OTTAWA: Microsoft recently announced that Internet Explorer, its long-running web browser is officially coming to an end as a product. Released almost 20 years ago, Explorer, as it is often referred to, had quite the uphill battle when it entered the marketplace.
Today it seems people take for granted their browser software even though it has become the environment in which we do almost everything on a daily basis. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the browsers that existed (and his own which he created) were all text-based. It wasn’t until the National Center for Supercomputing Applications created Mosaic that graphics were introduced to the browser, as well as many other Internet applications that were bundled with it (hence the name Mosaic).
Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left the company and started his own company Mosaic Communications and started working on a new browser. That company was renamed Netscape Communications and, of course, those that have been browsing the web for awhile will remember Netscape as the number one browser for many years.
The NCSA sold the rights for licensing Mosaic to a company called SpyGlass, which in turn licensed the technology to Microsoft which used it for the basis of Internet Explorer. Netscape continued to grow, once holding a market share of 86% until its eventual decline in the early 2000s. Internet Explorer became much more popular as it was bundled in with its Windows operating system – something the company faced a lot of heat for but which helped it achieve an estimated 95% market share as Netscape declined.
Emerging from the ashes, Netscape put all of its code into a not-for-profit organization called Mozilla. From there, all kinds of variant browsers have been produced but the two most popular by far are Firefox and Google’s Chrome which together make up over 60% of the market. Internet Explorer, currently shipping as IE 11 still captures around 30% of the market across its various versions. Since older versions are not necessarily compatible with newer operating systems, it’s clear that many people are still running older computers to surf the web. As a computer historian, this doesn’t really surprise me since I am fully aware that older computers are still more capable than most people realize.
So by bringing an end to Internet Explorer, what will Microsoft hope to accomplish? The new browser, code-named Spartan, will be included in the upcoming Windows 10. It’s possible (although not confirmed) that the new lightweight browser will be available on platforms other than Windows as Microsoft starts embracing other platforms (especially mobile) with more open arms than ever before.
If you are a loyal user of Internet Explorer (there are a still a few of you out there, aren’t there?), it’s not like IE will just disappear from the landscape. The software will continue to run, but will likely fall victim to unpatched security problems and a lack of new features as the rest of the world marches on. But I suspect many of you won’t really care either way.
