Browser Wars Episode 1: The IE Menace

A war is raging with new lines, territories and allegiances being created every day. It is the Browser War, the fight for “usage share,” or what particular browser people are using the most. The browser war traces its roots back to the start of the Internet with Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – once the overwhelming choice, finds itself under attack from all sides.

Internet historians consider the battle today the second ‘browser war.’ The first is generally accepted to be the rivalry that exploded in the mid to late 1990s between Netscape and Microsoft.  Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer (IE) versions one through five (and its subsequent addition to all Windows platforms upon installation) nearly eliminated the competition.  By 2002, IE had 95% of the user share.  The war had ended.

Microsoft had won, but in doing so, changed the rules.  The main advantage Microsoft had (and has) is the automatic installation of IE on Windows platforms – still the most popular OS worldwide.  IE is the simplest browser to use on a Windows OS machine, because it’s already installed.  While this led to a significant lawsuit and hefty payout for violation of anti-trust laws, it is still the leg-up that other browsers can’t compete with.

By the time Microsoft rolled out IE6, the way browsers were developed had changed significantly.  While rich in features, IE6 had significant bugs, security issues and lapses in the following of standards.  While this meant IE was far ahead in the number of tasks and offerings, it also made for unsafe browsing, often ran slow, displayed some sites poorly and caused web developers to put significantly more time into developing sites not only adhering to standards, but also to Microsoft specific bugs.  From the frustration these and other issues caused, a new generation of browsers has stepped up: Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari, among others.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released IE8.  With Internet Explorer down to 66% usage share (in all versions – 6,7 and 8), they enhanced IE with better privacy protection, gave it simpler and more intuitive browsing features and built it to be compatible with the IE7 standards.  Additionally, it is far less prone to crashes than any prior IE model.

That is not to say that IE8 is without its issues.  It is still a slower running application than its competitors, significantly slower in some cases. It has some image display issues and formatting consistency problems.  Lastly, it does not offer some of the features of its competitors such as Safari or Firefox (among others).

It seems safe to say that as long as Microsoft Windows remains the most popular OS, Internet Explorer will continue to rule browser usage share.  However, the IE slice is smaller than it once was, and statistics show the second browser wars are far from over.