SEOUL, June 17 (Reuters) – For South Korean software engineer Jung Ki-young, Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O)’s decision to retire its Internet Explorer web browser marked a 25-year love-hate relationship with the technology. The end of the intertwined relationship.
To mark its demise, he spent a month and 430,000 won ($330) designing and ordering a tombstone with Explorer’s “e” logo and an epitaph in English: “He’s a great tool for downloading other browsers. .”
Photos of the tombstone went viral online after the memorial was displayed at a cafe run by the brothers in the southern city of Gyeongju.
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After 27 years of operation, Microsoft on Wednesday scaled back support for the once-ubiquitous Internet Explorer to focus on its faster browser, Microsoft Edge.
Jung said the memorial shows his mixed feelings about the old software that played such a big role in his working life.
“It’s a pain, but I think it’s a love-hate relationship because the Explorers themselves used to dominate an era,” he told Reuters.
He says he finds his websites and online applications take longer to use with Explorer than other browsers.
South Korean software engineer Jung Ki-young photographs the tombstone of the Internet Explorer browser on the roof of a cafe in Gyeongju, South Korea, June 17, 2022. Jung Ki-Young/Handout via REUTERS
But his clients have been asking him to make sure their websites look good in Explorer, which has been the default browser for South Korean government offices and many banks for years.
Launched in 1995, Explorer has been the world’s leading browser for over a decade because it’s bundled with the Microsoft Windows operating system preinstalled on billions of computers.read more
But it began to lose out to Google’s Chrome in the late 2000s and has been the subject of countless internet memes, with some developers arguing that it underperformed its rivals.
Jung said he intended to use the tombstone to make people laugh, but was still surprised by how far the joke was circulating online.
“That’s another reason I’m thankful for the Explorers, which now allow me to make a world-class joke,” he said.
“I’m sorry it’s gone, but I’m not going to miss it. So its retirement, for me, is a good death.”
(1 USD = 1,292.2600 KRW)
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Reporting by Minwoo Park and Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Andrew Paradise
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