On 14 June, CWI’s Steven Pemberton was interviewed on national radio and television in the Netherlands, talking about the end of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. He appeared in the 6 and 8 o’clock NOS News on Dutch national TV, and in ‘News & Co’ on Radio 1. Pemberton, who in his time at CWI was one of the first Internet users in Europe, knows a lot about browser technology: he was a co-designer of HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, RDFa, and other Web technologies at W3C.
The news items can be found here, in Dutch:
- NOS 8 o’clock news, NPO1 TV (14 June, starting at 20.00h; IE item from 17:32)
- NOS 6 o’clock news, NPO1 TV (14 June, starting at 18.00h, IE item from 11.23)
- Radio Nieuws & Co, NPO Radio1 (14 June 2022, item on IE from from 36:30)
- News article from NOS' technology editor Nando Kasteleijn on the NOS website
The NOS website writes, originally in Dutch:
“Generations have grown up with it, but the chance that you still use the browser is small. On 15 June 2022 Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser for many years, retires. The position of most important browser has been held by Google Chrome for a decade now. (…) The company says that in the coming months users will be referred to its successor: Edge. Eventually, the program will be completely discontinued via a software update.
Internet Explorer was released in the summer of 1995. "Microsoft was actually very late," says Steven Pemberton, who has been a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica for nearly forty years. "At that time, Netscape was very popular and that company controlled the market. Microsoft had to do a lot to catch up." (…) “The software giant focused on the use of web standards: HTML (for the structure of the page) and CSS (for its layout). These two are still widely used. "You could say: the company took the first steps towards professionalization”, Pemberton says.”
For the whole article (in Dutch), written by NOS technology editor Nando Kasteleijn, see the IE article on the NOS website.
About Steven Pemberton
Pemberton has been a researcher at CWI for almost 40 years. He worked in the Distributed and Interactive Systems group at CWI and retired in 2019 but is still very active. During his studies in Sussex, he was educated by Dick Grimsdale, who built the first transistorised computer and was himself a tutee of the famous Alan Turing. Recently, he won the 2022 ACM CHI Lifetime Service Award.
Radio interview at Steven Pemberton's home on 14 June 2022.
NOS News TV interviewing Steven Pemberton at his home on 14 June 2022.
More information
- Steven Pemberton's personal homepage
- CWI news item on the recent 2022 ACM CHI Lifetime Service Award for Steven Pemberton
- Interview for Steven Pemberton's retirement symposium in 2019: Inspiring Web Pioneer Steven Pemberton
