RIP Internet Explorer is the Best and the Worst Internet Browser for many

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For the majority of its existence, Internet Explorer failed us. calistomebel Today, it feels like we failed Internet Explorer.



Microsoft updated Windows and its website on the day of today in a tribute to Internet Explorer, which has been out of service for 26 years. If you try to download or use the browser, Microsoft will now nudge you to use Edge (its new default browser) instead.



The browser's demise is not surprising. It is also not a major inconvenience for the majority of internet users in 2022. Microsoft started ringing the death knell of its old internet portal last year. Runescape servers According to Statcounter, IE usage has decreased to less than one percent of the browser's total market share, as per the Web analytics site Statcounter. The world functionally decided it was dead long before Microsoft did.



I'm not here to dance on the grave of Internet Explorer however. Yes, for much of its existence, IE was one of the most unreliable browsers you could use. Depending on the time of year and what you were using it for, certain sites wouldn't even display correctly or you'd be bombarded with a plethora of pop-ups, or expose your Windows XP machine to a barrage of viruses. PC users of a certain age might recall loading up IE after an adult or grandparent tried it and found seven browser toolbars that were not legitimate and taking up the entire screen due to malware.



Despite all this however, it's worth noting that IE was the first browser to access the internet for a lot of people (if they didn't use Netscape Navigator first), since it was pre-installed on every Windows PC from 1995. As a child I'd done some web surfing using the terrible AOL browser, but when my family switched to broadband internet, IE was the way I was the first to jump on. Watching the early viral memes on eBaum's World before I realized that much of it was stolen with no credit and playing RuneScape or searching for cheat codes for video games (remember those?) were all formative experiences for me that were enabled by IE.



And , like many like-minded people I knew at the time (read as nerds), we all realized IE kind of sucked and moved on to Firefox or Opera and finally Chrome. Internet users, in general didn't need to owe IE anything. It died because of meritocracy, as even its parent company later released a much better browser, called Edge.



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Good memories aren't able to replace security and performance. However, they do reflect Internet Explorer's importance to culture for people who grew up on the internet, watching it transform from a digital Wild West to the all-encompassing cyber-world we are familiar with and cherish today.