The inside story of Internet Explorer (RIP)

We look back at the chequered history of Microsoft’s browser

Internet Explorer is officially being put out to pasture next year. We look back at the chequered history of Microsoft’s browser.

Since Edge was first bundled with Windows 10, the writing has been on the wall. Now Microsoft has made it official: Internet Explorer (IE) is officially being put out to pasture. IE11 will officially go out of support for most users on 15 June next year. Although Microsoft is offering corporate customers a reprieve until as late as 2029 in some cases, the message is clear: IE is over.

It’s an ignoble end for a browser that, despite its reputation in later years, was genuinely innovative and pioneered several technologies that are at the core of the web today.

This contribution is today obscured by Microsoft’s famous “browser war” with Netscape in the early 1990s. But it wasn’t only Microsoft’s controversial business practices that were responsible for IE’s growth – it also delivered features that nobody else did at the time.

“IE2 was literally four software engineers, my most senior software engineers, and four months of time,” explained Ben Slivka, who founded the Internet Explorer team within Microsoft. That team soon expanded to 35 of Microsoft’s top engineers. “IE3 was our catch up and surpass version,” said Slivka. “I worked between 80 and 100 hours a week.”

That team delivered some of the breakthrough web technologies that are still being used today. “We were the first browser to ship with CSS,” said Slivka, referring to Cascading Style Sheets, the system for writing HTML that separates the design of the page from the text. It’s the reason today’s websites can be built once, and still render correctly on a narrow phone screen or a widescreen monitor.

Slivka recalls the moment they showed a beta of IE3 at a conference in the mid-90s. “The Netscape guys were like, ‘Oh, ****, we’re gonna get hosed’.”

Once IE3 was released in 1996, it was a landmark moment for the web, and one that ultimately led to Microsoft’s market share of web browsers peaking at a ridiculous 96% in 2001. “My team was maniacally focused on building the world’s best web browser,” Slivka said, adding that, in his view, another reason for IE’s dominance was Netscape losing focus as the company focused on its big-money IPO.

However, it was a similar lack of focus that later led to IE’s slow decline, a problem Slivka attributes to former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer not realising the web is “the next platform”.

“IE waned in usage and influence, because Ballmer’s idea was that it was supposed to support Windows,” Slivka explained. “He didn’t understand that people weren’t building Windows applications anymore.”

IE’s influence was already on the wane by the time Google Chrome arrived in 2008, but Google’s browser struck it like a juggernaut. By 2015, IE’s mark share had tumbled to around just one in ten web users.

What browser does Slivka use today now that IE is defunct? “Chrome, of course,” he laughs.