What new sorcery is this? The browser wars finally took a turn for the interesting this year, as the new Microsoft Edge put up a fight against Google Chrome, the browser that has pretty much cornered the market.
Meanwhile, good old Mozilla Firefox is also showing that it has some life in it.
So, on paper, the battle for the best browser is now a race between three players, with a handful of underdogs like Opera and Vivaldi also in the mix. However, one previous titan of the industry has slowly been bowing out.
Yes, talking about Internet Explorer here.
IE no longer has a place in the modern world, with even Microsoft recommending against using it for daily browsing.
As Chris Jackson, a Microsoft engineer, so aptly put:
“You see, Internet Explorer is a compatibility solution. We’re not supporting new web standards for it and, while many sites work fine, developers by and large just aren’t testing for Internet Explorer these days. They’re testing on modern browsers.
So, if we continued our previous approach, you would end up in a scenario where, by optimizing for the things you have, you end up not being able to use new apps as they come out. As new apps are coming out with greater frequency, what we want to help you do is avoid having to miss out on a progressively larger portion of the web!”
Yet, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the world is ready to give up on Internet Explorer, no sir!
IE jumped from 3.88% in September to no less than 5.57% in October, inching really close to Firefox that finds itself in third place. Another odd month like this, and it may even overtake this most iconic of browsers that is the face of independent web technologies.
The big question is, though, why exactly is this happening.
Hard to say right now, but perhaps it might have got something to do with some enterprise software that runs on this vintage program. It’s hard for the browser market to move this many points in such short space of time, harder yet for a retired solution like Internet Explorer.
On the other side of the charts, we have Google Chrome sitting pretty at 69.25%, with Microsoft Edge having crossed double figures at 10.22%.
