A SOUTH Korean engineer who built a grave for Internet Explorer (IE) – photos of which quickly went viral – told AFP that the now-defunct web browser had made his life a misery today.

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

In honour of the “death” of the browser, a gravestone marked with its signature “e” logo was set up on the rooftop of a café in Gyeongju by engineer Jung Ki-young, 38.

“He was a good tool to use to download other browsers,” read the inscription on the gravestone.

Images of the tombstone quickly spread online, with users of social media site Reddit upvoting it tens of thousands of times.

Once dominant worldwide, IE was widely reviled due to its slowness and glitches in recent years.

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 government sites until very recently, said local reports.

Websites of the Korea Expressway Corporation and Korea Water Resources Corporation functioned properly only in IE until at least June 10, according to a report by the Maeil Economic Daily.

‘Suffering’ for IE

As a software engineer and web developer, Jung said he constantly “suffered” at work because of compatibility issues involving the now-defunct browser.

“When you are doing web development work in South Korea, the expectation is always that it should look good in Internet Explorer rather than Chrome.”

Websites that look good in other browsers, such as Chrome or Safari, can look very wrong in IE, which often forces him to spend many extra hours working to ensure compatibility.

Jung said he is “overjoyed” by the browser’s retirement.

But also said he felt emotional and nostalgic about IE’s demise, as he remembers its heyday – one of the reasons he was inspired to erect the grave stone.

He quoted Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki: “People are often relieved that machines do not have souls, but we as human beings actually give our hearts to them.”

He said he is pleased by the response to his joke grave and that he and his brother – who owns the café – plan to leave the monument on the rooftop indefinitely.

“It has been very exciting to make others laugh.” – AFP, June 17, 2022.