When she finally decommissioned it in 2022, she whispered: “Goodnight, you weird, unsung 32-bit hero.”

Here’s where it gets strange.

The real story, though, is about a forgotten hero: the isolation. Each tab ran in its own 32-bit process, so if one crashed, the rest survived — a feature Chrome made famous, but IE9 had it too. Except… Microsoft hid it behind a registry key by default. So almost no one knew.

Because the 32-bit version was unexpectedly fast . Microsoft had introduced a new JavaScript engine, Chakra (codename), hardware-accelerated graphics via Direct2D, and a sleek new UI with the address bar merged with the search box. It could render complex SVG, HTML5 video, and CSS3 shadows without coughing.

She kept one Windows 7 VM with IE9 32-bit alive for years, long after Microsoft stopped supporting it. A museum piece, but a working one.