To commemorate her demise, he spent a month and 430,000 won ($330) designing and ordering a tombstone with the Explorer “e” logo and the English message: “It was a good tool for downloading other browsers.”
After the memorial was displayed at a cafe run by his brother in the southern city of Gyeongju, the image of the tombstone went viral.
Jung said that the memorial showed his mixed feelings toward the old shows, which played a huge role in his working life.
“It was a pain in the ass,” he said, “but I’ll call it a love-hate affair because the explorer himself dominated an era.”
He said he found it took longer to make sure his websites and online apps worked with Explorer, compared to other browsers.
But his clients kept asking him to make sure their websites looked good in Explorer, which has been the default browser in South Korean government offices and many banks for years.
But it started losing out to Google Chrome in the late 2000s, and became the subject of countless memes on the Internet, with some developers noting that it was slow compared to its competitors.
Jung said he meant to make people laugh at the tombstone, but he’s still surprised by how far the online joke has gone.
“This is yet another reason for me to thank Explorer, it has now allowed me to make a global joke,” he said.
“I’m sorry he’s gone, but I won’t miss him. So his retirement, for me, is a good death.”
