Back in the day, when Netscape and Microsoft started the First Browser War, Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator fought to become the most popular browser.
Ultimately, to many people's dislike Internet Explorer won and Netscape disappeared. Netscape Communicator evolved into Firefox. At this time Internet Explorer's share of the browser market kept growing, largely due to the fact that it was bundled with Windows until the EU decided to make it compulsory for Microsoft to include a way for users to change to other browsers easily.
Since then, I have become a web developer, and I stopped using Internet Explorer again in favour of Firefox and eventually Safari. I'm not the only one who stopped using Internet Explorer, however. Year after year the share for Internet Explorer has dropped. Here are the statistics that show this for November 2015 from W3 Schools:
| 2015 | Chrome | IE | Firefox | Safari | Opera |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| November | 67.4 % | 6.8 % | 19.2 % | 3.9 % | 1.5 % |
And here is a set of statistics from 2002, 13 years ago (when I used Netscape I'll have you know!)
| 2002 | AOL | IE | Netscape |
|---|---|---|---|
| November | 5.2 % | 83.4 % | 8.0 % |
But why is this the case?
Microsoft just didn't care
Microsoft was very bad at developing Internet Explorer between iterations, they thought because they had a huge market share that they wouldn't lose it. I only realised this after becoming a web developer myself, since developing for Internet Explorer all the way up to IE9 is very difficult.
Even if other browsers had features for a year or two, Internet Explorer would most likely not get these features for a long time after. Prefixed support wasn't even there. Microsoft, as always, just thought it was ok to just leave it.
Microsoft only cared when Internet Explorer started to disappear.
The future
Microsoft will have a lot of catching up to do with Microsoft Edge since Internet Explorer got them the bad name of the browsers. I personally do not see this happening in a way that will transform the share so that Microsoft has the upper edge again, but I can see them regaining some of the lost ground with it.
Edge is a fantastic browser, especially from Microsoft. Edge really does support cutting-edge technologies and implements most of the web standards well.
