Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Louis Adam and today I’m going to go back to the long history of Internet Explorer, which is coming to an end.
Launched in 1995, Internet Explorer is the name of the web browser designed by Microsoft. Its first version was developed for Windows 95. In 27 years of career, Internet Explorer knew a quasi-monopoly before being finally eclipsed.
The boom of the year 2000
Internet Explorer’s heyday was the 2000s. Driven by the democratization of the Internet and the popularity of Windows XP, for which it is the default browser, Internet Explorer quickly became the most common software for Internet users. who wish to discover the web. In 2004, it represented more than 90% of the web browser market share.
But this quasi-monopoly also arouses criticism: in 1998, in the United States, legal action was taken against Microsoft, accused of favoring its own browser to the detriment of the competition. 10 years later, the European Commission will launch a similar procedure, resulting in a record fine imposed on Microsoft.
And the criticisms do not only affect the competitive aspect. If Internet Explorer is unavoidable in the early 2000s, the liberties taken by the browser with the standards of the W3C, the organization which enacts the standards of web technologies, have earned it many enemies.
Firefox and Chrome versus IE
This is one of the arguments put forward by Firefox, its main competitor at the end of the 2000s, to stand up to it. The Mozilla Foundation browser makes it a point of honor to respect standards, when Internet Explorer takes advantage of its dominant position to overcome them.
The war could have gone on for a long time, if Google had not finally come to reshuffle the cards by imposing Chrome as the most popular browser of the 2010s.
The decline began with the arrival of Internet Explorer 11. This latest version of the browser, launched in 2013, is mainly maintained for compatibility reasons. Microsoft was already working on a new browser project, Edge, which was to take over from Internet Explorer.
IE shuts down today
The first announcements about the end of support for older versions of Internet Explorer arrive around 2015, but Internet Explorer 11 continues to work alongside Edge, to ensure a smooth transition.
Because it’s not easy to put a browser like Internet Explorer back on the shelf: a number of web applications have been developed specifically to work with this browser and removing it in a somewhat too abrupt way would put many users in the embarrassment.
But in 2020, Microsoft announces the end of support for Internet Explorer 11 for June 15, 2022. A few fallback solutions still remain: Edge has, for example, an Internet Explorer mode to ensure compatibility. But the browser itself will no longer be offered for download by Microsoft, and users will be redirected to Edge.