Elon Musk's Philosophical Hit on Internet Explorer
Description
The image is a popular meme featuring Elon Musk smoking a blunt during an interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Musk, wearing headphones, is grimacing as he exhales a large cloud of smoke. The top of the image has text that reads, '*hits blunt* aren't we ALL just Internet Explorers?'. This meme combines the 'hits blunt' or 'stoner thoughts' format, used for pseudo-profound or silly realizations, with a tech industry pun. The humor lies in the double meaning of 'Internet Explorers' - referring both to people who explore the internet and to the notoriously slow, outdated, and now-deprecated Microsoft web browser. For developers, especially senior ones, Internet Explorer represents a long history of compatibility issues, bugs, and development headaches, making the comparison both a relatable joke and a form of shared trauma
Comments
7Comment deleted
Much like Internet Explorer, my brain on a Monday morning also has a quirky box model, renders reality incorrectly, and is definitely not standards-compliant
After 20 years of shipping, I’ve realized I’m basically IE11: slow to start, leaking memory, and yet still in production because some ancient SAP workflow can’t migrate off me
We're all just Internet Explorers: slow to load, incompatible with modern standards, and somehow still running critical enterprise systems that nobody wants to touch
This hits different when you realize that after decades of IE being the punchline, Microsoft finally gave up and rebuilt Edge on Chromium - essentially admitting 'you know what, maybe we ARE all just Chrome now.' The real existential crisis is that we fought the browser wars only to end up in a Chromium monoculture where even 'exploring the internet' means running Google's rendering engine with different skins. IE's legacy isn't its bugs or lack of standards compliance - it's teaching us that browser diversity matters, a lesson we apparently forgot as soon as we got rid of it
We're all internet explorers; just hope product never capitalizes it, or you'll be shipping X-UA-Compatible, conditional comments, and an IE mode runbook for that one ActiveX intranet
We’re all Internet Explorer eventually - deprecated, stuck in quirks mode, and kept alive by Group Policy because one exec’s ActiveX dashboard still ‘depends’ on us
Elon's right - we're all IE6: enterprise-mandated, unkillable, and rendering the business logic wrong since 2001