Internet Explorer
Cause of Death
Natural causes following a prolonged decline; primary organ failure attributed to market share loss, compounded by decades of accumulated technical debt and one catastrophic encounter with Google Chrome in 2008
Toxicology Report — Contributing Factors
Accumulated CSS non-compliance (Chronic, 27 years)
ActiveX dependency syndrome (Structural)
Internet Explorer 6 nostalgia in enterprise IT (Environmental)
Google Chrome market share: 65% (Catastrophic exposure)
Last Words
""Please wait while Internet Explorer processes this request." — final status bar message, displayed for 14 minutes before the process was killed"
Witness Statements
""We kept it running because our internal HR portal only worked in IE. That portal was built in 2003. Nobody could remember who built it. We could not turn IE off without also turning off payroll." — Enterprise IT administrator, undisclosed company with 40,000 employees"
— Witness 1
""I used Internet Explorer until 2019. I am not ashamed. It was installed and it worked. I was not going to go get a different one." — Home computer user, age 67, still using Internet Explorer 11 on a machine that has not been updated since 2018"
— Witness 2
""The compatibility mode button was the most important button in web development for fifteen years. You pressed it when a site didn't work. Sometimes it helped. This is not how browsers are supposed to function." — Frontend developer, retired"
— Witness 3
""It came with the computer. That is all I have to say in its defence. It came with the computer, and for many years, that was enough." — User, 1996–2009"
— Witness 4
Could It Have Been Saved?
No. By the time Microsoft understood what Google Chrome was doing to the browser market, Internet Explorer had accumulated two decades of architectural decisions that could not be reversed. The launch of Edge in 2015 was the Bureau's definition of too late: a new browser launched to replace an old browser, using the branding of the old browser, for users who had already left for a different browser entirely. Internet Explorer died as it lived: by inertia.
Legacy
Internet Explorer's most enduring legacy is negative space — it taught a generation of web developers what not to do. Every CSS hack, every browser compatibility library, every "this site works best in Chrome" notice is, in some sense, a memorial. IE also maintained the world's largest installation base for legacy government and banking applications, many of which still run on machines that have not connected to the internet since 2016, which the Bureau considers a form of immortality.
Bureau Epitaph
✝
Internet Explorer
1995-08-16 — 2022-06-15
"Here lies Internet Explorer. It came with the computer. For a while, that was enough."