After 27 years, Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer, is retired. That means it might vacation to the Grand Canyon before I do. Whatever it does, I doubt anyone will miss it. Though IE is retiring now, its career ended long ago. I can’t recall when I last used the browser; I think it was for an intranet web app at a company I previously worked for. Outside of that, I had stopped using IE many years prior.
Internet Explorer first launched in 1995, bundled with Windows 95. But my browsing history didn’t start up with IE. I first surfed the web in 1997 with Netscape Navigator. Though IE was on the Win95 PCs I used in college back then, my class assignments defaulted to the popular Netscape browser.
At home I had dial-up on a 14.4k modem, but at college things were a bit faster. My favorite website to visit in those days was nintendo.com (back when I still got most info through my Nintendo Power magazine subscription). I remember when Super Mario Kart 64, new at the time, had its hero image on the site and I watched it load; it took over a minute!
Of course, eventually Netscape was out and IE was in. Later I used Firefox and then Google Chrome. I also tried Opera for a short time. These days, I use Safari since I’m all-in with Apple.
Microsoft is edging IE users more to….Edge, its modern web browser based on Google’s Chromium technology. I’ve used Edge enough to say it’s quite good these days; I like it. But if I didn’t rely on Safari, Chrome would probably be my 2nd choice because it’s more ubiquitous. That said, Chrome has privacy issues, more than Edge I think. For that there’s Brave or the DuckDuckGo browser.
No browser is perfect, and I recall over the years the trouble IE had, yet it remained dominant for a long time. Now, finally, it’s officially retired. Surprising that it lasted so long – 27 years! Farewell, I guess.
What was your first browser experience? Do you remember your first favorite website?
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Thank you for sharing.