Summary

Browsers are a give away; no one pays for themNot an indicator of anything except that MS does not have the best browser in town

Analysis

Loosing market share in a catagory which provides no income is of little relevance.  The fact is Internet Explorer would be at a much lower usage level if it were not for the fact that many windows users are novices and will not stray from the standard.  Further there are many web sites still that will only work properly with explorer, and they demand you use it.


Internet Explorer requires a rewrite from the ground up.  It is slower than FireFox or Chrome and certainly less feature rich.  I think it is much wiser for microsoft to get Windows 7 out the door than put lots of resources into the browser.  Vista has been a bust.  If they make Windows 7 an improvement over XP they stand to garner lots of the corporate market and end users, myself included, who refused to buy Vista because of all its issues.

And by the way if Windows 7 is a hit, Internet explorer will be dragged up along side.  Vista's issues have no doubt eroded its support.

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