Microsoft’s Internet Explorer bows out, but browser wars aren’t over yet

There was just a small ripple across the technosphere when Microsoft (MS) announced it would retire its Internet Explorer (IE) browser, shutting down all support by August 2021. MS also stated that the IE successor, the MS Edge browser, would move completely onto Google’s open-source Chromium platform.

Neither IE nor Edge are popular anymore. Barely 1.3 per cent of the world’s surfers (desktop plus mobile) used IE in July 2020, and cynics would suspect that many of those IE windows were opened by accident. MS Edge only has about 2.2 per cent market share.

Google’s Chrome, (also based on Chromium and integrated with the Android operating system), is by far the most popular of browsers, with 66 per cent market share across all platforms.