Microsoft announced the retirement of its web browser ‘Internet Explorer’. In its place, a new product was introduced as ‘Internet Edge’ till 15 June 2022. Internet Explorer’s eventual downfall was already anticipated by web-watchers, but it may come as an unwelcome surprise to those who are not quite up-to-date. Well, for most, this was no shocking news.
Almost everyone is familiar with the term ‘Googling’ for searching on Google, but there is no such thing as ‘Microsofting’. So how did Google become synonymous with web search, while Microsoft, despite its long and pioneering history, failed to be synonymous with anything? The answer is market share. Google’s share of the total web search is 92.24 percent – more than 3.5 billion searches a day. In Microsoft’s own search engine Bing, it is only 2.29 percent.
Microsoft was never a small player. When the web was in its infancy, it was the market leader. This was when Microsoft stepped into the fray, focusing on making the ‘personal computer’ more personal. By the time Internet Explorer was released in 1995, Microsoft had positioned itself at the forefront of the digital world, with a much better design and more intuitive interface. But after establishing its reputation, Microsoft stopped advancing the development of ‘Internet Explorer’.
He was constantly improving in Windows but not in the web browser. Since that time ‘Internet Explorer’ has always been lagging behind, whether it is tabbed browsing or innovations like the search bar. It became increasingly irrelevant and for this reason, its prevalence also kept declining.
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