Comment by tempaway5345 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempaway5345 | Hacker News Reader

First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update.

This can't be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren't as frequent as Chrome's

The answer of why IE hung around for so long probably has to do with corporate intranets and Microsofts huge enterprise customers needing to preserve backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is one of Microsoft's strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them.

The answer of why it lost to Chrome is that Chrome was a very strong entrant in the battle from day 1 of its release. Remember the Chrome launch comic? https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

>This can't be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren't as frequent as Chrome's

It was typically the case that Internet Explorer major version updates were optional, so you could use IE6 on Windows XP SP3, despite IE8 being out at that time.

IE6 was actually supported until 2016 on embedded versions of Windows XP!

> Backwards compatibility is one of Microsoft's strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them.

I know that Microsoft in general puts a lot of thought and resources into backwards compatibility.

But the thing is, with IE, I never felt it.

Back in the day, whenever a new version of IE came out, so much stuff would break, and the whole company would scramble to get everything fixed and compatible again - and getting things to work on multiple versions of IE simultaneously (and flawlessly) was such a pain.

We never had any similar problems with Firefox or Chrome... those updates never hurt as much. IE was the only browser, where new versions would cause all-hands-on-deck meetings...

As of the article, major version updates only with new versions of windows. And "why it lost to Chrome is that Chrome was a very strong entrant" begs the question.

Windows updates could be turned off back then. And often was

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