Much like Internet Explorer itself, the funereal boat was quickly overtaken by fire[fox].

Goodbye, Internet Explorer. You gave off a lot more smoke than we expected, and our fire extinguisher did not work.

The eulogy

Friends, we gather here today to mourn the software Microsoft Internet Explorer, which passed away this week at the decrepit age of 19 ½.

IE made a huge impact on our lives in its time on Earth. Most human beings alive today first experienced the internet via Internet Explorer. Back when it was a strapping young browser, it introduced us to the wonder of Geocities, webrings, personal homepages with multiple animated “Under Construction!!” GIFs, and Encarta.

IE touched many lives, and not just sexually, but mostly sexually. Whether you were five curious middle schoolers pretending to be a single 28-year-old horny person in a chat room, or a sweaty loner attempting to jack off to “nudes” of Jennifer Aniston that were clearly just her head pasted onto a porn star’s body with Elmer’s glue, IE opened you to the wonders of human sexuality.

We pause for a moment of silence to picture that swirling blue lower case “e.”

As many of us do, Explorer struggled in its later years. Much as an elderly relative becomes suddenly mystifyingly racist, so IE became a virus-spewing inferno that could leave your hard drive riddled with weird porn popups.

But IE was a different browser for a different time. It was an era before tabs. If you wanted to visit 18 different websites, you opened 18 different windows, and probably your computer crashed. If you wanted to look at a JPEG, that was fine, but it would take 10 minutes to load. But you liked it. It made you feel strong. The “tab generation” will never have that.

After years of brave but very pathetic measures on the part of Microsoft to keep it alive, IE is finally being allowed to die a dignified death. It is survived by its little brother, Bing, but probably not for long.

Please take a moment to imagine a modem dial-up noise being played on the bagpipes.