Goodbye Internet Explorer, the most "memable" browser ever

UPDATE 14.02.23: less than a year after Microsoft announced its decision to stop supporting Internet Explorer 11, the famous browser has finally stopped working. In fact, by clicking on the program icon, it will offer us to switch to Edge, Microsoft's new home browser that has, in fact, permanently retired from its predecessor. A historic day then, marking the end of what had become synonymous with the early Internet era, the one made of 56k Modems and endless waits to load an image.

«Internet Explorer 11 will be retired and support will no longer be available on 15 June 2022» reads Microsoft's technical support page - a short and curt eulogy for the most nostalgic Internet browser in the history of the web. While somewhat all members of the Millennial generation and all previous generations had started exploring the Internet with Explorer, over time its fame was linked to memes mocking its proverbial slowness. But it was precisely those memes that consecrated its place in the pop culture of the inter-millennium, with a 'career' that began in 1995 and ended today after years of honourable service. From today, if you try to open the browser, you will be redirected to Microsoft Edge, and future Windows updates will gradually delete Explorer, which will only survive in the form of the IE11 engine that Edge will use to open obsolete websites.

With Explorer goes away an icon, but above all goes away one of the last memories of the 'first' Internet, the one that made modems croak horribly, the one in which fluid pages and interactive images were a science-fiction dream - but also the one that seemed to hold the most promise for a whole world that, at the brink of the 20th century, was still tied to the uncomfortable analogue medium and for which the Encarta encyclopaedia represented the last frontier of digital culture. For many years, before Firefox or Chrome came along with their swiftness and agility, the blue 'E' of Explorer was the very symbol of the Internet, and even in meme form that symbol has remained, albeit as a comical presence representing the slowness of the technology of yesteryear and the degree of sophistication to which we have now arrived.