The browser wars have been compressed into clean timelines now. Nathan Lineback’s Internet Explorer Is Evil preserves something those timelines usually remove: how pissed off people actually were.
Visit Internet Explorer Is Evil
The site describes itself as a record of the humor and controversy around Microsoft’s introduction and promotion of Internet Explorer. It grew out of the era when IE was being tightly integrated with Windows, Netscape was collapsing, ActiveX was a security argument at every technical lunch table, and browser choice was tangled up with operating-system power.
The historical value is not neutrality. The historical value is precisely that this is not neutral.
The web had buttons for hatred
There is an entire page of anti-IE buttons and banners.
Internet Exploder. Burn IE. Nuke Internet Explorer. Microsoft Internet Assimilator. A spinning pentagram. A Borg cube. A tombstone. A fake blue-screen joke.
Another page preserves parody WAV files, old MIDI files and a Windows screen saver that fills the display with burning Internet Explorer logos.
This is what political cartoons looked like when the political entity was a web browser.
The “Reasons not to use Internet Explorer” page mixes real technical complaints with deliberately stupid ones. System DLL replacement, ActiveX and operating-system integration sit next to claims that IE scares children, bites people’s heads off and costs exactly one soul per installed copy.
That mixture tells you more about late-1990s webmaster culture than a polished history ever could.
It kept going after the war
Lineback did not simply freeze the site when Firefox arrived. Later rants followed Microsoft through newer versions of IE, Edge, compatibility modes and the eventual retirement of the Internet Explorer application.
The broader ToastyTech site also contains the GUI Gallery, Windows utilities, old DOOM material and other preserved bits of personal-computing history.
For a webmaster in 2026, this is useful context. Browser compatibility arguments did not begin with Chromium, and platform owners trying to make their preferred browser unavoidable is not a new anxiety.
This page came from CacheRat’s larger collection of surviving old-web material.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
Do not visit expecting detached scholarship. Visit because detached scholarship rarely includes a rotating demonic Internet Explorer logo.