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In 1993, 99.7% of people used a browser called Mosaic. It was the first browser ever to run on Windows, which ensured its popularity.
In 1994, Netscape navigator was released. Within a year, it had 50% of the market share.
In 1995, Internet Explorer was released. It started slowly at first, and in its first year only gained about 7% market share. Netscape crushed Mosaic during this time, gaining most of the market share. Around the same time, Opera was released.
Between 1998 and 1999, IE overtook Netscape in the first "Browser Wars". By 2001, IE had around 90% market share.
Netscape, seeing their rapid decline, decided to open source its browser and the Mozilla Foundation was formed. The Mozilla browser gained a following, although a small one. In 2003, Mozilla held about 2% market share, and IE had basically all of the rest. Around the same time, Opera upgraded to version 7, and its Presto rendering engine, and started growing.
In 2004, Mozilla's testing project Firebird was renamed Firefox, and V 0.8 of the popular browser was released. On November 9th 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released to the public, and a potential solution to Spyware, Ads, Popups, as well as the ability to have tabbed browsing. It instantly gained in popularity, more and more people downloading it every day. It went from a 5% market share to a 8% market share in 2005.
On the 20th September 2005, Opera became free. There was not so much of a jump in market share, although it certainly started growing. It boasted speed above all others, tabbed browsing (which it actually had since its very first release), as well as immensely good security, and a popup blocker that surpassed that of Firefox.
IE was gradually, but steadily losing market share. Its peak of more than 90% in 2002 was falling, below 90%, then below 85%. Firefox and Opera were gaining a loyal following as Internet Explorer started losing ground.
And so now, we see the release of IE7, with tabbed browsing (which Opera has had for 11 years and Mozilla has had for 4), RSS Feeds, and other features that have been standard in other browsers for years. There is no innovation in IE7, its all just copying the competition.
So where will we see IE go in the next few years? Still it has problems - it does not pass Acid2; in fact, the IE developers have actually said they wont try and make it pass Acid2. There are still security issues; it is still lacking in features, and it still doesnt render so many sites correctly.
All of these problems are not problems at all in Firefox or Opera - they will both render valid markup correctly. Firefox is backed by a large developer base, the open source community always kicking in to make it better; and the Opera programmers are gods of their art. Compared to Microsoft, however, these two companies are tiny, making very little money at all in comparison. Why is Internet Explorer still not standards-compliant, when Microsoft has so much money?
These problems are leading to the ultimate downfall of IE. IE7 is no more standards compliant than IE6, really, except for a few bugs in the IE6 rendering engine. PNG Alpha-channel transparency has only just been released, when it could have been released so much earlier. And IE still doesnt support SVG.
Firefox and Opera are now the browsers leading the revolution, with IE just following along. There is no innovation, no originality.
So what will happen?
Well, IE will never completely lose its market share. The fact that IE is bundled with Windows is going to ensure its continued chunk of market share (after all, there are many idiots around); but Firefox and Opera will increase in popularity. IE7 is a desperate attempt to gain back market share that has miserably failed.
Still, no-one with any sense takes IE seriously. Web developers become increasingly more annoyed as valid html and xhtml fails to render properly in IE, me included. There are many websites now that say 'best viewed in firefox', and these are going to get increasingly more prevalent, to the point where developers refuse to allow it to work in IE - completely blocking it out. This may lead to the ultimate downfall of IE, it may not.
IE7 is differently designed to IE6 - its not specifically part of windows anymore, whereas IE6 was incredibly integrated into the OS. This could show that Microsoft are starting to take IE out of the OS to the point where it can be removed. Maybe IE8 will be a completely seperate, removable program, maybe not.
The popularity of IE is falling. Whether it will completely lose its market share is uncertain, but the thing that is nearly certain is that both FF and Opera will gain popularity.
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What do you mean by "I finally just gave up and decided to let IE view the page that way"?
Microsoft copyrighted the coloring of the scroll bar. So opera and mozilla cannot use it.
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