This can't be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren't as frequent as Chrome's
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's strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them.
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? https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
It was typically the case that Internet Explorer major version updates were optional, so you could use IE6 on Windows XP SP3, despite IE8 being out at that time.
IE6 was actually supported until 2016 on embedded versions of Windows XP!
I know that Microsoft in general puts a lot of thought and resources into backwards compatibility.
But the thing is, with IE, I never felt it.
Back in the day, whenever a new version of IE came out, so much stuff would break, and the whole company would scramble to get everything fixed and compatible again - and getting things to work on multiple versions of IE simultaneously (and flawlessly) was such a pain.
We never had any similar problems with Firefox or Chrome... those updates never hurt as much. IE was the only browser, where new versions would cause all-hands-on-deck meetings...
Wow. Historical revisionism if ever I saw it. Netscape imploded like the fall of Rome, rent by incompetent business leaders and crumbling from unassailable technical debt. IE defeated the competition by anti-competitive practice, then had no competition as their opponents scored all of the own goals. Mozilla was a slow rising Phoenix from the ashes of that catastrophe.
From there, Microsoft did what big companies do best, having destroyed their competition. Absolutely… sweet… stuff all. Years of nothing. Technically advanced? Competent? Ha I say! If miserly underinvestment is now “technical brilliance” I weep for the youth. Thank goodness that competition eventually returned; but there are reasons every single human who could jumped on chrome when it was released.
At 4.0 the gap widen. While IE's rendering speed got even faster, its integration with Active Desktop etc. slowed down the start up in Windows 98. Netscape got even slower across the board. It's funny that even without the fancy features Netscape 4 was slower than IE4.
By 5 the dust was largely settled. Netscape was on rapid decline and IE5 optimized/got rid of all the IE4 crap in Windows 98SE. My desktop (Pentium III 800Mhz) was faster with 98SE' IE5 than IE4, which was much better than Netscape 4.0.
Note: I don't dispute they were slow, anti-competitive, etc., just that now from a tech point of view IE seems garbage, but that's a false believe and when a new IE launched it was decently competent.
IE4 introduced DHTML, i.e., the paradigm that the entire HTML document is on the DOM and you can modify it with JavaScript (and style it with CSS, which is also on the DOM).
IE5 introduced XMLHttpRequest, i.e., the foundation of the modern SPA.
Both of these were major advances in web development, and websites started requiring (or preferring) IE because they wanted to use that stuff.
From there, yeah, IE6 was mostly bugfixes and webdev languished until Chrome came around (with Firefox being great, but not enough to topple IE.)
...Advertising? Antitrust action?
Because, let's be honest, Firefox had been around for a while, and Opera was there even longer. The people who waited until Chrome for to jump ship were, mostly, people who hadn't heard of an alternative.
It looks you concede the fact that IE was clearly better in its 4.0-6.0 releases than its competition (chiefly Netscape), but hate this fact so much, that you then still somehow dispute it.
MS had its usual anticompetitive practices, but that does not disqualify the fact that IE was at the time also technical state of the art.
(My teenager MS hating me at the time reacted similarly and stubbornly used/advocated Netscape/Opera anyway).
As I recall, Microsoft actually stopped development of IE, saying the job was done, the web browser complete.
Am I correct? Can anyone verify this?
IE won the browser wars -- fair and square.
I remember when IE4 came out. It was a fascinating piece of software (and extremely crashy too in beta) packed with all sorts of forward looking technologies like Active Channel, Active Desktop, a chat app, Outlook Express, and more. I'm a bit sad, but I could literally watch a 2 hour documentary on IE4, there must be so many stories behind its development and eventual demise.
I'de disagree with that statement as some of their moves (such as purchasing GitHub) could be equally viewed as part of their typical EEE strategy that permeated the entire business.
WSL could also be, and indeed is by many, viewed the same way ("Microsoft is just trying to pseudo-own the linux ecosystem by embedding it within Windows").
Personally, seeing how EEE permeated the entire business in the infamous 90's & 00's era Microsoft and all of the dirty laundry that ended up being aired, I don't doubt for a second that the current-era Microsoft is just as bad, but better at hiding it.
Apples don't fall far from the tree.
Fool me once...
These days, Microsoft are concerned about getting my money at my god damn desk every second of the god damn day.
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'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 "be 10x better" paradigm is especially hard when it's your empty white box versus mine.
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.
* Then Mozilla, and Opera did it first
Netscape won the original Browser wars because it was better and faster and smarter. Over time it became slow and bloated as Netscape literally tried to bundle an OS into its browser.
The original IE was faster and smarter than Netscape Navigator, people literally made conspiracy theories about why it was faster.
Microsoft stopped developing IE effectively, then Open-Sourced Firefox came along to challenge, but it was inherited from the same Netscape codebase and made minimal market progress at the time.
Google suddenly came out with Chrome, it was faster, smarter, and cleaner than IE and others. And worked best with google.
Microsoft controlled the OS, but it did not control the web, and in various ways the web said use "Chrome" because Chrome was better.
