Will Internet Explorer ever die? It's had a good run! Once a long time ago there were once only 2 choices of browser, Internet explorer or Netscape. Internet explorer was later built into the Windows operating system and neatly killed the Netscape competition because new computer users didn't want to download a new browser when there was already a nice Microsoft one supplied.This is an example of the neat Harvard business model in action, which means finding a gap, saturating it and squeezing out the competition.
But
It makes web designers’ lives a pain, and it makes users’ computers less secure. We have seen browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Chrome . So you might be interested to know that Internet Explorer appears to dieing really, really slowly.
In 2004, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (wiki) had over 90 percent of the browser market. Today, they’re closer to 66 percent, while competitor Firefox has broken 1/5 market share. This information was brought to our attention by a graph and blog post written by Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler. The numbers are important, given that every Internet user relies on a browser as his or her gateway to the Web. The numbers are telling, especially as you look at how the release of new versions of the Microsoft web browser have had almost no effect on market share or retention.
click for bigger versionWhether it’s greater security, more reliability, extensions, or something else, it’s clear that more and more people are choosing Firefox, and Chrome over its slowly sinking competitor. The trend is also surprisingly linear, rather than exponential. If IE were to continue on this downhill course, Microsoft Internet Explorer would have no users by about 2021. Of course, to look so far into the future is completely unreliable but in the end, it’s about one simple trend: Internet Explorer continues to shed users…gradually.