Internet Explorer vs. Microsoft Edge

What the collage compares

The four panels are read by rows: on top are Internet Explorer 9 and Princess Peach, below are the old blue Microsoft Edge logo and Bowsette. Peach is a heroine of the Mario series; Bowsette is a fan-made image, not another form of Peach. The picture brings a browser and a character together, as if a new program gained a more eye-catching companion. The golden arc around the letter e in the IE9 logo contrasts with the simple blue emblem of Edge; the difference is noticeable even without captions on the logos. Peach wears a pink dress and a crown, while Bowsette has horns, a dark outfit and a spiked collar; the contrast in the character pair is as clear as the one between the logos.

The logo at the bottom belongs to the earlier Edge, which appeared with Windows 10 in 2015. That generation of the browser used its own technical foundation; later Microsoft released Edge built on Chromium. So the blue mark in the meme points to the early period of Edge, not to the current product.

From Super Crown to Bowsette

In New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, the Super Crown turns Toadette into Peachette. In a fan comic, the artist Haniwa, known as @ayyk92, applied a similar idea to Bowser: this produced the feminine Bowsette, with horns, a shell and costume details reminiscent of Bowser.

These were two different stories. Peachette is the official gameplay form of Toadette, described by Nintendo; Bowsette was born from a fan reinterpretation and quickly became popular in drawings and jokes. The collage uses the already recognizable Bowsette, but its own author cannot be identified from the surviving copy.

Two waves of September

Bowsette spread online in September 2018. In a dated post from September 27, the browser collage carries a Reddit mark: by that date the image was already circulating, although such a mark does not establish the original publication. This shows how quickly the new character began to be placed next to images from other topics.

In 2011 Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9; within a few years its familiar logo had become a handy shorthand for the old web. Opposite it sits the Edge logo, new at the time, and a character whose popularity was just gaining momentum. The joke glues together not the results of a technical test but different internet tastes: the familiar and slightly outdated against the fresh and bright.

The fan comic with the Super Crown, which is linked to Bowsette's emergence on September 19, and the browser collage from late in the month are different publications. Haniwa's authorship applies to the comic, not to this version of the collage.

Invented captions

“When the school computer finally opens the right website.” This is an invented caption: the top row becomes the expectation, and the bottom row the dramatic arrival of a new browser.

“I updated the app and now I pretend I've become more productive.” This is also an invented variant; it shifts the contrast to the hope that the updated interface will do the user's work for them.