Internet Explorer
By Microsoft
Internet Explorer was a web browser developed by Microsoft and bundled with Windows for over two decades, becoming the dominant browser worldwide during the late 1990s and 2000s before losing ground to Firefox and later Chrome. Microsoft…
Definition
Internet Explorer was a web browser developed by Microsoft and bundled with Windows for over two decades, becoming the dominant browser worldwide during the late 1990s and 2000s before losing ground to Firefox and later Chrome. Microsoft discontinued Internet Explorer as its primary browser strategy in favor of the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, and support for the legacy product has since ended entirely.
Overview
Internet Explorer was first released by Microsoft as part of its response to the rise of Netscape Navigator, and its inclusion as a free, pre-installed component of Windows gave it a distribution advantage that Netscape, initially a paid product, could not match, contributing to a rapid shift in browser market share during what became known as the first browser war between the two companies. Mechanically, Internet Explorer used Microsoft's own Trident rendering engine for most of its lifespan, which implemented HTML, CSS, and JavaScript support with its own quirks and proprietary extensions, such as ActiveX controls, that diverged from the standards other browsers followed and created long-standing compatibility challenges for web developers targeting multiple browsers simultaneously with a single codebase. Among browsers, Internet Explorer's dominance in the 2000s was followed by a steep decline as Firefox and then Chrome offered faster performance, better standards compliance, and more frequent updates; by the time Microsoft replaced its browser strategy with Edge, Internet Explorer's market share had fallen from a large majority to a small fraction of overall web usage worldwide. In practice, Internet Explorer was the default way most Windows users accessed the web for many years, and it remained relevant afterward mainly through enterprise and legacy intranet applications that had been built specifically around its non-standard behaviors and were slow to migrate to modern, standards-based browsers. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Internet Explorer, redirecting users to Microsoft Edge, which since its Chromium-based rewrite uses Google's Blink engine rather than Trident. Internet Explorer's legacy is largely one of compatibility debt: its proprietary quirks shaped years of workaround-driven web development practices that later browsers and standards efforts worked hard to move past over the following decade. Many organizations continued running legacy Internet Explorer-only intranet software well past its official end of support, illustrating how deeply embedded a dominant, non-standard browser can become inside enterprise software over a long enough period of use. That long tail of dependency is a large part of why Microsoft kept limited Internet Explorer compatibility layers available inside Edge for years after Internet Explorer itself was formally retired. Internet Explorer's story is often cited in discussions of browser and web standards history as a cautionary example of what happens when a dominant, slow-moving product loses ground to faster-iterating competitors offering better performance and compliance, a pattern later echoed in Microsoft's own decision to abandon its in-house engines for Chromium.
Key Features
- Bundled free with Windows for over two decades
- Used Microsoft's proprietary Trident rendering engine
- Supported ActiveX controls and other non-standard extensions
- Dominant browser market share during the late 1990s and 2000s
- Lost majority market share to Firefox and later Chrome
- Superseded by the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge
- Left a legacy of compatibility workarounds in web development
Use Cases
Alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions
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