There are claims that Microsoft is to retire its Internet Explorer web browser and replace it with an all-new browser called Spartan with the upcoming release of Windows 10.
As of February 2015, Internet Explorer’s (IE) market share slipped to second place with around 17%, while Google’s Chrome browser boasted more than 42%. One clear challenge for Microsoft is that it has always been committed to producing its own browser for its own Windows operating system (supporting IE on Apple Macs for a brief period). Apple on the other hand is happy to produce versions of its Safari browser for both Mac OS X and Windows, and Google produces versions of Chrome for every popular desktop and mobile operating system.
Perhaps Microsoft feels it’s time to take some action – in which case what is it trying to accomplish?
A Quick History
IE was introduced as an add-on for Windows 95 and was a key part of the internet boom of the 1990s. Bundled free in all subsequent versions of Windows, it soon gained dominance, winning the browser war against its older competitor, Netscape.
With a browser share that grew to be as substantial as Microsoft Windows’ dominance of the operating system market, Microsoft was subject to numerous anti-trust litigation cases in the US and Europe. Nevertheless some of the HTML elements introduced in IE, and the fact it was more forgiving of badly coded websites than Netscape, meant that IE had a lasting influence on web design and the way websites were designed. This was especially so for internal corporate websites, which often used Windows-based systems.
In the 2000s, disquiet over Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour and IE’s lack of proper standards support led to a flourishing of competitors, boosted by the open sourcing of Netscape, which would become the basis for the popular Firefox browser. In reaction to Microsoft’s approach of pushing its own technologies and ignoring open standards, the appeal of more rigorous web standards compliance demonstrated by other browsers including Opera, Safari and Chrome have since carved away at IE’s dominance. Additionally, IE became one of the worst offenders for security vulnerabilities. Since then, it’s become the browser everyone loves to hate.
Time for a RealitIE Check
Trident, Internet Explorer’s layout engine which turns HTML and code into readable web pages, is showing its age. Benchmarking sites show that it is the performance laggard of the competing products. It took until 2008 and Internet Explorer 8 before the browser passed the web standards compliance test, Acid2.
