SEOUL, June 17 (Reuters) – For Jung Ki-young, a South Korean software engineer, Microsoft (MSFT.O) The decision to pull his web browser, Internet Explorer, marked the end of a quarter century’s love-hate relationship with technology.
To commemorate her demise, he spent a month and 430,000 won ($330) designing and ordering a tombstone with the Explorer “e” logo and the English message: “It was a good tool for downloading other browsers.”
After the memorial was displayed at a cafe run by his brother in the southern city of Gyeongju, the image of the tombstone went viral.
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Microsoft scaled back support for the ubiquitous Internet Explorer Wednesday after 27 years of operation, to focus on its faster browser, Microsoft Edge.
Jung said that the memorial showed his mixed feelings toward the old shows, which played a huge role in his working life.
“It was a pain in the ass, but I would call it a love-hate affair because the Explorer itself was dominating an era,” he told Reuters.
He said he found it took longer to make sure his websites and online apps worked with Explorer, compared to other browsers.
An Internet Explorer token, placed by South Korean software engineer Jung Ki-young, is photographed on the roof of a coffee shop in Jeonju, South Korea, June 17, 2022. Jung Ki-Young/Handout via REUTERS
But his clients kept asking him to make sure their websites looked good in Explorer, which has been the default browser in South Korean government offices and many banks for years.
Launched in 1995, Explorer became the world’s leading browser for more than a decade as it was integrated with the Microsoft Windows operating system preinstalled on billions of computers. Read more
But it started losing out to Google Chrome in the late 2000s, and became the subject of countless memes on the Internet, with some developers noting that it was slow compared to its competitors.
Jung said he meant to make people laugh at the tombstone, but he’s still surprised by how far the online joke has gone.
“This is yet another reason for me to thank Explorer, it has now allowed me to make a global joke,” he said.
“I’m sorry he’s gone, but I won’t miss him. So his retirement, for me, is a good death.”
(1 dollar = 1,292.2600 won)
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Reporting by Minwoo Park and Hyunhye Shin; Editing by Andrew Heavens
Our criteria: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.