Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Will Internet Explorer 8 bring back IE’s lost Browser market

Internet Explorer 8 has crossed the Beta stage with Release Candidate 1 being made available to public. If no serious flaws are found in this release, the next would be the final release. It’s being reported that Internet Explorer 8 is better than IE7, so does it  mean that it would be instrumental in recovering IE’s lost market share?

When Internet Explorer was released it started as a competitor to already on top Netscape Navigator. Aggressive marketing strategies kept on raising its market share until it became the king of browser market with over 94% share around mid 2004 when it started declining.

Were competitor browsers responsible for decline of IE’s market share or it was Microsoft’s own decision to end the war? I feel it’s the latter. Whether it was an intended decision or was outcome of overconfidence, Microsoft decided to decline, by declaring in 2003 that Internet Explorer would no longer be standalone applications but major versions would be released only with the new versions of Windows Operating System.  So while Internet Explorer 6 was the default bundled browser with Windows XP, and IE7 default browser for Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has just been released when Windows 7 is nearing its finish.

You may think that despite declaration of not releasing IE as standalone apps, they indeed continued to release installers for IE as they did for IE7 which many users installed on Windows XP systems and now for IE8. The fact, however, is that these installers are not standalone applications as they are too sensitive to Operating System configuration. While other browser may have their minimum requirement for Operating Systems, IE’s minimum requirement is specific to minor updates. For example take the current IE8 RC1 release, which has a dependency on a minor update (KB932823) which according to linked page says “Install this update to resolve an issue in which a user is unable to use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to download files on a computer that is running Windows with IME enabled.”

Since my installation was a fresh XP SP2 installation with only those updates installed which were required for Windows Live Writer, I decided to go ahead with automatic downloads and the installation failed! Should we call this a standalone application which cannot stand-alone and fails for want of a 400KB update which could have easily been added to its already heavy size of 16MB without much ado?

When I already have Opera, Chrome, Firefox and Safari installed on my system (ordered according to my usage pattern), would I care for IE after such failures? I would not, leave for one reason that I wanted to have a blog post on it’s usability compared to the other 4 as mentioned above. So I decided to give it a few more moments and made the updates manually completing the installation and got the greeting message “Welcome to Internet Explorer.

Do I look like diverting from the title “Will Internet Explorer 8 bring back the lost Browser market”? No! I’m coming to the point! though the installer for Internet Explorer 8 RC1 is available for download and anyone can download it, the 400KB update mentioned above that needs to be downloaded manually goes through online Product Authentication check ,and pirated copies of Windows OSes are bound to fail the check and will require to live solely on Firefox and Chrome. This necessarily means that Microsoft clearly means to exclude the section of users living on pirated versions of Windows OS and give away that piece to its competitor browsers.

In any case it’s unlikely that Internet Explorer will ever regain its market share considering that now there are comparatively many competitors each trying hard to beat others and in process slicing off another piece of IE’s share. What are your views? Eagerly awaiting those in comments.