Today is the last day for Microsoft Explorer. It will no longer be supported by Microsoft, and it is clearly no longer the Internet browser of choice. That said, I expect we will still receive complaints 5 years from now that a website doesn’t work, only to find that the user is still using Microsoft Explorer in 2027.
Explorer was launched in 1995, and subject to anti-trust lawsuits and monopoly accusations in 1997. That was only 25 years ago. The Internet was in its infancy and most of us couldn’t comprehend where this technology would take us and how much it would change. I often wonder how my parents planned a family vacation without the Internet, and they had even less free time because they had to spend entire Sunday afternoons driving around just to pay bills.
Like seemingly everything else in tech, eventually someone will come along and make a better version and wipe you out. See Blackberry, Napster and iPods. But ‘eventually’ usually isn’t very far off, when you think how many companies and products have surged to global domination and completely disappeared in that 25 year window. As the pace of technology increases will ‘eventually’ start coming in shorter and shorter increments? How long will it take for the next software behemoth or tech giant rise and fall?
Internet explorer is dead,
Long live Chrome… Maybe