Internet Explorer is dying but it shouldn’t be killed outright as it still has purpose in the world. I’ll explain.
Way back when, 4000 years before Christ, humans started to build civilisations around agriculture. The increase in commerce required a system of language to track all the new activity. Writing was born.
Human population and technological advancement now proceeds at logarithmic pace, but our need for a system of language to manage our commerce hasn’t changed at all.
Enter the browser wars, the new battlefield. The new Silk Road. It started at Universities as a communication network but quickly grew to become the single most unifying force the world has yet seen. Netscape and Microsoft sought to rule this new world. Microsoft won. For a short time.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the standard browser, it seemed there were no other browsers, no one dared rise up. Who could defeat a regime that had kids at home and corporations all using IE6? Then came all sorts of challengers to the throne, the city-states of Rome all smelled weakness. They stopped paying their tributes and while not declaring out and out war began to voice their displeasure with action.
Microsoft’s influence is waning in favour of a faster, more efficient and universal web but we’re in the in between stage where we need to support the old Cuneiform while we transition to a more alphabetical writing. Progress!
Some are saying that we should be angry that we have to support older languages as we transition to new ones. I disagree. Instead, we should move forward as fast as we can, but to try to bury the old ways to make way for the new makes us no better than tyrants for doing so.
Why would we kill Latin so that Spanish, French and Italian could fully develop? We wouldn’t, but I do agree that Latin has its place as the root of Romance Languages, their foundation, and how we now name any species of plant or animal on Earth, but that’s the extent of its usefulness, not in daily life.
