A UX designer’s view — Why did Microsoft’s Internet Explorer fail?
Today, we live in an age that we can get all the information at our fingertips at any time, and browsers give us this opportunity. The internet explorer was one of the earliest browsers that dominated the market in the early 2000s, but why did it fail later? I am going to highlight five factors that are somehow related to the failure of Internet Explorer.
- Speed
Speed is everything in the age of technology. The IE browser was slow, buggy, and frozen quite often when the other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari are much faster and easier to use.
2. Innovation
Meanwhile, browsers like Google Chrome came up with a feature to set up their themes on the home page plus a chrome store that users can install web apps and extensions, IE got nothing.
3. Adaptability
Since mobile users have gone up over time, all the websites and apps need to adapt to the mobile landscape. The products or services that are late in this game would lose the game, and the Internet Explorer was far from the mobile responsiveness.
4. Default Browsers
While Google and Apple phones are dominant in the market, Windows phones fail. Since most mobile users tend to use their default browsers on their phones, fewer people use the IE browser over time.
5. Updates
In the past decade, when the rival Google Chrome has updated 70 times since the launch, the IE has only four times (source). Therefore, we can tell the IE browser team fail to learn user needs over time.
Since the IE browser was failing, Microsoft launched a new browser called the Edge in 2015, and it ended support for the IE 11 on August 17, 2021. Today, The Edge has a market share of 3.14% in the browser market share worldwide. We can’t say Microsoft lost the browser battle. However, the battleground is changing, and they have to adapt fast to today’s market.
