Internet Explorer’s impending end signals govt must modernise

BENGALURU: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), which once was the world’s most popular browser — it had a peak market share of 95% in 2003 — will soon become history. Microsoft has announced that it will cease all support for it in August next year. In some products, like Teams, it will stop working even earlier.

Google’s Chrome — with its speed, cleaner look, thousands of extensions (such as for translation, ad-blocking), and better privacy options — has become almost the default browser for much of the world. In India, even more so. While Chrome has a market share of 66% globally across devices and consoles, it’s as high as 82% in India, according to web analytics service StatCounter. That goes up to 85% if only desktops are considered. In contrast, IE is at just 0.2% (0.5% for desktops alone).