IE 'grave' sums up pain, joy of S. Koreans for its demise

SEOUL－A South Korean engineer who built a grave for Internet Explorer－photos of which quickly went viral－said on Friday that the now-defunct web browser had made his life a misery.

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.

In honor 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 Jung Ki-young.

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

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 remained the default browser for many Seoul government sites until very recently, local reports said.

As a web developer, Jung said 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," the 38-year-old engineer 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.

He said he was pleased by the response to his joke grave, and that he and his brother, the owner of the cafe, plan to leave the monument on the cafe's rooftop indefinitely.

"It's been very exciting to make others laugh," Jung said.

Agencies Via Xinhua