How did Internet Explorer become a victim of joke for being slow?

We all use to have a good laugh at the memes like this trolling the Internet Explorer being slower than other contemporary browsers.

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But how does internet explorer became victim of this joke?

Well, this goes back to the days with the first release of Windows 7, the most popular edition of Windows used till the date. Earlier releases of Windows 7 used to come with a Internet Explorer version 8.

Like all the web browsers, Internet Explorer too has a rendering Engine and a JavaScript Engine. The web pages that the web browsers loads does nor resides on the server as those are displayed. But actually are in different pieces consisting of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These web pages static or dynamic (Dynamic web pages are dynamic until those are processed on server, once those are processed, the generated HTML is sent from the server) are received by browsers and all the different pieces of HTML, CSS and JavaScript are put together by browser to create and display a page. The layout and rendering engine processes the HTML & CSS (for layout and styles) and the JavaScript engine processes the JavaScript (for client side behavior of elements) which needs to be transferred to machine language for processing and client side. 

Each browser uses the rendering and JavaScript engine they have developed in-house or a fork of any open source engines. In the Internet Explorer v8 and its earlier versions Microsoft was using their JScript JavaScript Engine. Unlike other JavaScript Engines used by other browser of its time (V8 by chrome, SpiderMonkey by Firefox) which were a JavaScript compiler and had the ability to convert entire JavaScript code in few passes the JScript was an interpreter which used to convert the Javascriipt code line by line. So Internecine Explore would take comparatively larger amount of time to load the JavaScript.

But that was the time when there was a sudden rise in development and popularity websites like Facebook which have a huge amount of code written in JavaScript or JavaScript frameworks like jquery etc to  increase the performance. The poor Internet Explorer with a JavaScript interpreter was damn slow on these sites whereas other browsers like Chrome and  Firefox. So people started to turn to these alternative browsers. 

It took 2 years for Microsoft to release a better version of IE, Internet Explorer 9 in March 2011 which had a new JavaScript Engine Chakra which was a Javascript compiler and could compete with other browsers in processing speed of JavaScript. Microsoft even shared this improvement in its Developer IEBlog as:

"IE8, like other versions of IE before it, included a script interpreter for running JavaScript. Pure interpreters are usually adequate for traditional web pages with limited amounts of script, and we did a lot of work to improve performance of these sites in Internet Explorer 8, both in script as well as across the browser.

With IE9, we decided that we needed a better approach to building a script engine for the present and future demands of the Web. Clearly, the new engine had to be able to run traditional pages well. But the engine also needed to perform well on Web applications of today and the HTML5 application of tomorrow, as well as keep up with changes in the Web and in the devices used to browse it."

But two years were long enough for people to move to other browsers. There is also a meme for the only job left for the IE exlorer during this time:

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So it was like people moved on to other browsers and never came back to IE or came back when it was the only option to download the other browser.

The reason behind IE not being popular again among users even after that upgrade was not automatically upgrading the existing ones and not keeping up to support required for latest trends in market or web like HTML5, CSS3 etc.

Chrome on the other hand used to provide invisible  updates to all the users. It was since Google started providing chrome as a service rather than product and it became like install and forget to maintain it. Support for all the latest layout and rendering pieces like HTML5,CSS3 was being automatically provided to users.

In addition to that a wide array of easy to install extensions and application in chrome, plugins in Firefox were always an additional delight for the users which they did not wanted to leave for IE. And in all that IE became a victim for the memes and trolls.

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