Welcome Home: Everything You Need to Know About Internet Explorer Tan (Yes, This Site Is Still Loading)
Congratulations. You made it. Whether you stumbled here by accident, typed in the URL with shaking hands fueled by nostalgia and cold brew, or were sent here by a colleague who thought you needed "closure" — you are home. This is Internet Explorer Tan, and we have been waiting for you since approximately 1995.
Take a moment. Breathe. You're safe here.
So, What Exactly Is This Place?
Internet Explorer Tan is a technology blog dedicated to one of the most complicated relationships in the history of human-computer interaction: the bond between web developers, everyday internet users, and the browser that made everyone question their life choices on a near-daily basis.
We are talking, of course, about Internet Explorer.
For those of you who are younger and blissfully unaware — Internet Explorer was Microsoft's flagship web browser, introduced in 1995 and officially laid to rest (sort of, kind of, not really) in 2022. In between those two dates, it managed to become the world's most-used browser, the world's most-despised browser, and somehow, against all odds, the world's most missed browser — at least by those of us who find a peculiar comfort in shared suffering.
Internet Explorer Tan exists to honor all of that. The triumphs. The disasters. The CSS floats that never quite floated right. The z-index values that made no logical sense. The ActiveX controls. Dear lord, the ActiveX controls.
Who Is This For?
Short answer: you.
Longer answer: Internet Explorer Tan is written for developers who have the thousand-yard stare of someone who once had to make a website render identically in IE6, Firefox 2, and Safari — in the same afternoon, with no Stack Overflow. It's for IT professionals who still get a nervous twitch when someone mentions "compatibility mode." It's for regular folks who remember the little blue "e" on their desktop like an old neighborhood friend who always showed up late and occasionally crashed your birthday party.
It's for anyone who has ever felt the unique, specific grief of watching a perfectly valid webpage crumble into an unformatted nightmare the moment it opened in Internet Explorer, and who has chosen — bravely, perhaps unwisely — to laugh about it.
We are not here to be cruel. We are here to process.
What Will You Find Here?
Internet Explorer Tan publishes original editorial content across a few lovingly curated categories:
Features
Long-form deep dives into the technology, culture, and consequences of the IE era. Think investigative journalism, but make it browser-flavored. We've explored the secret corporate ecosystems still clinging to IE compatibility mode, examined how modern browsers are quietly becoming the very monster developers once fled, and traced the psychological aftermath of a generation raised on broken box models.
Nostalgia
Because sometimes you just want to feel things. Our Nostalgia category is a warm, dimly lit corner of the internet where we celebrate the moments, the memories, and the maddening quirks that made IE unforgettable. Yes, unforgettable. Like a car accident you somehow look back on fondly because you made it out alive and learned to drive better.
Opinion
This is where we get spicy. Hot takes on modern browser monopolies, the ghost of IE in today's enterprise software, and whether the chaos of the browser wars actually made us better at our jobs. (Spoiler: it did. It also made us worse at sleeping.)
The Philosophy of This Site (We Have One)
Here at Internet Explorer Tan, we operate from a place of affectionate neutrality. We are not here to tell you that Internet Explorer was good, because that would be revisionist history and also a lie. We are not here to tell you it was purely evil, because that would ignore the very real ways in which it pushed the web forward — often by being so spectacularly wrong that everyone else had to figure out how to be right.
Internet Explorer was, in many ways, the internet's first great shared experience. It united developers in frustration, united users in confusion, and ultimately united an entire industry around the idea that the web deserved better — and that we were the ones who had to build it.
That's worth talking about. That's worth laughing about. That's worth a website.
A Note on the Name
Yes, we are called Internet Explorer Tan. Yes, this is a reference to the fact that Internet Explorer — like a browser left open on a Windows XP desktop in a sun-drenched office — has a particular kind of faded, slightly yellowed quality to it in memory. The kind of thing that looks dated but is somehow still running in the background, consuming resources, refusing to fully close.
We find that relatable.
How to Navigate (Irony Fully Intended)
Use the menu at the top of the page. It should load. If it doesn't, please try refreshing. If refreshing doesn't work, try clearing your cache. If that doesn't work, try a different browser — though we'd prefer you didn't, for sentimental reasons.
You can browse by category, search for specific topics, or simply scroll through our archives and let the waves of recognition wash over you. We update regularly with new features, opinion pieces, and the occasional deep dive into whatever modern technology is currently triggering our collective browser-war PTSD.
Come Back Often
We mean that. Internet Explorer Tan is a living document of a very specific moment in internet history — a moment that shaped everything that came after it, for better and for worse. New articles go up regularly, and there is, frankly, no shortage of material. The ghost of IE is everywhere once you start looking: in enterprise software, in legacy codebases, in the anxious muscle memory of developers who still instinctively add vendor prefixes to everything just in case.
We will be here, still loading, still publishing, still finding new things to say about a browser that technically no longer exists but somehow never really left.
Welcome to Internet Explorer Tan. Make yourself at home.
Just don't expect the page to render correctly on the first try.