Goodbye Internet Explorer!

With the retirement of Internet Explorer, an era has come to an end after more than 26 years of service.

The official retirement of Internet Explorer was announced on June 15, 2022 — 26 years and 10 months (9,801 days, to be exact) after its release on August 15, 1995, back when the public-facing Internet was in its infancy.

The Journey

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001 around the time of the final settlement of Microsoft's antitrust case, and it didn't receive a major feature update for several critical years thereafter. Internet Explorer was by then the dominant web browser.

ActiveX Controls were a feature of Internet Explorer since 1996 that allowed web pages to package executable code into HTML that would run on client-side machines without any user intervention.

Then in 2004, Mozilla Firefox — one of the first major open-source projects on the internet — was released, offering tabbed web browsing, extension support, and no ActiveX Control vulnerabilities. As users flocked to Firefox, and a few years later to Google Chrome, Internet Explorer offered little in the way of updates until 2007, with Internet Explorer 7, but by then it was pretty much over.

The Reason for Its Decline

Firefox, and then Chrome, would eventually come to overshadow Internet Explorer and drive down its once dominant market share to previously unthinkable lows from which it never recovered. Users complained that IE was slower than Chrome, prone to crashing, and could be hacked easily. The market share of IE — which was over 90% in the early 2000s — began to fade as users found more alternatives. Today, Chrome dominates with roughly 65% share of the worldwide browser market.