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Long Live Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer was ahead of its time, and then it was dead.

​Internet Explorer, as we know it, is dead. Microsoft is killing off the name of the most popular internet browser in the history of computing in favor of a ​browser called Spartan. Go ahead and make your jokes, yawn if you want to, then pour one out, because it's actually kind of a big deal.

Laugh at the bloated, slow, insecure piece of trash that was Internet Explorer 6 in its later days, the version that ultimately made the name toxic among nerds. So toxic, in fact, that in a recent ad campaign, Microsoft promised to ​make Internet Explorer "suck less." But know that it wasn't always like this.

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Before IE, there was Spyglass Enhanced Mosaic, a browser designed by a small group of University of Illinois researchers. Spyglass licensed Mosaic to Microsoft for $2 million, which renamed it Internet Explorer, and used it (and its inclusion in Windows 95) to bash Netscape Navigator into nothingness.

In Windows 95, you didn't search for files or click around your computer looking for them. Instead, you "explored" your file system using Windows Explorer. So, when Microsoft finally ​began packaging a browser with Windows on December 31, 1995, naturally you "explored" the internet as well.

"I'm really surprised that the name has stuck so long," Eric Sink, project lead of Spyglass's browser team, told me. "The original name was all about Windows 95, because everything else had 'explorer' in it. With all the drama it's been through since then, it's crazy the name is still around. In many ways, I feel like IE is not at its weakest point. It's definitely been at weaker points in the past."

We'll get to that in a moment, but first let's take a look at when Internet Explorer ruled the world. For better or worse, IE fundamentally changed how the internet worked during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Because IE so thoroughly crushed Netscape in terms of market share, Microsoft didn't have to comply with many internet standards, and instead made them up as it went along. Websites had to be specifically coded and recoded to ensure they worked with IE's quirks.

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"Microsoft kept their pedal on the gas of their browser team until they won, then they pulled back. There's no question they rested on their success after they beat Netscape," Sink said. "Microsoft stopped caring about any other platform for their browser except Windows, and, as Windows lost dominance, browsers that were Windows only also began to lose dominance. Firefox and Chrome gained popularity on Mac and were just better browsers."

Whether Internet Explorer's original market share was earned or forced upon its users was the crux of the massive antitrust case against Microsoft, which dominated headlines in the late 1990s. The US argued that Microsoft used its operating system dominance to also assert its dominance in the internet browser space.

"It already feels weird to talk about it in past tense"

Microsoft argued that the operating system and browser are part of the same ecosystem, that the browser isn't necessarily a separate product, that it is and can be an extension of the operating system. By today's standards, what Microsoft was doing at the time seems almost innocuous and innovative; the US's case against it feels shortsighted and perhaps destructive.

"Microsoft was ahead of its time by trying to tie two different aspects of the computing experience together," Andrew Russell, an internet historian at Stevens Institute of Technology and author of Open Standards and the Digital Age, told me. "Microsoft said the internet and computing is dynamic, it's changing fast, soon the browser will be the main interface between the user and anything online. Microsoft was saying that you can't define the operating system and the browser as two different markets, because they were treating it as one thing."

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How poetic that Google and Chrome, the browser that hammered the last 50-or-so nails in Internet Explorer's coffin, is doing something suspiciously like what Microsoft was trying to do with IE nearly 20 years ago. And how ironic that, no doubt, many people switched to Chrome because people's lives were so tied up in Google's ecosystem.

Why not use a Google browser when you already use Google search, and Google Docs, and Gchat, and Google Reader, and Gmail? The ecosystem Google created is just like the one Microsoft tried to say it was making during its antitrust proceedings.

It's not just Google, of course. If you have a Mac, it's much easier to say screw it and just buy an iPhone and an iPad and an Apple Watch to go with your Apple TV and CarPlay than it is to try to figure out how to make a goddamn Zune (RIP) sync with iTunes.

"What Google and Apple have managed to do is exactly what Microsoft was trying to do," Russell said. "Increasingly, you're seeing customers locked into walled gardens or silos. With things like the cloud, you have to pick your company, and trust them, and then that's your experience."

That's true, of course, for the people who still have decided to go with a Microsoft-based experience. You can have your Windows Phone, and your Surface, and your Office Online Excel spreadsheets. But you'd be looked at by those in the know as not tech literate, or perhaps someone's mom or dad, if you still used Internet Explorer, despite that fact that it very much doesn't suck anymore.

So that's why Internet Explorer must die.

"I don't think the name is toxic, except with nerds like me, and I think they're abandoning it because someone at Microsoft decided they want to be cool again," Sink said. "When they have a brand toxic to the leading nerds and developers, that's not cool."

It's not cool, but it is and always will be important.

"IE was really the main player in this era where people used their browser to experience the internet. With apps and this fracturing ecosystem, it's not like that anymore," Russell said. "It's pretty amazing to think about how long it lasted. It already feels weird to talk about it in past tense."