Internet Explorer and Me

Michael Pro

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codeburst

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3 min read

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Jan 7, 2019

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I have been working with Internet Explorer my whole software engineer’s life. I feel nostalgic for good old days mixed with painful memories fixing IE bugs.

I would like to share some thoughts and highlights from this journey.

Internet Explorer 4. 1997

No CSS. Just good old HTML and Javascript :)

I started working as Software Engineer in 1998 and can you believe I built my first web site supporting Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.

Internet Explorer 5. 1999

CSS. W3C standards. Quirks mode.

I recall building a website and testing it in IE5.5 but don’t have much to highlight here.

Internet Explorer 6. 2001

Internet Explorer’s total domination. Reaching 95% of market share.

👍We should give some credit to Internet Explorer team here. The box model used originally in Internet Explorer is considered superior and is used as default in many popular UI libraries like Bootstrap.

The CSS Working Group from W3C even admitted this was a design mistake to use content-box by default and not border-box.

I started using Opera as my primary browser.

Internet Explorer 7. 2006

Who remembers working with IE7. I don’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Internet Explorer 8. 2009

HTML5. Rise of Chrome. Browser wars.

I worked on several projects where teams hired me just to make websites work in IE8. It is quite easy if you worked with IE4 😈.

Want to take an acid test?

I switched from Opera to Chrome as my primary browser.

Internet Explorer from v9 to v11. 2011–2014

Evergreen hopes for IE9🙏

👍 Big credit goes to Microsoft for proposing and implementing CSS grid layout in IE10 .

Internet explorer has always been a component of operating system Windows. Unlike a standalone software product it has quite a different life-cycle. This partially explains why it was such a long and painful transition from IE8.

According to Microsoft, IE11 is supported until the end of Windows 10 which is on October 14, 2025. 😲

Our team has been supporting IE11 for the last 5 years. Corporate users are in general more conservative and tend to use older browsers probably due to corporate polices.

Edge. 2015

Re-branding of Internet Explorer as Edge wasn’t the best idea from my perspective. As a result we have to think of supporting Internet Explorer besides Edge for another 5–10 years. Evergreen browser you said 😠?

Finally, Edge will be using Chromium which could have a negative impact on the industry.

Thoughts

Well, this whole story is an example of some good engineering, missed opportunities and questionable product management.

Imagine if we would have an Internet Explorer supporting ES2015, PWA, Web components… 🙏