When Internet Explorer passed Netscape for the first time

It was on September 28, 1998 that Internet Explorer passed Netscape in market share for the first time. It took just under three years for it to go from an afterthought in the Microsoft Plus pack to the dominant browser. And that was the beginning of the end for Netscape. Internet Explorer held the position until April 30, 2012, when Chrome passed it for the first time. They jockeyed for position until May 14, 2012, when Chrome emerged with the lead.

I keep flip-flopping on whether controlling the browser matters as much now as it did in 1998. But it mattered for different reasons in 1998.

Why the browser mattered in 1998

In less than three years, Internet Explorer went from almost an afterthought to the majority web browser.

The problem in 1998 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, 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.

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 they could in as many of them as possible. The goal at the very least was for the page to look good in the current versions 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 Microsoft had every incentive 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. Bill Gates outlined a plan in a memo titled The Internet Tidal Wave. Gates and Microsoft could tolerate such a future if it ran on their browser.

So they did what they could to ensure the future ran on Microsoft’s browser. They started bundling Internet Explorer with Windows instead of making it part of the optional Plus Pack that half the population didn’t bother with. They made it a free download for copies of Windows that didn’t include it. And they even 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. The Department of Justice sued in May 1998 over this anti competitive behavior seeking remedies up to and including Microsoft’s breakup.

Internet Explorer became the dominant browser and stayed that way for more than a decade, until 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, get the control you wanted over design elements, and 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, but they both 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 it was Chrome that ended up emerging at the top, Firefox and Safari gave it 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, many of them relying on Microsoft’s non-standard extensions. 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 to the Chromium engine on January 15, 2020.

Why Internet Explorer lives on inside Edge

Migrating those legacy Web apps that were dependent on Internet Explorer remained a problem. That’s the reason Microsoft Edge retains an optional Internet Explorer compatibility option. It’s something that a lot of organizations disable, and if you don’t need it, it’s a good idea to disable it for enhanced security. But for organizations that still have one or two business critical applications that were built for Internet Explorer, Edge’s IE compatibility mode is 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.