after an IBM internal tool called, get this, 'GML'. GML was used inside IBM to create mountains of printed documents that no one ever read (remember it was the 1980s, most everything was printed then) GML was written inside IBM sometime in the mid-1970s and its basic characteristics and form were passed onto HTML.

        The Browser project was later taken up by the supercomputing project, and later sold to the public as Mosaic. (If I remember correctly they were physically about 200 yards away in Champaign)

        SpyGlass also had a copy of the code and all of the notes. I had left IBM before the SpyGlass/MS deal, MS has GREAT lawyers! SpyGlass never stood a chance.

        I never knew the details of the Mosaic-SpyGlass relationship - both of those leaders wanted to be the Star - And be very, very rich.

        Any questions just ask, this is all ancient history.

        1. cdrcat

          Re: So how was all that Spyglass Code in there then?..

          GML was involved with the history of HTML[1] because it was a predecessor to SGML. However stating that the GML codebase became Mosaic or Spyglass sounds surreal. If you have alternative facts, I suggest you pass them to the appropriate history buffs to cross-check them: why post anything important here?

          [1] https://www.w3.org/2012/08/history-of-the-web/origins.htm

      2. TrueNull

        Re: So how was all that Spyglass Code in there then?..

        I left out something in my reply to you.

        The code written by the students at the University of Illinois for the joint-study with IBM, remember prototype code, went on to be the basis for both Mosaic and a little later SpyGlass, there were some people in common in all three organizations. That prototype code was exactly that, a prototype, not design or code fit to sell to the public. Both organizations who extended the code were for-profit, that makes a big difference.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: So how was all that Spyglass Code in there then?..

          You are either very drunk or very stupid. What you wrote is complete and total garbage.

          Heard of ViolaWWW? From Cal Berkeley? In '92. Guess not. Mosaic without the embedded images but some cool stuff added. Ran on X Windows.

          I not only remember SGML from the 1980's but remember why it failed. One of the poster boys for Standards fiascos. As for GML, lots of other proprietary tagged text formats out there starting starting in the mid 1960's. CDC, ICL and DEC to name but three I knew about at the time had their own kicking around in the 1970's. No big deal back then.

          If you were actually around at the time you would know that Ted Nelson sort of begat (belatedly) the Hypertext fad of the late 1980's / early 1990's, which Tim Berners-Lee produce the first simple practical non proprietary application for. By junking all the fat and keeping it simple.

          The evolution of the web in its current form has zero to do with the ramble tosh you wrote. Nada. Zilch. Its in the same category as the guy who claimed to have invented email because of some trivial software he wrote about 5 years after I sent my first computer mail message. And that program was a based on a system that had been kicking around for more than a decade.

          1. TrueNull

            Re: So how was all that Spyglass Code in there then?..

            Might you have any information related to my search? Thanks.

            MS/IBM Golf

            IBM/Microsoft The round of golf where MS told IBM it was now in-charge

            In late summer 1986(?) there was a golf meeting in Westchester County New York between Microsoft (Gates) and partner, and IBM (John Akers and partner). I was at IBM at the time. The lengthy meeting summary was very selectively distributed inside upper IBM management afterwards, I didn't get to see that summary, I tried; I believe the information was deemed 'insider information'. Any chance someone has the summary of this famous meeting?

            I have difficulty imagining Gates playing golf but that's another story. I was told both companies tried diligently to gracefully lose the golf match.

            In this round of golf/really-a-meeting famously Gates told IBM they were no longer in-charge of the dominant x86 operating system. This was a BIG deal, IBM was told it was no longer the leader in PC systems or its future.

            Any chance someone here has knowledge of this meeting? Forty-years later is a long time to wait for the surprise ending. Thanks

  19. WhereAmI?

    Code lurker

    I was looking at some not-so-old web code of mine (five years old IIRC) just three days ago. Most of it is HTML5/CSS, but buried in there is a small piece piece of JS to drive YouTube videos and buried in the JS is a 'deal with IE' branch...

    Die? Nope. It's gonna join the cockroaches.

  20. PenfoldUK

    IE is dead?

    Didn't mourn it's passing.

    Haven't used it personally for ages.

    And for work only using it on legacy systems.

  21. RobLang

    Long overdue

    We had to support IE until yesterday. Now there's going to be a huge library update-athon and burning of pollyfill code while the front page politely apologises to IE users. We've dropped it from our test process, filled the company Slack with memes and now looking forward at all the features that were going to be too hard to make work in IE.

    IE 5.5/6 was a good browser, rightly nailing the slow Nutscrape to the wall but it should never had been delivered with the OS after XP, locking MS into having to bare-bones maintain it. They should have done this retirement process long ago.

  22. darklord

    Dead or just renamed

    So we have Edge which as last time i checked is a WEB access program sooooo a rebranded IE. shame it doesn't work with its own Microsoft SharePoint products

  23. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
    Windows

    I was in a weird place a couple of years ago where I had to support IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on a site.

    The weird thing is that everything I did worked in everything but one. No, not IE - Edge. Go figure.

    Anyway, bye bye IE. You weren't quite as bad as all that, but even so, in your honour I am now going to play "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead" at full volume...

  24. HammerOn1024

    Inter Who?

    Morn what? A crappy piece of software? It should have joined Clippy long ago.

  25. IT Hack

    How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

    Downloaded the latest version of Firefox.

  26. pip25
    Meh

    IE died

    Now we have Chrome dominating the browser market instead.

    Yay?

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: IE died

      Now we have Chrome dominating the browser market instead.

      Please do not get me started with the 2D FLATTY FLATSO McFLATFACE look, light blue on blinding white color schemes, and its direct influence on Firefox (Australis) and Windows (8 and later)...

      [oops. too late]

      (well with THAT said, I.E. looks a WHOLE LOT BETTER than it did 5 minutes ago)

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