Microsoft's Internet Explorer bows out, but browser wars aren't over yet

 

Chrome has steadily gained market share, but its dominance is unlikely to last forever.

There was just a small ripple across the technosphere when Microsoft (MS) announced it would retire its Internet Explorer (IE) browser, shutting down all support by August 2021. MS also stated that the IE successor, the MS Edge browser, would move completely onto Google’s open-source Chromium platform.

Neither IE nor Edge are popular anymore. Barely 1.3 per cent of the world’s surfers (desktop plus mobile) used IE in July 2020, and cynics would suspect that many of those IE windows were opened by accident. MS Edge only has about 2.2 per cent market share.

Google’s Chrome, (also based on Chromium and integrated with the Android operating system), is by far the most popular of browsers, with 66 per cent market share across all platforms. Apple fans prefer Safari (16.65 per cent). Geeks use Mozilla’s Firefox (4.26 per cent), or Opera (2.05 per cent), or Vivaldi (0.04 per cent). Both Opera and Vivaldi are built on top of Chromium, so Google’s dominance of this space is even more extreme than it looks at first glance.

This is a sea change from the turn of the century. In 1998, Microsoft had to defend itself against antitrust allegations when it integrated the IE browser with its Windows operating systems and offered it for free. In 1998, when MS denied being a monopolist despite the overwhelming dominance of the desktop category, the smartphone wasn’t even a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eyes. In September that year, two college kids would incorporate a search engine company called Google.