Actually, Internet Explorer 6 was once 97% of the browser market. That’s right, 97%—they had the browser market locked down!
If ever there was a situation where “embrace, extend, extinguish” (EEE) should have worked, it was with the open web.
Yet Microsoft failed. Why is that?
First, while Microsoft initially was installed by default on every Mac, they had neglected the Mac version of Internet Explorer. So Apple took action and made their own browser—Safari. They shipped this in 2003.
But also, Microsoft refused to build a version of Internet Explorer for Linux. This forced Linux advocates to build their own web browser engines, most prominently KHTML. Apple forked KHTML into WebKit, which was then used as Safari’s browser engine.
Thereafter Netscape rose from the ashes as Mozilla, released Firefox. And Firefox not only caused tabs to go mainstream, but also extensions too.
And where was Microsoft while all this was happening? Resting on their laurels, content with the belief that EEE would work. They never improved IE6. As all the other browsers came out, IE6 looked more and more worse.
But still, they had the corporations using it, so there was no fire in Microsoft to improve IE6.
The final nail in the coffin was Chrome. Corporations were willing to make the leap to Chrome because Google built backwards compatibility for IE6 with Chrome.
Microsoft tried to recover with subsequent versions of Internet Explorer. But they eventually discontinued it and released a new browser called Edge.
Nevertheless, Microsoft never achieved browser dominance again even with installing edge as the default browser on Windows.
Microsoft failed to #EEE the open web. It wasn’t the open web that was extinguished. It was Internet Explorer.
