BENGALURU: Wednesday marked the end of an era with the first-ever internet browser, Internet Explorer, calling it quits. Launched by Microsoft in 1995, the announcement of its retirement came 27 years later. Despite being infamous for its endless wait to load, the news came as a heartbreak to Priya Jain, a city-based entrepreneur. Even though she hasn’t been using the browser for years now, Jain recalls that she and her classmates knew nothing but Internet Explorer during their school days. “When I was in Class 8, the browser was so new that we thought it was the highest form of technology we will ever have,” she says. But this browser is to us what Doordarshan was to our parents, adds Jain.
“Most of us cannot relate to a time when TV screens used to read Rukawat ke liye khed hai (inconvenience is regretted) and a band of colours would appear on the screen that viewers would watch for hours. This is what we did with Internet Explorer, wait for it to load for hours. I think of a meme (see picture) from Titanic whenever I think of Internet Explorer,” she says. Like Jain, Chandan Raj says that the browser was his childhood buddy.
An introvert by nature, Raj would spend most of the time on his desktop. “My first memory of the browser is the weird dial-up connection music. The only search engines we had back in the ’90s were Yahoo and MSN. I would mostly use the browser to download songs for free,” says the businessman. Raj says he and those who owned a computer with access to the internet, felt elite. “We would divide school projects — one of us would download texts, the other would save pictures, and others would download songs — all with Internet Explorer.
We’d save everything on pen drives (a luxury those days) to take printouts from the nearest cyber cafes,” he recalls. Shashank R, a city-based trader, took quite some time to get used to other browsers. “Opera, Firefox or Chrome, no matter which browser I wanted to open, I would click on Internet Explorer by default. But a core memory is that I used it to download other browsers,” he says.
Sumaiya Zamindar, a homebaker, recalls being fascinated with baking games as a child. “I remember wanting to bake a cake online. I would patiently wait for the internet connection to set up and then launch Explorer. I would let the game load for 15 minutes, come back and play for five minutes,” says Zamindar, adding that memories of Internet Explorer remind her of times much simpler.