Thoughts on the fading away of the age of IE

<i>First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update.</i><p>This can&#x27;t be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren&#x27;t as frequent as Chrome&#x27;s<p>The answer of why IE hung around for so long probably has to do with corporate intranets and Microsofts huge enterprise customers needing to preserve backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is one of Microsoft&#x27;s strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them.<p>The answer of why it lost to Chrome is that Chrome was a very strong entrant in the battle from day 1 of its release. Remember the Chrome launch comic? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;googlebooks&#x2F;chrome&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;googlebooks&#x2F;chrome&#x2F;index.html</a>

When I was a younger (and more-foolish) web dev few years ago, already well in the decline of IE, I met someone much older who said he was one of the developers of IE. He must have seen it coming in my face from my grin, or he had experience on the topic, so he quickly reminded me of something that was absolutely true; back then when IE was released it WAS at the top of web tech development, the problem came with the trail of users still active years&#x2F;decades later, since the tech itself was pretty good when it was released. Sure in some releases they might not have been literally the best, and they did employ shady techniques, but it&#x27;s true that they were always technically advanced and competent releases.

It&#x27;s pretty remarkable that Firefox and Chrome were able to succeed over a web browser that came installed on everyone&#x27;s devices.<p>A person had to use IE to go and find another software that does the same thing. And for a browser, there is relatively little UI to begin with - it&#x27;s mostly an empty box to view websites. The technical folks are used to that, but the majority of market share is non technical people. The &quot;be 10x better&quot; paradigm is especially hard when it&#x27;s your empty white box versus mine.<p>Thinking back, I suspect adblocking and pop-up blocking was a big part. The IE era web was extremely user hostile, with pop-up windows and pop-behind windows everywhere. And Firefox* offered a solution to it by blocking those, which I think was hard for Microsoft to follow due to their partnerships with major websites. Tabs were another, but I think that was less important.<p>* Then Mozilla, and Opera did it first

An interesting retrospective and nice to read, though I had to chuckle at &quot;soft&quot; discs. Is &#x27;floppy&#x27; now considered offensive?<p>I started my web dev career when MSIE was accelerating and achieved crazy levels of dominance. Developing for IE was shit. I mean, I was never out of work, but the wasted time figuring out which quirk you were coding around was, frankly, ridiculous when you look back on it. But you had an arsenal of workarounds and techniques which that generation of developer fantastic problem-solvers and have lots of initiative.<p>Despite <i>how</i> they did it, it is essential that nobody in or around the industry forgets how good MSIE was for mainstream adoption of the internet&#x2F;www. It literally made it so that everyone was online. This was when the beige box in the corner was your window to the www and very few people had that kind of connectivity in their pocket.<p>Reflecting on how MS achieved dominance and then essentially backburnered MSIE development really befuddles me to this day. Some of the thoughts in the comments make sense; Was it arrogance and MS seriously thought Win32&#x2F;.NET would remain dominant? Or simply that they&#x27;d dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre?

There&#x27;s many company-intern intranet applications still in use out there, which rely on old IE features like ActiveX and whatnot. Afaik, older versions of .NET came with features that required IE.<p>Also Asia always was and to my knowledge still is using a lot of IE - not sure about the reason why.<p>A little history lesson:<p>* Netscape wanted to dominate the web, gain a monopoly and gain full control.<p>* IE came late to the party - long after Netscape was already established<p>* MS invested a *ton* of resources to catch up, rapid development pace, quick updates, constantly new features and improvements<p>* MS too wanted dominance and full control of the web<p>* MS gained marked share through &quot;dirty tricks&quot; leveraging their OS dominance<p>* MS got repeatedly sued for unfair competition, paid large sums, paid lip-service to the courts but never truly changed their strategy<p>* that hurt Netscape but didn&#x27;t kill it<p>* what killed off Netscape was their own doing: a costly code rewrite, that took way to much time and delivered subpar results<p>* Microsoft won, they had what they wanted: full control of the web, and the power to shape it however they saw fit<p>* they did nothing. they just stuck with IE6, no new features or improvements for years, even bugfixes and security fixes became really slow. all momentum was lost.<p>* Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape - MS still did nothing.<p>* Firefox gained significant market share - that finally kicked MS into gear<p>* MS re-started updating and improving IE - but they were technologically behind and had to play catch-up again<p>* Chrome entered the ring and boosted the pace of development<p>* IE never fully caught up<p>* Chrome gained full dominance of the market - but unlike IE did not slow down development<p>* MS tried all their dirty tricks again - but they still continued to loose market share<p>* they rebranded IE to Edge (still using the same render engine, but dropping backwards compatibility)<p>* they dropped their own render engine, and switched to using webkit<p>* despite even more dirty tricks, no breakthrough success in terms of market share<p>I believe the fading of IE pretty much started with Microsoft resting on their (un-earned) laurels, after Netscape died. And yes, that&#x27;s even before IE peaked - while they still had upwards momentum.

