UnNews:Internet Explorer no longer a Browser

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

28 August 2006

The Brown Screen of Death, a typical consequence of using the Internet Explorer

Vladivostock, USSR -- After a heated discussion, the Internet Advancement Union (IAU) voted yesterday by a narrow margin that the Internet Explorer is no longer a browser. This vote downsizes the internet from nine browsers to just eight.

The Internet Explorer is demoted by the resolution to a category of dwarf browsers together with Apple Safari and Tetris.

According to the new definition, dwarf browsers are applications that "can be used to surf the internet just like regular browsers, but that have failed to clear their neighborhood from bloated operating systems."

"The Internet Explorer is a dwarf browser by the ... definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of beyond-the-pale internet applications," states the approved resolution.

But the new definition has provoked a backlash. Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft's Vista mission, says the new definition is "awful".

"The definition introduced is fundamentally flawed," he told UnNews. "As a scientologist, I'm embarrassed. I am going to fucking kill the entire IAU board."

However, recent discoveries of other non-functional, useless applications in the Internet Explorer's neighborhood have led most zoologists and Web 2.0 evangelists to agree that Microsoft's flagship should never have been termed a browser in the first place.

Al Gore, who discovered the internet in 2002 while looking for a missing ballot in Florida, is pleased with the IAU's decision. "As far as I'm concerned, the right decision was made," he told UnNews. "I know a browser when I see it and there are eight of them."

His colleague Steve Jobs, who discovered Safari, a small browsoid in the OSX cloud in 2003 and who has recently announced that he will run for Evil Emperor of the Universe in 2007, agrees.

"The public is not going to be excited by the fact that the Internet Explorer has been kicked out," Jobs said. "But it's the right thing to do. Of course, this means that, as of today, I can no longer claim to have discovered a browser, but I can still rule the universe," he added. "And of course, I will continue to make awful movies about toys and cars that can talk."

The next few years are likely to see the discovery of hundreds of Internet-Explorer-sized applications, Jobs said, and if all of them are considered "browsers", things would get "very confusing" and "difficult to control".

The IAU's decision has sparked a public outrage. Concerned citizens and women all over the United States have petitioned to have the Internet Explorer reinstated as a browser. "Sure, it never worked properly and no one was using it anyway," said Melinda Gates, a primary school teacher in Topeka, Kansas. "But they should have 'grandfathered' it for historical reasons."

School children are picketing the Smithsonian Institute, where the IAU is headquartered, demanding an immediate reversal of the controversial vote and threatening mass emigration to Cuba, whose democratically elected president Jorge Arbusto has already announced that his country will not accept the IAU's ruling.

"I invite all users of Internet Explorer and other malcontents to come to Cuba and join our fight against everybody else," he said on the Cuban Broadcasting Syndicate (CBS). "The revolution is a dictatorship of the explored against the explorers".