Still Loading Since 1995
![The Secret Handshake in the Markup: How <!--[if IE]> Taught a Generation to Whisper](/images/conditional-comment-secret-handshake-markup.webp)
Before feature detection became a personality trait, developers kept one browser happy using a syntax that looked like a typo and worked like a miracle. A technical appreciation of the conditional comment, the most polite insult ever written into a style sheet.
Nov 14, 2026
At its peak, my Internet Explorer window had seven toolbars, two search boxes, and a weather widget for a city I did not live in. A field guide to the great toolbar gold rush, and an honest question about what we hoard now instead.
Nov 14, 2026
The error ding did not mean anything bad had happened. It meant something had happened at all. On the strange acoustic landscape of early-2000s office computing, and why a simple Windows WAV file can still make American developers sit up straight in 2026.
Nov 14, 2026
From sitcom punchlines to reaction GIFs, the humble IE progress bar has spent three decades standing in for every kind of agony on Earth. We trace the little blue 'E' from dial-up trauma to permanent meme status.
Nov 06, 2026
We used to wait a minute for a single JPEG and called it a good day on the internet. Now a three-second load sends us into a rage spiral. Maybe Internet Explorer was accidentally teaching us something we've since unlearned.
Nov 06, 2026
ATMs, MRI machines, and allegedly some very important boats have all been caught running Internet Explorer. We rank the strangest IE-powered machines on Earth and explain why nobody dares to update them.
Nov 06, 2026
Internet Explorer's most infamous CSS quirks — the box model disaster, hasLayout, float collapse, and the double margin bug — didn't just torment a generation of developers. They quietly rewired how the entire industry thinks about code, compatibility, and defensive design. This is the strange story of how a browser's failures became the foundation of a profession.
Oct 19, 2026
Not all Internet Explorer versions were created equal — some merely inconvenienced you, while others actively dismantled your will to live. We've ranked every major release from IE 3.0 through IE 11 using a rigorous scientific formula of CSS compliance, JavaScript coherence, and documented instances of developers weeping at their keyboards.
Oct 19, 2026
In 2026, Internet Explorer is officially dead — retired, eulogized, and memorialized across the tech press. And yet, inside the firewall, something keeps the lights on. An investigation into why enterprise organizations quietly maintain IE compatibility layers reveals less about browser technology and more about who actually makes decisions in corporate America.
Oct 19, 2026
Before the ping-pong tables got repossessed and the kombucha taps ran dry, a surprising number of dead startups were still quietly running Internet Explorer. We dug through web archives, talked to survivors, and ranked the most spectacularly embarrassing final browser statistics so you don't have to.
Oct 09, 2026
Before you close this tab in protest, hear us out. Internet Explorer made a lot of mistakes — spectacular, career-damaging, therapy-inducing mistakes. But buried in the rubble of the browser wars are a handful of ideas that were, in retrospect, not entirely wrong. Some of them were even ahead of their time. We know. We're as upset about it as you are.
Sep 02, 2026
Somewhere in a basement office, a developer is lovingly configuring a Windows XP virtual machine just to confirm that a dropdown menu still breaks in IE8. This is not a cry for help. This is a profession. We went deep inside the thriving, slightly unhinged world of IE emulation to find out why.
Sep 02, 2026
Internet Explorer is dead. Unless you work in banking. Or healthcare. Or manufacturing. Or government contracting. Or, honestly, a surprising number of other places where the calendar still reads sometime around 2009 and nobody is particularly bothered by this. We mapped the corporate afterlife of the world's most mocked browser — and found out the obituary was premature.
Sep 02, 2026
You typed in the URL, waited an appropriate amount of time, and somehow landed here. Welcome to Internet Explorer Tan — the internet's most lovingly sarcastic shrine to the browser that defined an era, broke a million websites, and somehow still haunts your dreams. Pull up a plastic chair from 2003 and stay awhile.
Jul 19, 2026
Internet Explorer may have received its official death certificate back in 2022, but somewhere deep in the fluorescent-lit bowels of corporate America, its ghost is still clocking in at 9 AM. We talked to the sysadmins, the vendors, and the haunted developers who are living this nightmare — and somehow, incredibly, laughing about it.
Jul 16, 2026
Your company just announced a bold digital transformation initiative. The slide deck is gorgeous. The buzzwords are immaculate. And buried in slide 47, in a font size legally too small to read, it says 'IE11 compatibility required.' Congratulations — you've been modernized.
Jul 16, 2026
Microsoft promised us a revolutionary AI coding assistant, and sure enough, it's revolutionary — in the same way Internet Explorer was revolutionary. It technically works, it's somehow mandatory at your job, and it requires a workaround for everything you actually need it to do.
Jul 15, 2026
Think you've moved on from Internet Explorer? Your CSS habits say otherwise. This field guide helps you identify the telltale twitches, irrational workarounds, and deeply embedded coping mechanisms that mark a developer forever shaped by the blue 'e' of doom.
Jul 15, 2026
Internet Explorer was officially retired in June 2022. Someone forgot to tell the Fortune 500. Meet the developers who celebrated IE's funeral, bought the cake, and then showed up to work Monday morning to find an ActiveX control that controls a $40 million manufacturing line.
Jul 15, 2026
Somewhere out there, a perfectly healthy developer is deliberately breaking their own website in Internet Explorer — and smiling about it. Meet the masochistic subculture of legacy browser testers who believe that if your layout survives IE6, it can survive anything.
Jul 15, 2026