That minimal Firefox market progress was about a quarter of the entire Web, and enough to see the content of the Web so dramatically transformed over a decade (that even Safari claimed to be Gecko) to a standards based platform with minimal reverse engineering all the IE-isms and documenting those for others to follow, and in so doing opening the playing field for standards compliant browsers.
Your summary, presented as fact, is quite poor and I'm gonna assume you have no particular expertise here and were instead sharing some opinions you picked up rather than sharing any actual history from experience, right?
I was there, a part of almost all of this for 25 years now, so there's my authority. What's yours?
If bundling is overrated why do you think google created chrome in the first place? and continued to fund it and push it on their platforms for years?
No, this is not correct: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...
Firefox very much made market progress. Chrome didn't catch Firefox until 2011: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...
Android was already on version 4 by that time, so of course they were catching up as they were becoming dominant in that space, and Chrome was the default browser installed on every device.
... and it got bundled by default with the installers of many free software
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.
Despite how they did it, it is essential that nobody in or around the industry forgets how good MSIE was for mainstream adoption of the internet/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.
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/.NET would remain dominant? Or simply that they'd dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre?
You aren't entirely wrong; Microsoft tripped over themselves trying to get XP's successor out of development hell.
It was five years from Windows XP to Windows Vista, compared to one to two years between Windows releases up to XP. And then as we all know, Windows Vista completely flopped because it was too advanced for its time.
It took eight years from Windows XP to Windows 7 until Microsoft finally had a new Windows release that people would come out and buy. In a way, they really were too busy elsewhere to care about IE.
Also Asia always was and to my knowledge still is using a lot of IE - not sure about the reason why.
A little history lesson:
* Netscape wanted to dominate the web, gain a monopoly and gain full control.
* IE came late to the party - long after Netscape was already established
* MS invested a *ton* of resources to catch up, rapid development pace, quick updates, constantly new features and improvements
* MS too wanted dominance and full control of the web
* MS gained marked share through "dirty tricks" leveraging their OS dominance
* MS got repeatedly sued for unfair competition, paid large sums, paid lip-service to the courts but never truly changed their strategy
* that hurt Netscape but didn't kill it
* what killed off Netscape was their own doing: a costly code rewrite, that took way to much time and delivered subpar results
* Microsoft won, they had what they wanted: full control of the web, and the power to shape it however they saw fit
* 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.
* Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape - MS still did nothing.
* Firefox gained significant market share - that finally kicked MS into gear
* MS re-started updating and improving IE - but they were technologically behind and had to play catch-up again
* Chrome entered the ring and boosted the pace of development
* IE never fully caught up
* Chrome gained full dominance of the market - but unlike IE did not slow down development
* MS tried all their dirty tricks again - but they still continued to loose market share
* they rebranded IE to Edge (still using the same render engine, but dropping backwards compatibility)
* they dropped their own render engine, and switched to using webkit
* despite even more dirty tricks, no breakthrough success in terms of market share
I believe the fading of IE pretty much started with Microsoft resting on their (un-earned) laurels, after Netscape died. And yes, that's even before IE peaked - while they still had upwards momentum.
ActiveX saw much heavier use in those markets than the US & Europe. Other parts to the east too. Partly this is because of language issues (terrible non-latin writing support and such in browser-native options), partly because of requirements set down in local government and/or bank policies (South Korea being the most significant example here, but not the only one) because of security concerns.
Early on trying to enforce the security requirements those governments/banks needed required running native code (remember that there was a US export ban on encryption supporting keys longer than 40 bits so relying on browser-only code communicating over HTTPS transport was dubious) and the options where ActiveX or Java. Largely because ActiveX was built-in to a browser, and partly because Java has a reputation for being heavier in terms of client system requirements, ActiveX often won over Java.
While most of those forces have ceased to be, or are at least greatly reduced, for a long time they created significant friction for moving away from IE in those areas. Once an option is as entrenched as IE became in some of those locations, it takes a long time for other options to be considered at all viable – there is a lot of momentum that they have to try arrest.
And now, two decades later, MS is shipping web apps as a part of Office.
That edgeHTML starts at version 12.0 is a hint for being a continuation of that lineage - but there's also a few bugs/idiosyncrasies edgeHTML has inherited from Trident.
I remember that edgeHTML did spoof the user agent so browsers would not detect it as IE, and would not apply IE specific hacks and polyfills. And that would cause problems with some web apps, that could be fixed by re-enabling a select few hacks/polyfills.
It's been a long time ago, so I don't remember what specifically it was... sorry.
Also misses the Linux and Mac history - KHTML/Konquerer and WebKit/Safari, which of course was the basis for Chrome. Google didn’t need to start from scratch.
As for the decision to do a rewrite - sure Microsoft put pressure on Netscape, and that did influence their decision, and sure Microsoft might have killed off Netscape anyway - but the rewrite still was Netscape's own decision, and it was also Netscape who failed to pull it off successfully.
It was called ChromeFrame.
There was also an ActiveX plug-in that allowed hosting XULRunner in IE, which allowed embedding Firefox inside it.
