(By comparison, today’s titan, Chrome, controls about two-thirds of the browser market.)Īs a result, developers invested a lot of time into building internal applications for things like accounting or inventory management that could only be accessed through Internet Explorer. No other browser has ever had as much of a stranglehold on the web before or since. In that era, Internet Explorer was utterly dominant, commanding 95% of the browser market at its peak in 2004.

Many companies outside the tech industry started developing their IT infrastructure in the early 2000s, in the wake of the first commercial internet boom. They’ve gotten stuck on Internet Explorer either by failing to regularly update their IT systems, or because they use specialized equipment that can’t be updated. Healthcare, manufacturing, and local government are the main sectors that still have Internet Explorer holdouts, according to radio show Marketplace. Mostly, it’s large, legacy organizations in industries that don’t rely too much on the web to conduct their core functions. Which begs the question: Who on earth is still relying on this obsolete web browser to run their business? But Microsoft was quick to clarify that it would still support a version of Internet Explorer built into its newer Edge web browser, as a service to all the companies that still rely on Internet Explorer. The announcement was no surprise-the once-dominant web browser faded into obscurity years ago and now delivers less than 1% of the world’s internet traffic. Microsoft announced yesterday (May 19) that it would finally retire Internet Explorer on June 15, 2022.

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