Goodbye Internet Explorer: Microsoft retires browser after 27-year run

Wednesday marked the demise of Internet Explorer, once the monopoly of the world wide web, the 27-year-old browser will soon cease to exist and will join BlackBerry phones, dial-up modems and VHS in the dustbin of tech history.

Microsoft will no longer support the once-dominant browser that legions of web surfers loved to hate - and a few still claim to adore.

But IE's end was not a surprise. A year ago, Microsoft said that it was putting an end to Internet Explorer on June 15, 2022, pushing users to its Edge browser, which was launched in 2015.

Users marked Explorer’s passing on Twitter, with some referring to it as a “bug-ridden, insecure POS” or the “top browser for installing other browsers", but for others it was a moment for 90s nostalgia and the first foray into surfing the web.

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Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer in 1995, the antediluvian era of web surfing dominated by the first widely popular browser, Netscape Navigator.

Its launch signalled the beginning of the end of Navigator. Microsoft went on to tie IE and its ubiquitous Windows operating system together so tightly that many people simply used it by default instead of Navigator. Users, meanwhile, complained that IE was slow, prone to crashing and vulnerable to hacks. IE's market share, which in the early 2000s was over 90%, began to fade as users found more appealing alternatives. Today, the Chrome browser dominates with roughly a 65% share of the worldwide browser market, followed by Apple’s Safari with 19%, according to internet analytics company Statcounter. IE's heir, Edge, lags with about about 4%, just ahead of Firefox.