Internet Explorer Was Never This Cool

There’s this image I keep in my head: a Sailor Moon-style magical girl in a colorful miniskirt, wielding a staff against digital viruses. This was Microsoft’s ad for Internet Explorer 11 in Japan. Somewhere in Redmond or Tokyo, someone decided that was the solution to Internet Explorer’s branding problem, and honestly, I respect it.

In the US, Microsoft was struggling to make IE seem like anything but a necessary evil. They threw money at privacy promises and corporate partnerships and whatever else. But in Japan, they just went full anime and committed to the absurdity. A cute girl fighting trojans and worms. No irony, no winking at the camera—just a straightforward magical action sequence selling browser security.

It’s the kind of marketing that shouldn’t work but does, at least on me. It’s specific enough to matter, weird enough to stick, and confident enough that it stops being embarrassing. You can tell no one involved was trying to appear sophisticated. They just wanted to make Internet Explorer cool, realized that was impossible in any conventional sense, and pivoted to the only thing that might actually work: pure, unfiltered anime energy.

I don’t know if it increased IE adoption in Japan or if anyone actually cared. But I remember it. That’s more than I can say for every other browser war skirmish from that era.