A popular meme swirled around the web in 2014, making fun of Internet Explorer’s unpopularity. “If Internet Explorer is brave enough to ask to be your default browser, you’re brave enough to ask that girl out.” Pretty much no one in their right mind — at least no millennial in their right mind — uses Internet Explorer anymore, making the app’s persistence and tenacity laughable.

But it wasn’t always this way for Internet Explorer. In fact, the web browser was once so dominant that its competitors begged the government to intervene. The U.S. Department of Justice took Microsoft to court in 2001 because it feared that Internet Explorer would rule the web browser market forever.