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WATCH: RIP IE – To the surprise of absolutely no one, Internet Explorer dies aged 27
A gravestone marked with the browser's signature 'e' logo is inscribed: 'He was a good tool to use to download other browsers'.
Photo: Kiyoung Jung/AFP | Kiyoung Jung
Microsoft Internet Explorer was the icon of browsers and choice for millions (if not billions) of people across the globe.
Now, the once favourite browser has finally passed on in South Korea.
As per an AFP report, the South Korean engineer who built a grave for Internet Explorer – photos of which quickly went viral – said the now-defunct web browser had made his life a misery.
The country has some of the world’s fastest average internet speeds and remained bizarrely wedded to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which was retired by the company earlier this week after 26 years.
In honour of the browser’s ‘death’, a gravestone marked with its signature ‘e’ logo was set up on the rooftop of a cafe in South Korea’s southern city of Gyeongju by engineer Kiyoung Jung, 38.
“He was a good tool to use to download other browsers,” the gravestone’s inscription reads.
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Images of Jung’s joke tombstone quickly spread online, with users of social media site Reddit upvoting it more than tens of thousands of times.
IE browser’s gravestone
As a software engineer and web developer, Jung told AFP he constantly “suffered” at work because of compatibility issues involving the now-defunct browser.
“In South Korea, when you are doing web development work, the expectation was always that it should look good in Internet Explorer, rather than Chrome,” he said.
Jung said while he was “overjoyed” by IE’s retirement, he also felt genuinely nostalgic and emotional about the browser’s demise, as he remembers its heyday – one of the reasons he was inspired to erect the gravestone.
He said he was pleased by the response to his joke grave and that he and his brother (who owns the cafe) plan to leave the monument on the rooftop in Gyeongju indefinitely.
“It’s been very exciting to make others laugh,” he said.
Internet Explorer is dead, what next?
On its official blog, Microsoft said opening Internet Explorer over the next few months will progressively redirect users to their new modern browser – Microsoft Edge with IE mode.
Users will still see the Internet Explorer icon on their devices (such as on the taskbar or in the Start menu) but if they click to open Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge will open instead with easy access to IE mode.
Eventually, Internet Explorer will be disabled permanently as part of a future Windows Update, at which point the Internet Explorer icons on users’ devices will be removed.
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Kiyoung Jung’s comments via AFP.
