The Browser That Took Over The World...and then DIED
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,114 words · ~5 min read
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internet explorer was a fixture on nearly all Windows pcs from the
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mid-1990s to the mid-2000s in fact it
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was estimated that internet explorer's usage share was as high as around 95
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in 2003 but once viable alternatives like
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firefox and chrome hit the market internet explorer lost its stranglehold
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on our digital lives faster than mc hammer lost his fortune
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so what led to its demise and why was it such a widely reviled browser well
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funnily enough a lot of internet explorer's problems had their roots in
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microsoft's desire not to frustrate its users but rather to
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innovate you see microsoft tried to set
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its early versions of ie apart from its competitors by focusing on adding new
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features rather than simply trying to make the browser as fast as possible
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and they had a measure of success by this metric in fact ie was the first
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browser to support a number of technologies that are ubiquitous on
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today's web such as css which is a
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modern standard for web page design that allows pages to look pretty and be more
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functional compared to the clunky messes of the early 90s ie also started using
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its trident rendering engine with version 4.0 which is the piece of code
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that controls how a web page's underlying code will be turned into what
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you see on your screen and trident was groundbreaking because it allowed
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certain elements on a web page to change on the fly back in 1997 this was like a
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huge deal later ie introduced the underlying support for ajax not to be
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confused with the greek hero the household cleaner or the dutch soccer
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club which supports using server data to display up-to-date information on a web
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page without requiring a refresh a concept that is critical for modern
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sites like gmail and google maps that are highly interactive these features
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and others made it so that developers flocked to internet explorer because it
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supported technologies that could make their websites more interactive and
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visually appealing by contrast ie's competitors at the time such as netscape
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often couldn't handle these features without slowing down or even crashing
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so that was how it got popular also some
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arguably pretty anti-competitive stuff but changing gears here the problems that
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eventually made the browser infamous started to rear their ugly heads in the
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early 2000s with such a stranglehold on the market microsoft neglected to put in
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enough resources to continue to improve ie and as the internet as well as online
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security threats continued to evolve the browser gained a reputation for being
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both slow and insecure making matters worse microsoft made it
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difficult to switch to an alternative web browser by deeply integrating ie
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into Windows and making it very hard to uninstall throwing away needlessly much
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of its previously earned goodwill with its users by the mid 2000s rival
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browsers such as firefox took advantage of this time of weakness by embracing
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open web standards for speed reliability and security rather than relying on a
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host of proprietary technologies like internet explorer did these open
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standards had finally reached the point where developers no longer had to rely
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on microsoft's proprietary solutions to support interactivity so
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that was a pretty big shift so with that ie's market share dropped
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precipitously and yet microsoft still
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didn't seem to be seriously trying to address the problem and all the while
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more and more pages appeared broken or improperly rendered in ie it wouldn't be
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until 2009 that microsoft would get around to releasing internet explorer 8
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which featured significant improvements in standards compliance and security
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but by that point ie had already lost between a quarter and a third of its
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2003 market share so the damage had
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already been done and google chrome's appearance in 2009 all but assured ie's
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demise although it hung on for a few more years
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microsoft finally replaced internet explorer with the edge browser whose
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rendering engine was purged of all of ie's old code in 2015 after internet
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explorer's usage share dropped below 20 so today ie only still exists so that
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folks can use legacy websites written with its proprietary features in mind
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you may have encountered this if you've had to log into a workplace network for
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example and also as a lesson that you
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can't just sit on your hands while the world passes you by
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end up including so what's your web browser of choice have you followed the
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crowd and gone with chrome are you still holding on to firefox or do you like
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edge just because it reminds you of a certain browser from your youth
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just edgier