Saying Goodbye to Internet Explorer (Premium)

Over roughly 20 years, Internet Explorer experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows. But it’s time to say goodbye. Past time, really.

And since my own history in personal technology journalism parallels that of Internet Explorer, I thought it may be more interesting to tell a few stories from the dawn of the Internet era interspersed with what happened to Microsoft’s web browser.

In 1995, Gary Brent and I were working long nights to finish our Windows 95 book in time for the product’s launch. There were distractions: Microsoft also plied us with betas for Office 95, Plus! 95, and MSN (“the Microsoft Network”), an online service that would integrate with the Windows 95 shell.

But there was also a wildcard: Microsoft had licensed technology from Spyglass and was creating its own web browser, called Internet Explorer (IE). This browser would not be done in time to be included in the box—and, yes, back then, there were actual boxes—but it would ship with Plus! 95 and PC makers were, ahem, encouraged to install it on new Windows 95-based PCs as well. IE would formally ship as an integrated part of Windows 95 in OEM Service Release 1 (OSR-1), which, as its name implies, was aimed at PC makers since Windows was most broadly distributed on new PCs.

IE was initially interesting because it, like MSN, integrated with the Windows 95 file system. That said, this is also what got Microsoft in trouble with U.S. antitrust regulators: in a bid to forestall Netscape Navigator from spearheading a new web platform that might surpass Windows, the software giant artificially integrated IE deeply into Windows 95 to give it an unfair competitive advantage. Unfortunately, this integration was the source of many reliability and performance issues as well, since IE was new technology at the time. (I remember its later inclusion in the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack being a source of irritation because it introduced serious issues to that once rock-solid platform.)

The first two versions of IE were unimpressive, but Microsoft quickly iterated and had even grander plans that went beyond the products and features it eventually introduced. In the pre-broadband days of 1996, I recall going to a local movie theater to view a satellite broadcast from Microsoft about IE 3.0, which was going to finalize the web/file system integration and add features like frames, Site Map, and FTP. This was the first time I saw Joe Belfiore (remotely), and I was delighted to later meet him at the Windows XP launch a few years later.

IE 3.0 was the version that put Microsoft’s web browser over the top. It arrived almost exactly one year after Windows 95 and was launched with a splashy “midnight madness” online event. It also surpassed Netscape Navigator as the most sophisticated web browser and usage. Netscape tried to recover by creating the Communicator suite, and it sought legal and regulatory remedies that eventually did curtail Microsoft. But not before it was too late: AOL purchased Netscape in late 1998 and that was the end of that.

Windows 98 was originally going to feature an IE-based shell in which icons and other items were selected with a single click, as is the case on the web: selectable text was even colored blue and underlined, as was common on the web at the time. But beta testers panned the feature, and Windows 98 shipped with that functionality disabled by default. Those who wished to could, of course, turn it on. Few did. (I met Bill Gates at the Windows 98 launch in San Francisco that year. I wasn’t particularly impressed, and he wasn’t as tall as I thought he’d be.)

Subsequent releases of IE—IE 4, IE 4.01 (included with Windows 98), IE 5.0 (included with Windows 2000), IE 5.5 (included with Windows Millennium Edition), and IE 6 (included with Windows XP) continued and expanded on IE’s functional and usage share dominance. But by the time Windows XP arrived, Microsoft was already mired in antitrust problems on multiple continents and, despite claims to the contrary, these issues seriously hampered its ability to innovate on multiple fronts over the next several years.

Microsoft’s antitrust issues triggered a real crisis of confidence for me: the more I learned about Microsoft’s anticompetitive behavior, the less impressed I was with the firm and its products. I was likewise unimpressed that it had integrated IE with Windows solely to harm its competitors, and that it had done so with no regard to how that would impact the quality of Windows or the experience of those using the product.

Microsoft eventually made major regulatory concessions. It allowed PC makers to bundle other browsers with Windows and make them the default. And in Europe, it eventually provided a browser ballot interface so that users could make that choice on first boot. But it wasn’t just antitrust that took down IE: determined to dominate in the coming era of computing, Microsoft took engineers away from IE and put them on the Longhorn team where they could create the web-like Avalon and related interfaces.

This meant that Microsoft essentially gave up on improving its web browser, allowing Mozilla Phoenix/Firefox—the successor to Netscape Navigator—and, later, Google Chrome to push forward and begin the long, slow process of sidelining Microsoft’s browser. IE 7 didn’t ship until 2006 (and was included in Windows Vista), and while Microsoft scrambled to make the product relevant again, it never really regained its mojo.

During this time, Microsoft would routinely come to my home for meetings as part of their east coast road trips, and I had a running gag with Dean Hachamovitch, who led the IE team for several years, in which one or both of us would show up for meetings with a box of donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. Dean was good people, but he was fighting an unwinnable fight against a market that had simply moved on.

By the time IE 8, 9, and 10 arrived, I had moved on too, first in halting steps and then for good. First to Phoenix/Firefox, and then, like most of the world, to Google Chrome. Finally admitting defeat, Microsoft created Project Spartan for Windows 10 and later renamed it Microsoft Edge. When this more modern product failed to gain usage share despite being bundled with Windows 10, it started over yet again with a new version of Edge based on the Chromium engine that Google uses for Chrome. Today, Edge is just cresting the 10 percent usage share mark on the desktop, a far cry from the heady early days of IE, when Microsoft’s browser had over 80 percent usage share. Of course, Microsoft’s mobile defeat didn’t help either: the software giant has never obtained decent usage share in the modern mobile era.

Tomorrow, Microsoft will finally end support for IE 11, the latest and last version of Microsoft’s first web browser. This isn’t the hard line in the sand it sounds like because some IE 11 versions—like those on Windows 7 with Extended Security Updates, Windows 8.1, and others—will still be supported for a short time. But IE, effectively, is dead.

Of course, IE, literally, has been dead for several years, at least for most people. The only holdouts are businesses that built what we used to call intranet websites and apps based on IE. And businesses, really, are the double-edge sword that explains Microsoft’s various successes and defeats. Businesses tend to stick with technologies that work and don’t upgrade frequently, and because they have historically been responsible for two-thirds of the software giant’s revenues, Microsoft has historically put up with their slowness and reticence to upgrade. And here we are in 2022, and there are businesses that not only use IE but rely on it.

And I don’t know. I don’t have much empathy for that. Sorry.

Nor do I feel much in the way of nostalgia for Internet Explorer. The things that made it great during the heady years of 1998 to 2001 were its relentless improvements. And the things that made it terrible in the years after that was that Microsoft ignored it while rivals surged ahead. Ultimately, we should all use the products and services that meet our needs best, and IE failed because it no longer did that. That was a strategic error on Microsoft’s part, not ours.

And so, yeah. IE is dead. Mostly. But as I noted, IE has really been dead for a long time. And whatever modern browser you’re using today—whether it’s Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi—certainly meets our needs better than IE. That makes its passing not just bearable but a relief.

So here’s to IE. You had your moment in the sun.