Explained: Why Microsoft finally dumped Internet Explorer

Tech giant Microsoft
recently announced the retirement of its longstanding web browser, Internet
Explorer, in favor of its newer product, Microsoft Edge. With support for
Internet Explorer only set to last until June 15, 2022, its remaining users
have just over a year to find an alternative. But of course, most web users
already have.

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While the eventual downfall of Internet Explorer was seen as a foregone
conclusion by those who monitor web trends, the news might come as an unwelcome
surprise for those who are somewhat less up-to-date.

For the most part, though, this news is a whimper rather than a bang — a
footnote at the end of an iconic story spanning more than 25 years.

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As a current professional in the IT industry, I’ll break down some
possible reasons for this decision, and what we can learn from it.

Searching for the answer Almost everyone is familiar with the idea of
“googling” something, but there’s no such thing as “microsofting” something.
How did Google manage to become synonymous with web searching, while Microsoft,
despite its long and pioneering history, failed to become synonymous with
anything? The answer is market share. Google handles 92.24% of web searches —
more than 3.5 billion requests a day. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has a
paltry 2.29%.

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It’s easy to see why users prefer Google’s web browser, Chrome, over Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer, which uses Bing as its default search engine. Users who
prefer searching via Google (which is almost everyone) can make Google the
default search engine in Internet Explorer. But it’s probably easier just to
install Chrome and use Google from there.

Success breeds complacency; complacency breeds failure Microsoft wasn’t
always a bit player. Back when the web was in its infancy, it was a
market-leading pioneer. Before there were app stores, or 5G, or even widespread
personal computers, there were large mainframe computers with “unfriendly”
Unix-based operating systems developed in the 1970s.

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These systems were about as bare-bones as you can get, with little
consideration given to graphics or usability. Unix’s original web browser,
Netscape, was similarly no-frills.

This is where Microsoft came in, by focusing on making “personal
computers” more personal. With much nicer designs and more intuitive user
interfaces, by the time Internet Explorer launched in 1995, Microsoft had
cemented itself at the forefront of the digital world.

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But as US Baptist minister and civil rights leader Benjamin E. Mays
famously warned, “The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather
in our complacency.” Having established its reputation, Microsoft stopped
pushing Internet Explorer’s development and started venturing elsewhere,
continually improving Windows but not its web browser. From that point on,
Internet Explorer was always late to the party in introducing innovations such
as tabbed browsing and search bars. It fell further into irrelevance and
obsolescence.

Compatibility issues Having spent much of my life as a web developer, one
of my biggest gripes is the incompatibility of some web browsers. It’s
exhausting and demoralizing spending hours polishing web pages, only for them
not to run properly on some browsers.

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This concern even spread to Microsoft’s in-house developers. In a 2019
blog post titled “The perils of using Internet Explorer as your default
browser”, Microsoft’s Chris Jackson warned: (…) developers by and large just
aren’t testing for Internet Explorer these days. They’re testing on modern
browsers.

The message was clear: web developers don’t get on well with Internet
Explorer, so sites that work well on other browsers might not work here — and
that problem is only going to get worse.

With Microsoft having lost interest in making sure Internet Explorer
keeps up, it has transferred its attention to its new browser, Microsoft Edge.
But the horse may already have bolted. The marketplace is crowded with Google’s
Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, and numerous open-source browsers.

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Phoning it in Here’s another key stat that illustrates Internet
Explorer’s decline: in 2020, more than two-thirds of all website visits were
via a mobile device.

Now, a browser that can sync across multiple platforms is a necessity. In
a world of Apple and Android devices, the term “Windows phone” sounds
prehistoric — because it pretty much is. Operating system support for Windows
phones ended in 2017, just seven years after Microsoft first launched the
range.

So, having existed since the dawn of the internet age (or least since the
internet went truly mainstream), Internet Explorer has failed in many ways to
keep up.

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Despite the success of its Surface tablets, Microsoft failed to maintain
a foothold in the smartphone market, which may explain its unwillingness to
keep developing Internet Explorer. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and
Internet Explorer’s clunkiness is the reason no one uses a Windows phone.

But the bottom line is Internet Explorer just lacks the versatility
needed by web-savvy users. And as of next year, even the non-savvy users will
stop relying on it too. (The Conversation) AMS