IE decline comes amidst growing obsolescence of web browsers

Remember all the way back to a decade ago, when Microsoft was so insistent on keeping Netscape Navigator off its Windows platform that it was willing to face being busted like a piñata by the DOJ just to make it happen? While the company somehow managed to avoid punishment despite a guilty verdict, the whole thing seems laughable now, and for two reasons. One is the news that despite Microsoft’s best efforts, marketshare of Internet Explorer has dropped to a mere sixty percent in comparison to the ninety-plus that it once boasted. The more important angle is the fact that while nearly every computer user still uses one, web browsers are increasingly becoming an outdated concept for all but the most basic of internet tasks.

One need look no further than iTunes, whose store-within-a-music-library-app concept seemed revolutionary when it surfaced in 2003. While the idea of selling music through the music playback software instead of via a web browser was a head-scratcher to some pundits at the time, the concept proved to be a significantly more sophisticated approach than being limited to the confines of a web browser – and Apple rode iTunes all the way to the dominant spot in overall music sales, even as web browser-based alternatives like AmaonMP3 still struggle to find a mainstream audience despite often lower prices (these days some geek will try to get around the obvious by claiming that iTunes is a web browser, but don’t let them fool you on technicalities).

And while the iTunes Store was something of an anomaly in the early part of the previous decade in that most other developers failed to embrace the idea, more recent history suggests that the full scale reduction of the web browser into second class internet tool status is indeed underway. While services like Facebook and Twitter were once primarily used via a web browser (the latter also relying on the equally antiquated SMS), those social networks are now increasingly used via dedicated apps. Facebook launched an official app for iPhone and other devices awhile, and even the traditionally hands-off Twitter has bought up some third party apps in order to promote them as being the official methods of using the service. And the vacating of the web browser for higher level internet tasks isn’t limited to mobile devices, as evidenced by the rise of desktop apps like Tweetie for Mac. And while free internet services like Gmail were originally intended to be used solely in a web browser, the opening of up that particular service to IMAP protocols, allowing it to be used free of charge within a real email app like Apple’s Mail or Outlook Express, signals an ongoing shift away from web browsers for various internet functionality.

So even as nearly every computer user still fires up their web browser nearly every day, the increasing sophistication of the internet over the past decade, and over the past couple of years in particular, has led that browser to be used for an increasingly insignificant aspect of each user’s online experience – meaning that today’s news about further drops in Internet Explorer’s marketshare has Microsoft facing not only the question of how their strategy failed so badly, but just what the company was fighting so hard for in the first place.