It was Aug. 16, 1995. “Waterfalls” by TLC was the No. 1 song in the country. Bill Clinton was in the White House. And Microsoft introduced a new way to surf the web: Internet Explorer.
It was buggy and slow, many said. But it was always there. Until it wasn’t. On Wednesday, the web browser, loved and loathed by a generation, was officially retired, swept into the dustbin of internet history. The occasion stirred surprisingly strong feelings of nostalgia for the 1990s and early 2000s, an era when many first came to know the online world through stuttering dial-up connections, chat rooms and long-gone social media sites like Friendster.
Now that Internet Explorer is no more, many pined for a time when the little blue icon with the lowercase “e” was their escape route out of childhood bedrooms, college dorm rooms and office cubicles. “Even though I don’t use it anymore, I’m still going to miss the idea of it,” said Brett Babino, 27, an Amazon worker from Port Arthur, Texas, who was 11 when he started using Internet Explorer to do schoolwork and play online games like Club Penguin.
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