Rest in Peace

The day Internet Explorer died, front-end engineers around the world exhaled.

It had troubled designers and engineers for years. CSS wouldn't render as expected. JavaScript behaved differently than in every other browser. You wrote IE-specific hacks. You branched with conditional comments. display: flex didn't work, so you rebuilt layouts with floats. Work that shouldn't have existed piled up, all for IE.

The problem wasn't just IE itself. Enterprise clients insisted on IE compatibility. Internal systems were built on IE assumptions. Business apps ran on ActiveX. "Our users still use IE." That single sentence killed any push toward modern browsers. Dropping IE support required not a technical argument but a political one.

An official death was needed.

Engineers said "IE is outdated" and got nowhere. They showed browser share graphs and got nowhere. Only when Microsoft declared "We are ending support for IE" did enterprise clients finally move. Without vendor blessing, Japanese corporations would not budge. Microsoft — a company that prized backward compatibility above all — killing IE themselves was a wise decision, I think. Without it, we might still be writing estimates for IE support today.

IE vanished, and front-end development saw dawn. CSS Grid and Flexbox, used without hesitation. ES6 syntax, written directly. Babel polyfills, fewer. Webpack bundles, smaller. The hours once burned on IE compatibility went to work that actually mattered.

The death of a product can crack open a new era. IE was the greatest cautionary tale we had. Rest in peace. And please, never wake up.