Goodbye Internet Explorer, we won't miss you

There is a joke among us geeks. It goes something like this:

Geek 1: Do you know the new Internet Explorer is so much faster?

Geek 2: Seriously... faster?

Geek 1: Yes, now it downloads Chrome even faster!

For several years now, this has been the story of the Internet Explorer (IE). It is a browser that comes bundled with the Windows computers - though, not in Europe after regulatory bodies there slammed Microsoft hard for pushing something by default - in almost every country, including India. And the first thing that most of the people, or at least the people who are comfortable with computers, do is download some other web browser using their IE.

Now, the IE is facing a retirement. While Microsoft won't outrightly kill this almost 20-year-old web browser, it will be replaced by something new - for now called Spartan - as the default browser in Windows 10.

So what should we make of it? Well, better late than never. The Internet Explorer was (and continues to be) a terrible program compared to its peers. Nobody is going to miss it.

Even in its early days in the middle of '90s, there were better browsers than the IE. Technically, even the Netscape was a better browser. But Microsoft bundled the IE with Windows and that made it a household name. Gradually other browsers faded out of existence or were pushed to margins. This continued until the early 2000 when Firefox burst on the scene. Built using parts of Netscape Navigator, which was killed by the IE in a war that Netscape couldn't have won, the early builds of Firefox were named Phoenix - after the bird that rises from the ashes. Firefox showed people what they were missing. It made tabbed browsing a standard. It brought in better download management.

Opera, Google's Chrome, and Apple's Safari all built on the general direction provided by Firefox, even as Microsoft dithered with the IE.

The IE became so laggard compared to the other browsers, particularly Chrome and Firefox, that it bordered on the verge of being a useless program. The only thing that kept it in the fray was the fact that it came with Windows and that it was the program that people used to download a new browser when they set up their machines.

Microsoft tried to review Internet Explorer several times. A new javascript engine called Chakra was added to it in 2011 to make it faster, but it wasn't enough.

Apparently, now it has became clear even within Microsoft that the IE is beyond redemption. Even if the company somehow improves it and makes it as good as other browsers, the tens of jokes on the IE floating around the web means that it will always be considered an inferior program.

Microsoft embarking on building a new browser from scratch, with an entirely new name and no association with the IE, is a good step. It may even help consumers in a big way because after several years of frantic activity, the browser market has started to look a little stale. Google's Chrome dominates but it has its own set of issues. Firefox, at least as an idea, is the best browser among all right now but it doesn't have the kind of technological vision or clout to push the boundaries again.

May be Microsoft with its new browser can provide some fresh perspective to consumers.

As for Internet Explorer, I don't think anyone is going to mourn its demise, except for maybe engineers at organisations like MTNL, who run such legacy applications that they still require their routers to be accessed with the IE.