Internet Explorer in Equestria

by TechnoNerd

First published February 19th, 2018 02:40

After a years-long, hard fought battle of the browsers, Internet Explorer, once the reigning king of the interwebz, is overthrown. First by its archrival, Firefox, of whom had risen from the ashes of a fallen ally, and then Chrome. Shunned and memed out of existence, there was no place anymore for the old browser. Even its parent corporation had succeeded it with a faster, Edge-ier browser.

And guess where the heck Internet Explorer ended up?

Slightly modified to tie into MLP a bit more. I didn't mention the Mane Six by name enough times.

Chapters

What's the letter of the day? Y!

What's the letter of the day? Y!
View Online

Internet Explorer in Equestria

What's the letter of the day? Y!

Author's Note

Why I do this to myself, I don't know. Have a trollfic. And yes, each of the browsers I've listed are ones that I've actually tried myself out of curiosity, but I personally jump between Chrome and Firefox depending on what I'm doing.

What's the letter of the day? Y!

Internet Explorer. Once the de-facto browser of an era... reduced to a smoldering shamble of code. The battle was long and hard. There were many contestants. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and smaller competitors. Midori, K-Meleon, and so on. Of course, at the beginning of the Browser Wars, Internet Explorer had handily defeated its largest rival, Netscape. Out of the fallen browser's ashes, however, sprung Firefox, vowing to end the corporate monopoly Internet Explorer, and by extension Microsoft, had held over the internet.

...

Also, Chrome was flung off of Safari somewhere along the line, and Opera in turn began building on Chrome's code. Additionally, at some point a little thing called "Off-By-One" sprung into existence as one of the most stripped-down browsers to exist outside of text-based browsers. So that happened.

...

What was this story about again? Um... upside-down flying cows? No. Giraffes on roller skates? No... uh, let's see. Something about farm animals if I remember correctly. Undead chickens? Nope. I hardly remember coming up with that at anypoint. Ah, heck. I guess this is what happens when you start off a story with a history lesson on the Great Browser Wars of the 21st century-- oh. I remember now. Sapient small horses.

Internet Explorer landed with a thud on the cool grass, still sparking violently from a battle lost long ago. An airy breeze passed overhead, gently rustling the leaves of the nearby trees.

Suddenly, a strangely robotic, animalistic screech began to emanate from the cyan-turqoise-off-blue-colored body of Internet Explorer, now a living, breathing being because the author decided to make something that was already absurd even more absurd than it ever could've been. Heaving heavily, the strange behemoth of a lower-case e stumbled to its feet. That is, if it had any in the first place. It stared upwards to the rolling hills that contrasted against the cloudy sky, a breath of relief being released as the obsolete browser came to recognize its familiar backdrop of home; Windows XP.

"Quick!" A squeaky voice called through the wind, "It's over here! I saw it fall out of the sky!"

The browser let out a metallic growl as animal-like shapes began to fill its vision. Had the Firefox returned to finish it off?

"Um..." another voice began, "Why are ya growlin' at us? We've been here for half an hour now, and you've just been... uh, floating there. Menacingly."

Internet Explorer remained frozen for another few minutes, twitching as it tried and failed to render the unfamiliar web standard that it saw before it. Or at least, until its Adobe Shockwave FlashTM plugin finally loaded. In an instant, its vision cleared, and rather than seeing the angry flaming fox it had fought for so long against, it saw... six technicolor horses?

The purple one with wings and a horn cantered up to it, prodding the browser's metallic side with a hoof. "It's... metal." the horse declared, curiously inspecting it from different angle, "Do you girls think it's some kind of machine?"

With a screech of buggy code and proprietary standards, the browser swat away at the purple horse.

"Hey!" Pinkie yelled angrily in return as its friend narrowly missed the blow, "What did you do that for?! C'mon, Twilight, get up!"

A large display materialized above the browser, navigating to a video clip on Youtube. Or at least, tried to. Several minutes later, it finally spoke through the words of Youtube.

"You remind me of someone." a low, gravelly voice growled.

Rainbow-mane flying horse, or Rainbow Dash, as the browser soon found via the power of memes, was the next to speak, swooping down and landing atop the browser. "Yeah, so?" rainbow horse replied, "Doesn't mean that you gotta be mean to my friends!"

For another few minutes, the place remained silent as Internet Explorer tried to play another video.

"Bah. Humbug!" The browser screeched, flinging rainbow-horse off itself with an ad-blocker.

In the place of Rainbow Dash, a pastel-yellow winged horse took its place. This one, Fluttershy, seemed to be the apparent waifu of many. "You don't have to be so mean, y'know." She began, "I mean, we don't even know why you're angry yet!"

"I do not know." A voice emanated from the floating display another handful of minutes later. "Nor do I caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa--"

Twilight Sparkle the purple wingy horned horse frowned, stepping back towards the floating browser, of which was now violently shaking... and creating duplicate images of itself wherever it moved?

"aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA--"

Twilight held up a wing to protect her friends, shielding them from the buggy horrors of Internet Explorer.

"Twilight," the final horse, a pale unicorn with an exquisite mane, "do you believe that now may be a good time to gather the Elements of Harmony and rid ourselves of this... this demon of a being?"

Twilight nodded. "Yeah." She agreed, "Let's do that, before we have a repeat of Tirek or Discord again."

And so Internet Explorer remained steadfastly frozen at the hilltop, screeching as loud as it can for hours on end, before suddenly silencing. It had finally overloaded itself, and crashed.

"There you are!" Pinkie squealed, the pink ponk pronking up the hill towards the BSOD-ed remains of Internet Explorer. "...What happened to you? I brought you a Sorry-For-Blasting-You-With-The-Elements-Of-Harmony cake!"

Internet Explorer didn't respond. It had stopped responding long ago, and was still trying to send crash information back to Microsoft.

"Come on, silly!" The mare nudged the cake further towards the crashed browser.

Twilight facehoofed loudly. "Pinkie," she groaned, "I don't think that it's even alive anymore."

Pink horse, or Pinkie as purple horse had called the mare, stared worriedly towards Internet Explorer. "You-- you mean..."

Abruptly, the browser shot back into the air, hovering devilishly as the Nyan Cat theme began to play from all directions. The scenery around it began to morph and twist in an ever-growing ball of destruction.

"YOUR FILES HAVE BEEN ENCRYPTED." A blaring voice emanated from all around, "PAY 10 BITCOINS OR YOUR FILES WILL REMAIN ENCRYPTED OR INACCESSIBLE."

Twilight shook her head in frustration, stamping her feet angrily. "You know what?" She began, her horn lighting up, "Screw this. Girls, your positions!"

Just like that, Internet Explorer was no more, save for lingering scraps of light-blue metal littering the (encrypted and ransomware-infested) ground.

But somewhere, high up in the air, an even greater foe lingered on...

Microsoft Bob.