MS is going to phase out its Internet Explorer browser, and would discontinue all support by August 2021. MS Edge is the successor of IE. It is on the lines of Google’s Chrome — open source platform.

IE has miniscule market share — 1.3 percent of the total number of surfers. Edge has 2.2 per cent market share. Chrome from Google is integrated with the Android operating system and has a massive 66 percent market share across all plaforms. Apple supporters prefer Safari (16.65 percent). Tech savvy Geeks use Firefox from Mozilla. (4.26 percent) or Opera (2.05 per cent) or Vivaldi (0.04 per cent). Both Opera and Vivaldi are built on top of chromium.

In 1998, IE dominated and MS had attracted anti-trust suit. It was loaded free with windows. It was mainly a desktop market. In September 1998, two college kids set up Google, a search engine company. Internet was just a text-based academic resource till in the early 1990s whenTim-Berners Lee developed hypertext mark up language (HTML) which laid the foundation of the World Wide Web (www). The first browsers were made available in 1994 by small companies. Mosaic was one such pioneer. Netscape Navigator was feature-rich and revolutionary. However, Mosaic and Netscape were paid programmes. These were loaded on the computers through floppies. MS asked Mosaic to design IE. Later it was offered as a free installation along with Windows operated computers. That drove other browsers out of the market.

By 2001, IE had almost 90 per cent plus browser market share. Still Geeks preferred Opera. E-commerce appeared. The payment systems were configured with IE. Mozilla launched Firefox in 2002. It was free and feature-rich. Its functionality was extended by millions of add-ons the developers wrote. It could do many things IE could not. It started gaining market share.

Apple changed the game five years later. It introduced iPhone in 2007. Google developed Android. This democratised the smartphone market. Windows was a laggard and missed the bus.

Chrome was released by Google in 2008. It imitated the tactics adopted by IE but bettered IE on account of the hindsight. Google created even a stripped down operating system based on Chrome. Chrome has acquired market share constantly. It is the world’s default browser right now. Chrome’s dominance perhaps would not last for ever, considering the browser history.