Just this morning I accidentally found an ancient (well, recently updated but never rebuilt), quoting tool I use from Intangi has an embedded web view when you click the help button. Being an old school 32 bit Windows app, I had a suspicion it was still IE based so I started browsing around their help site for a bit, trying to find a way out to a search engine where I could go to a page of my choosing. To make a long story short I used the path:<p>Intangi help -&gt; Intangi search -&gt; Intangi forum post with a GitHub link -&gt; GitHub&#x27;s legal notice pages -&gt; a link to the Creative Commons license on the CC website -&gt; CC main page -&gt; CC search in the bottom right -&gt; a search and CC blog post for a collaborating with Google from 2013 -&gt; The link to the Google page about the collaboration -&gt; some generic Google intermediary page with a Google products listing -&gt; the Google search page.<p>In all of this most pages except the Intangi pages and the Google search page were broken somewhere between unrecognizable to &quot;I&#x27;m surprised anything loaded at all&quot; with a ton of JS script error messages along the way, which is why it wasn&#x27;t as simple as GitHub search -&gt; Google Search. This gave me the hint it wasn&#x27;t the usual system IE 11 rather some kind of legacy embed. Searching for my user agent led me to see it was reporting itself as IE7 and running the ACID2 test did indeed show the failed rendering I&#x27;d expect from IE7.<p>This gave me quite the chuckle as it was as a kid it wasn&#x27;t until the Internet Explorer 8 betas in early 2008 when the idea the browser was just a loadable program and I there might be others that are better hit me... and this was predating even that!<p>Props to whoever at Google insists on maintaining legacy versions of the search page. At this point it&#x27;s just the main home page, search results are new and somewhat broken for old browsers, but it&#x27;s still something. It even works when I load up an early IPv6 development stack into NT 4! And let me tell you, there are very few sites using IPv6 which work in browsers that old.

What we need now is the fading away of Windows Outlook and its Word based html renderer. Emails need to start using conditional rendering to show an “Outlook is no longer supported. Please upgrade to Thunderbird” message

I&#x27;m too young to be any kind of oracle on IE and it&#x27;s history, however I&#x27;m personally glad that IE was already fading away by the time I began my software engineering career. This is because, from the stories I&#x27;ve heard from older colleagues, IE rapidly turned into another loser EEE Microsoft boondoggle; trying to own the ecosystem and crush competition by:<p>1. Moving standards so fast, so randomly, and so opaquely, that nobody can keep up.<p>2. Abusing market share and WinOS (then sued for it)<p>3. Etc...<p>In my eyes, IE was <i>never</i> going to recover from all of that bad blood. It was ill-fated and doomed to die once greed took a hold.

I have been thinking about two questions for a long time. First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update.

Why did IE last so long and refuse to die? Simple:<p><pre><code> &lt;meta http-equiv=&quot;X-UA-Compatible&quot; content=&quot;IE=7”&gt; </code></pre> During the oughts a lot of large companies had a lot of applications written using Microsoft DHTML “behaviors” and other specific tech. At an insurance company I worked on an app in the late teens that required IE7 and moving that to Chrome&#x2F;Firefox was a 4 developers for 6 months effort. Which was actually really good since no one thought it could be done.<p>Many of these companies “standardized” on ie11 and wouldn’t even install chrome or Firefox. That’s why IE lasted so long.

Browser in those days, is not a good business. IE6 sticks years no updates, watching Firefox or Chrome grab the market, because Microsoft do not gain 1 cent from browser software, they were waiting for Google&#x27;s bad luck. Until a decade later, everybody saw browser&#x27;s value.

I wonder if we will have to handle more outdated browsers soon, now that Chrome dropped support for Windows 7&#x2F;8 and older Androids.

Some companies simply stop advancing when they’ve “won”.