Editorial . . . . . . . . . .
Internet Explorer, often known as “Internet Exploder” or the Internet’s favourite browser useful idiot, has finally met its demise. Microsoft finally put the frequently sluggish but consistently meme-able Internet Explorer to rest on June 15 after 27 years of service and will redirect Explorer users to the latest version of its Edge browser. The company made the decision to retire the application public a year ago, and as of June 15, it no longer provides maintenance for the nearly three-decade-old era-defining browser. Few people are likely to lament the browser’s departure. It was the unwelcome U2 album of its time and was installed without the user’s consent on every new Windows PC sold in the early 2000s. Due to its numerous security vulnerabilities, Internet Explorer served as a virtual gold mine for hackers. Microsoft’s reluctance in updating the browser to counter such assaults didn’t help.
The Windows operating system was packaged with Explorer when it was initially released in 1995 by the Microsoft Corporation. Explorer deserves credit for introducing many Windows users for the first time to the delights of the internet. After all, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, only made the first public web browser available in 1993. The IT world has long made fun of Internet Explorer because of its slow pace and clumsy user interface. The decision to abandon the browser, which launched in 1995, can be interpreted as an acknowledgment of its relevance lessness to contemporary users. The reputation that Internet Explorer has for having security flaws is well-deserved. In the early 2000s, clicking on a URL in a Something Awful forum may result in your computer being fully locked down or, worse still, destroyed by someone who simply enjoyed watching computers burn. Nothing on your computer should be avoided more than Internet Explorer, second only to Adobe Flash. Internet security experts were yelling that it was unnecessarily negligent with security. To be fair, though, it accompanied us during AIM chat sessions, Myspace, and Live Journal, so we can’t completely write it off. Many of us initially learned that we could discover anything—and I do mean anything—on the internet with Internet Explorer. Everything from obscure music releases and films to CD-Key cracking websites and the vast universe of emulators. Are video game emulators forbidden? We certainly didn’t give a damn. We have unrestricted access to the entire, frequently nasty content of the Internet. Even with today’s most secure browsers like Edge, Chrome, or Safari, there are things we did with Internet Explorer that we would recoil at if we saw someone else doing them. Internet Explorer was created for a time when the internet was genuinely a frontier when we were all just innocent bystanders on the internet. Internet Explorer must no longer be used since that time has gone. Goodbye IE.