When Chrome Passed Internet Explorer

It was on April 30, 2012 that Chrome passed Internet Explorer in market share for the first time. It took nearly 14 years for someone to pass the former afterthought in the Microsoft Plus pack to become the dominant browser. The two browsers jockeyed for the lead for two weeks, with Chrome overcoming IE for good on May 14, 2012.

With Chrome taking over, we traded one monopolist, Microsoft, for another, Google.

Why the browser mattered in 1998

In less than three years, Internet Explorer went from almost an afterthought to the majority web browser. It held the position for 12 years before giving way to Google Chrome.

The problem in 1998 when IE took over as the dominant browser was the two browsers were not completely compatible. Standards existed, but they were limiting in a number of ways. Both browsers extended the standard to add capability, but they didn’t necessarily do it in compatible ways. Microsoft in particular was bad about extending the standard in incompatible ways.

The result was not unlike opening a Microsoft Office document in Libre Office. It works fine at least half the time. The rest of the time, the document probably opens, but some of the line spacing is off, the positioning of an image may be off off, and if there are multiple issues, they cascade to throw off the pagination and make the document look sloppy. It’s probably readable, but it doesn’t look quite right.

In the 90s, I knew professional web designers who would take care to test in both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and ideally in as many versions of each of them as possible, to try to get their pages to render as intelligently as possible in as many of them as possible. The goal at the very least was for the page to look good in the latest  version of Internet Explorer and Netscape.

The logic went that you could watch any TV broadcast on any brand of television. It’s not like there were broadcasts optimized for Sony and other ones optimized for Magnavox. People who were used to that world tried to create content that would render in as many web browsers as possible.

Internet Explorer partisans

But there were some people who took a partisan approach. They picked a browser, designed for that browser, and displayed its logo in a banner on the site. If you used any other browser, you were doing it wrong.

I recall one or two sites in my regular reading rotation circa 1998 that sided with Microsoft, had a Designed for Internet Explorer banner on the sidebar, and even added a note underneath saying “And I mean it!”

I do remember obliging them, and closing Netscape and reopening their site in Internet Explorer to see how much difference it made. It wasn’t enough to make a fuss about. It rendered well enough in Netscape that some designers would have called it good.

The problem with Internet Explorer being nonstandard

The problem for anyone not named Microsoft was that the incentive grew to become less compatible and less standards compliant over time. The modern idea of a web app that runs in a Web browser and runs equally well regardless of the combination of hardware platform, operating system, and Web browser scared Microsoft. But they could tolerate such a future if their web browser was in the mix.

So they did what they could to ensure their browser was in the mix. They started bundling it with Windows instead of in the optional Plus Pack. They made it a free download for copies of Windows that didn’t include it. Microsoft even created versions of Internet Explorer for Unix. And they went even further and paid Apple (indirectly) to make it the default browser on Macs.

Microsoft was buying market share, but also cutting off Netscape’s sources of revenue.

Internet Explorer became the dominant browser and stayed that way for more than a decade, until giving way to Chrome in 2012.

The move toward standards-compliant rival browsers

Eventually, AOL, the company who ended up owning Netscape, gave up and open sourced the code, turning it over to the Mozilla project. Mozilla considered ways to make the browser more compatible with Internet Explorer. They even considered implementing ActiveX, the most problematic of Microsoft’s extensions. But ultimately, Mozilla decided to go the opposite direction, deliberately choosing to make its browser as standards compliant as possible.

By then, it was safe to make such a move. The HTML standards had been extended to the point where you could do most of the things we used to do with hacky proprietary extensions using the existing standards. Instead. The promise was, you could follow the standards, your page would look great in a Mozilla browser like Firefox, and probably wouldn’t look terrible in Internet Explorer.

Then Apple came along and built its own web browser, and they forked an open source engine that also used a standards compliant approach. Google came along and forked that engine again, the result being Chrome. But both Apple and Google maintained a standards compliant approach.

It’s hard to say whether any of them were big enough to turn the tables on Microsoft on their own. But together they were. Although Chrome ended up emerging at the top in 2012, Firefox and Safari gave Chrome a boost to get there.

Internet Explorer’s legacy

Internet Explorer’s legacy wasn’t good. Throughout the ’90s and even into the 2000s, web applications for corporate intranets proliferated. They were a mix of commercial software and internally developed applications, but the main thing they had in common was they only worked in Internet Explorer.

So we reached a point in the early 2010s where corporate intranets lived in a time warp. The corporate intranet was full of applications that required Internet Explorer. The company who built them was out of business, or the team who built it was long gone, but the apps performed necessary business functions.

And yet, surfing the public web with Internet Explorer was a pretty miserable experience by 2012 or so. It was much slower than using any other web browser. And over time, an increasing number of pages just didn’t work right in IE, but they were fine in all the other browsers.

Fixing the security and compatibility and performance problems of Internet Explorer eventually became too much. Microsoft admitted defeat and released Edge, a new browser based on a new engine in April 2015, and deprecated Internet Explorer.

Microsoft later decided that building a new new, high performance, standards compliant engine on its own wasn’t worth the effort. So they switched Edge to the Chromium engine.

Migrating those legacy Web apps that were dependent on Internet Explorer remain a problem. That’s the reason Microsoft Edge retains an optional Internet Explorer compatibility option. It’s something that a lot of organizations disable, but for organizations that still have one or two business critical applications that were built for Internet Explorer, it’s much better than keeping a fleet of Windows 7 machines around just to use a web app.

We got the dystopian future Microsoft wanted in 1998, and we all realized it wasn’t any good. Microsoft included.