Intangi help -> Intangi search -> Intangi forum post with a GitHub link -> GitHub's legal notice pages -> a link to the Creative Commons license on the CC website -> CC main page -> CC search in the bottom right -> a search and CC blog post for a collaborating with Google from 2013 -> The link to the Google page about the collaboration -> some generic Google intermediary page with a Google products listing -> the Google search page.
In all of this most pages except the Intangi pages and the Google search page were broken somewhere between unrecognizable to "I'm surprised anything loaded at all" with a ton of JS script error messages along the way, which is why it wasn't as simple as GitHub search -> Google Search. This gave me the hint it wasn'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'd expect from IE7.
This gave me quite the chuckle as it was as a kid it wasn'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!
Props to whoever at Google insists on maintaining legacy versions of the search page. At this point it's just the main home page, search results are new and somewhat broken for old browsers, but it'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.
1. Moving standards so fast, so randomly, and so opaquely, that nobody can keep up.
2. Abusing market share and WinOS (then sued for it)
3. Etc...
In my eyes, IE was never going to recover from all of that bad blood. It was ill-fated and doomed to die once greed took a hold.
When you get a bully on the ground, you keep kicking and you don’t stop. Otherwise they’ll just come back and make you wish you’d never been born.
In reality, there's other factors:
- Legacy applications where nobody wanted to rewrite them to work with non-IE
- Chrome gained market share because the entire user experience was better. That includes updates, but also it was just really snappy to use. Speed is probably the bigger factor; normal users don't care about updates.
- As some have pointed out, lots of less technical users just use the default
- Did I mention those couple decades worth of legacy apps? It bears repeating, since MSFT had successfully kept other browsers out of market share through their 1-2 punch of strategic browser incompatibility and shipping with the OS.
Chrome started out not being targeted by these, and in addition, Google pushed security patches pretty quickly.
Anyone got any numbers on the frequency of exploits, and the mean time-to-patch, for IE vs Chrome, over time?
Because it came bundled with Windows and because the internet was designed for IE. You can see that even today: Chrome is bundled with Android, and the internet is designed for Chrome.
>Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market?
Because IE, and specifically IE6, was a product of 2001. When Firefox (NOT Chrome) finally usurped the throne, it was because almost five years had passed since IE6 had released and the technologies for the internet and computers in general were being held back by what was then an ancient decrepit relic that was IE6.
Firefox introduced (mostly) W3C compliant (X)HTML, advanced CSS, JavaScript, tabbed browsing (nonchalantly stolen from Opera), and browser extensions/plugins among other things. Firefox was plain better than IE6 which at that point was frozen ancient technology, and Firefox usurped the throne from IE6. Microsoft's kneejerk reactions that were IE7 onwards and Trident!Edge came far too slow far too late and they never recovered from the loss.
Now you're probably asking why Chrome is the dominant monopoly browser today, and that answer is also easy: Chrome incorporated what Firefox introduced but marketed themselves more aggressively, continued to improve where Firefox languished upon obtaining the throne, and for better or worse threw out a lot of conventional computer nerd traditions which ultimately made for a more performant browser in line with common user desires.
That's one way of putting it. But I think the article indirectly explained it better:
> We know that binding IE with Windows is the key to IE’s domination of the browser market.
Google did a similar thing with Chrome. They bound it to Google's services. You got nagged every time you visited www.google.com. Understandably google's more advanced stuff didn't work with IE. But it also often didn't work with Firefox. This is what mozilla had to say about that https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... :
A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption.
He is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations in the past eight months; however, his allegations span far beyond current events and accuse Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.If you’re a large bureaucracy in the early 2000s you went with whatever was default - and that was IE.
Defaults were seen as so powerful, that MS was anti-trusted for this. They did it anyways at the time because the juice was worth the squeeze.
> Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same
Yes - Android and the iPhone.
The only real mobile browsers are Chrome and Safari, and Safari is only available within its walled garden, so to get a mobile-like development experience on desktop people used Chrome. It all followed from there.
(IE6 was Windows-only and tried to achieve lock-in with ActiveX, which let you run native COM controls in the browser. Hilariously inappropriate security model, but popular in the enterprise, and at one time mandated by the South Korean national ID system.)
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7”>
Many of these companies “standardized” on ie11 and wouldn’t even install chrome or Firefox. That’s why IE lasted so long.
Better alternatives plus compatibility layers.
There are lots of antiquated techs that deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history, but I feel like some people have done jquery dirty by pretending that we never needed it in the first place.
I don"t think any business has made money on building and supplying a browser.
So they have to get the money back from somewhere.
Google from getting you to use other google things and getting more advertising revenue.
MS by making you use Windows (yes IE was available for the Mac but I think that was to keep Apple afloat to stop anti-trust problems).
Apple first to get out of IE and then to get a browser on iOS and then not have to use Chrome and now get paid by Google to use its search engine. Possibly blocking Flash also was a reason.
Netscape - well that is the problem where do they get revenue - Google paying them to be the default search and probably to head off anti-trust.
Opera?
Vivaldi - from payments from search engines to use them and from clients why pay for bookmarks. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
I used OmniWeb on NeXT and OSX and did pay for that but they could not compete so not profitable.