The form of the package alone provides optional installation for the corresponding Windows, but starting from IE4, IE is integrated into the latest supported version of Windows as the default browser.

As Microsoft forcibly binds IE to the operating system, its market share has increased rapidly. At that time, Microsoft used the monopoly advantage of the Windows system to promote IE. Microsoft claims that IE and Windows are inseparable. For this reason, the US Department of Justice even intervened in Microsoft’s “anti-competitive conduct” investigation.

Unfortunately, in 1998, Netscape lost the competition with Microsoft Internet Explorer. After the first browser war began, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark once compared Microsoft to the Death Star (DeathStar).

The second browser war: IE vs Firefox

In order to save the market, Netscape announced that all future versions of its software will be free and open the source code of Netscape Communicator 4.0, forming an informal organization Mozilla, which is what we know today Firefox browser.

As of 2002, IE had a 95% market share and brought Microsoft more than $100 million in revenue each year. However, with the rapid rise of IE’s defeat, Mozilla, IE began to gradually decline, and browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera began to appear. In 2006, IE6 was rated as “the eighth worst technology product in history.”

In the 2011 “50 Worst Tech Products in the History of Technology” list, IE6 ranked 11th. If you have worked in web design, IE6 may want you to “jump the cliff” because it does not support CSS2, does not support transparency in PNG images, and often crashes. Therefore, on the Internet, you may see the following black IE picture, which also clarifies most people’s impression of IE.

IE does not have enough support for new technologies, causing many people to do the first thing after installing Windows:

  • The first step is to open IE;

  • The second step, use IE to download Chrome;

  • The third step is to set Chrome as the default browser;

In fact, according to the top browser trend chart released by the research organization NetApplications, in July 2014, IE accounted for 47.67% of the global browser market share, which dropped to 42.55% in July 2015.

In March 2015, Microsoft officially confirmed that it would abandon the IE brand. The new version of the browser code-named “Project Spartan” will have a new name. In April 2015, the Microsoft product launch announced that the Project Spartan project was officially named the Microsoft Edge browser.

On October 15, 2015, Microsoft announced that it would stop providing technical support for multiple older versions of Internet Explorer browsers on January 12, 2016.

Microsoft stated on its official website that Internet Explorer browser users must update their browsers before this date, and pointed out that only the latest version can continue to receive updates and security patches. As a result, in the Windows Vista SP2 operating system, the IE browser must be updated to IE 9, and in Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, the IE browser must be updated to IE 11.

On August 18, 2018, Microsoft announced that from August 17, 2021, IE browser will no longer support Microsoft 365, users will not be able to access certain features, and some features will stop working completely.

The former competitor Mozilla also had a good user base in the past. It is considered a more advanced browser than IE, and it looks like it will replace Internet Explorer as the most popular Web browser. With its open source features, Firefox once became the default standard browser for Linux distributions. Compared with other browsers, Firefox has much higher security. It does not collect user privacy. At the same time in 2017, Firefox 57, also known as Firefox Quantum browser.

This version is known as the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004. It not only greatly improves the performance, but also revises the visual effects. In the Quantum version, the resource consumption, especially the memory footprint, is much smaller than that of Chrome. The test data provided by Mozilla Firefox official website shows that Chro