Yesterday, June 15, 2022, Microsoft officially retired Internet Explorer. The browser that once commanded over 95% market share, that launched the browser wars, that drove web developers to drink — it’s finally, truly done. And while the memes are flying, there’s a genuine story here about how a single piece of software shaped the trajectory of the entire web.
A Complicated Legacy#
My relationship with Internet Explorer goes back to the mid-90s, when IE 3.0 shipped with CSS support and felt like a genuine leap forward. Microsoft’s decision to bundle IE with Windows was ruthless business strategy (and eventually ruled anticompetitive), but in the early days, it also meant that millions of people got access to a reasonably capable web browser for free.
Internet Explorer 6, released in 2001, is where the story goes dark. IE6 became the browser that wouldn’t die — so dominant that Microsoft essentially stopped developing it, leaving the web stuck with its buggy CSS implementation, proprietary extensions like ActiveX, and a rendering engine that was fundamentally incompatible with emerging web standards.
For an entire generation of web developers, “making it work in IE” was not a feature request — it was the job. I remember spending more time writing IE-specific CSS hacks and conditional comments than writing actual application logic. The * html hack, the box model bug, the PNG transparency workaround with AlphaImageLoader — these weren’t edge cases, they were daily reality.
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie6-fixes.css" />
<![endif]-->If that syntax gives you a twinge of recognition, you’ve earned your stripes.
The Stagnation Era and Its Consequences#
Between IE6’s release in 2001 and IE7’s arrival in 2006, web innovation essentially stalled. Microsoft had won the browser war against Netscape and had no competitive incentive to improve IE. During those five years, standards bodies pushed forward with CSS 2.1, the early work on HTML5, and ECMAScript improvements — but none of it mattered if the browser used by 90% of the world couldn’t render it.
This stagnation had consequences that rippled through the entire industry:
- Flash flourished partly because IE couldn’t do what developers needed. Rich interactivity, video playback, complex animations — Flash filled the gap that IE’s limited capabilities created.
- Web standards advocacy became a movement. The Web Standards Project (WaSP) and voices like Jeffrey Zeldman fought a long campaign to convince developers (and browser vendors) to build for standards rather than specific browsers.
- jQuery was born in 2006 largely to paper over the inconsistencies between IE and other browsers. The fact that we needed an abstraction layer just to do basic DOM manipulation tells you everything about the state of cross-browser development.
The emergence of Firefox in 2004, followed by Chrome in 2008, finally created the competitive pressure that Microsoft needed to take browser development seriously again. IE7, 8, 9, and eventually 10 and 11 each represented genuine improvements — but IE could never shake the legacy of those lost years.
The Long Tail of IE Support#
Even after IE’s market share plummeted, dropping it from your support matrix was never straightforward. Enterprise applications built on ActiveX controls, internal portals that relied on IE’s quirks mode, government systems with certification requirements tied to specific IE versions — these kept the browser on life support long after it was technically obsolete.
I worked on a project as recently as 2019 where IE11 support was a hard requirement from the client. Not because their users preferred IE, but because their corporate SOE (Standard Operating Environment) hadn’t been updated, and the IT department wouldn’t approve an exception. We spent roughly 20% of our frontend development time on IE11 polyfills, transpilation, and CSS fallbacks — for a browser with less than 5% of our actual user traffic.
This is the hidden cost that rarely shows up in market share statistics. IE didn’t just affect the browsers it ran on; it affected the entire web by forcing developers to build for the lowest common denominator.
What Actually Changes Now#
In practical terms, yesterday’s retirement means that IE 11 on Windows 10 will be progressively disabled, redirecting users to Microsoft Edge (which includes an “IE mode” for legacy compatibility). For most web developers, IE has been irrelevant for years — major frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular have already dropped IE11 support, and CSS Grid and modern JavaScript features have been shipping without IE fallbacks.
But the symbolic importance matters. As long as IE was “officially supported,” there were organizations that used that status as justification for requiring IE compatibility. With the official retirement, that argument evaporates. If you’re still dealing with stakeholders who insist on IE support, you now have a clear answer: Microsoft itself says it’s over.
My Take#
I’m not going to pretend I’m sad. Internet Explorer, particularly in its IE6-through-IE8 incarnation, probably cost the global web development community billions of hours of wasted effort. It held back web standards adoption by years. It created an entire cottage industry of workarounds and compatibility layers.
But I’ll also acknowledge that IE played a pivotal role in making the web accessible to the mass market. The browser wars, for all their damage, also drove innovation at a pace we might not have seen otherwise. And IE’s eventual decline created the multi-browser ecosystem we have today, where Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge compete on standards compliance and performance.
Pour one out for Internet Explorer. Not because we’ll miss it, but because we survived it. The web is better for having moved on, and yesterday made that transition official. Now, if someone could also convince Safari to implement features on a reasonable timeline, that would be great.