DEVELOPMENT GURUJI

In 2003, Internet Explorer enjoyed a monopoly of 95% of the market share.  Since its inception in 2001, it has taken IE less than 2 years to become uncrowned king of World Wide Web.

Reasons for IE’s unparalleled monopoly were many. It was free and unlike the browsers created by Netscape and Opera, it did not cost a penny to install IE to the browsers. Besides it came as a package with Windows, so who ever had Windows as Operating System, received IE whether they liked it or not.IE thrived well in the sparse competition afforded by Mozilla, Netscape. In short IE was the simply the fastest, stable and the best browser available in 2006.Notorious trial of US Department of Justice against Microsoft did little to challenge IE’s supremacy.

But the situation changed when Mozilla Firefox was released in 2004. The browser was far superior to IE and was open source. Users switched from IE to Firefox in droves. Competition became intense when Apple and Google entered the scene with their own web browsers, Google Chrome & Safari respectively; Clearly IE’s days were numbered.

As a last bid, Microsoft announced the release of IE 2007 in October 2006. IE8 is due shortly and web pundits are speculating that it will be the last nail in IE6’s coffin, The reasons they state are:

1.IE7 and IE8 can only be installed on Windows XP SP2+ or Vista. Many people continue to use older versions of Windows or avoid automatic updates.

2.Many large corporations have legacy applications that only support IE6. Upgrading these systems incurs significant costs which may not be justifiable - especially in the current economic climate. As a result, their employees have been unable to switch to alternative browsers.

Web pundits argue that with the high profile internet campaign by rival browsers, IE6 will soon be history. Users will naturally migrate to more advanced browsers like Mac or Linux. Is the Web Giant finally breathing its last?