What happens when someone, or some group, loses interest in maintaining their website? Maybe they take it offline. Maybe they just abandon it, and then it disappears when the bandwidth bills are not paid, the hosting service changes or goes out of business, or the site decays from lack of maintenance. But that doesn’t always happen. Some websites hang around for years, even decades, after they are abandoned, and you can still visit them. The funniest are those that promote or decry something totally obsolete, like the site Internet Explorer is Evil!
As you can guess, the site is dedicated to the evil of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It’s also an epic flashback to what most contemporary websites looked like – the long, long humour lists against the hypnotic, almost psychedelic tiled backgrounds, the rants, the story, the flashing header, and, of course, the obligatory button willing visitors to go get Firefox.
There’s even a walk-through and tutorial on how to remove IE…. from Windows 98. And just in case you’re really old-school, there’s a tutorial for installing Windows 95 without IE, too.
Looking through these old websites is like a trip back in time, and an archive of website design history. We’ve come a long since Angelfire! Aren't you glad that the concept of readability won out over flashing bright colors? You’ll find overviews and links to 14 of these obsolete and abandoned websites at Urban Ghosts.