South Korean man builds grave for internet explorer, says it was a good tool to ‘download other browsers’

After the internet explorer browser was recently shut down by Microsoft, a South Korean engineer built a grave for it, photos of which quickly went viral. In honour of the browser's "death", a gravestone marked with its signature "e" logo was set up on the rooftop of a cafe in South Korea's southern city of Gyeongju by engineer Kiyoung Jung, 38.

South Korea, which has some of the world's fastest average internet speeds, remained bizarrely wedded to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which was retired by the company earlier this week after 27 years.

"He was a good tool to use to download other browsers," the gravestone's inscription reads.

Images of Jung's joke tombstone quickly spread online, with users of social media site Reddit upvoting it tens of thousands of times. Once dominant globally, Internet Explorer was widely reviled in recent years due to its slowness and glitches.

But in South Korea, it was mandatory for online banking and shopping until about 2014, as all such online activities required sites to use ActiveX -- a plugin created by Microsoft. It remained the default browser for many Seoul government sites until very recently, local reports said.

The websites of the Korea Water Resources Corporation and the Korea Expressway Corporation only functioned properly in IE until at least June 10, according to a report by the Maeil Economic Daily. As a software engineer and web developer, Jung says he constantly "suffered" at work because of compatibility issues involving the now-defunct browser.

"In South Korea, when you are doing web development work, the expectation was always that it should look good in Internet Explorer, rather than Chrome," he said.

Websites that look good in other browsers, such as Safari or Chrome, can look very wrong in IE, which often forced him to spend many extra hours working to ensure compatibility. Jung said that he was "overjoyed" by IE's retirement.

But he also said he felt genuinely nostalgic and emotional about the browser's demise, as he remembers its heyday -- one of the reasons he was inspired to erect the gravestone.

(with inputs from agencies)

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