[socrateslee]

I have been thinking about two questions for a long time. First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update.

[RajT88]

Such things rarely have a single succinct answer.

In reality, there's other factors:

- Legacy applications where nobody wanted to rewrite them to work with non-IE

- Chrome gained market share because the entire user experience was better. That includes updates, but also it was just really snappy to use. Speed is probably the bigger factor; normal users don't care about updates.

- As some have pointed out, lots of less technical users just use the default

- Did I mention those couple decades worth of legacy apps? It bears repeating, since MSFT had successfully kept other browsers out of market share through their 1-2 punch of strategic browser incompatibility and shipping with the OS.

[smcin]

IE being the default also meant that malware and viruses targeted it, and VBA scripting in Office.

Chrome started out not being targeted by these, and in addition, Google pushed security patches pretty quickly.

Anyone got any numbers on the frequency of exploits, and the mean time-to-patch, for IE vs Chrome, over time?

[Dalewyn]

>First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die?

Because it came bundled with Windows and because the internet was designed for IE. You can see that even today: Chrome is bundled with Android, and the internet is designed for Chrome.

>Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market?

Because IE, and specifically IE6, was a product of 2001. When Firefox (NOT Chrome) finally usurped the throne, it was because almost five years had passed since IE6 had released and the technologies for the internet and computers in general were being held back by what was then an ancient decrepit relic that was IE6.

Firefox introduced (mostly) W3C compliant (X)HTML, advanced CSS, JavaScript, tabbed browsing (nonchalantly stolen from Opera), and browser extensions/plugins among other things. Firefox was plain better than IE6 which at that point was frozen ancient technology, and Firefox usurped the throne from IE6. Microsoft's kneejerk reactions that were IE7 onwards and Trident!Edge came far too slow far too late and they never recovered from the loss.

Now you're probably asking why Chrome is the dominant monopoly browser today, and that answer is also easy: Chrome incorporated what Firefox introduced but marketed themselves more aggressively, continued to improve where Firefox languished upon obtaining the throne, and for better or worse threw out a lot of conventional computer nerd traditions which ultimately made for a more performant browser in line with common user desires.

[rstuart4133]

> Now you're probably asking why Chrome is the dominant monopoly browser today, and that answer is also easy: Chrome incorporated what Firefox introduced but marketed themselves more aggressively

That's one way of putting it. But I think the article indirectly explained it better:

> We know that binding IE with Windows is the key to IE’s domination of the browser market.

Google did a similar thing with Chrome. They bound it to Google's services. You got nagged every time you visited www.google.com. Understandably google's more advanced stuff didn't work with IE. But it also often didn't work with Firefox. This is what mozilla had to say about that https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... :

    A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption.

    He is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations in the past eight months; however, his allegations span far beyond current events and accuse Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.

[junon]

Large enterprises, medical organizations (think hospitals etc), governments (think smaller/local governments), and the elderly/tech un-savvy are very much on old Windows versions (e.g. XP) to this day. They don't even realize there are other browsers, or in the case of enterprise/medical, the cost and risk of updating is too great and requires vetting a bunch of stuff, which costs money and time.

[fardo]

Defaults are powerful, and IE was default.

If you’re a large bureaucracy in the early 2000s you went with whatever was default - and that was IE.

Defaults were seen as so powerful, that MS was anti-trusted for this. They did it anyways at the time because the juice was worth the squeeze.

[jansan]

I still do not understand how Apple gets away doing the same (or worse) with Safari on iOS.

[pizzapill]

Because Microsoft, Google and Apple are the fig leaf for each other. No Monopoly in sight.

Microsoft had to keep Apple alive to be their fig leaf, Google keeps Mozilla alive to be their fig leaf. Apple is not as dominant as Microsoft was.

[pjc50]

> Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market?

> Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same

Yes - Android and the iPhone.

The only real mobile browsers are Chrome and Safari, and Safari is only available within its walled garden, so to get a mobile-like development experience on desktop people used Chrome. It all followed from there.

(IE6 was Windows-only and tried to achieve lock-in with ActiveX, which let you run native COM controls in the browser. Hilariously inappropriate security model, but popular in the enterprise, and at one time mandated by the South Korean national ID system.)

[zvolsky]

When Chrome launched, its rendering speed was in a league of its own, delivering immediate results without the need to repeatedly click a link for faster loading. The design was clean and intuitive compared to alternatives such as Firebug and Fiddler the HTTP debugging proxy.

[AndrewDucker]

It's a niche, but Firefox runs just fine on Android.

[ifdefdebug]

And it runs full featured ublock on Android giving me an ad-free web experience.