At the time of writing, Internet Explorer just finished Quarter 2 of 2008 a 74% market share among web browsers, with Firefox in second place with 18%.

If you aren’t a web developer (or a computer geek of any kind), you’ll probably look at this figure and go “Wow, Microsoft sure is dominating the browser market.” And you’d be right. But you’d also be missing a key fact. Take a look at this table of browser usage. Just four years ago (Q2 2004), IE had a 95% market share. That’s over 5% loss per year.

I think that quite a bit of this has to do with web developers. I don’t know any web developers who use IE as their primary browser. The vast majority of us do our development in Firefox, then cross our fingers and see how it looks in IE. There are two major reasons for this.

The first is web standards. Firefox is close to perfect on these. Internet Explorer is at something like 50% implementation. When we make something in Firefox, it looks how we’d expect it to look, because Firefox for the most part follows the standards. Then we load it up in IE, and it’s a jumbled mess, and we spend countless hours trying to fix it in IE without breaking it in Firefox (often sacrificing certain things because they just can’t be done in one without breaking it in the other).

The second (much more important) one is addons. IE is basically a rock; it’s meant for consumers, and there’s nothing extra (except for a small sprinkle of Microsoft-made extension). Firefox has a giant repository of addons, actively being developed by the user base. Many of these are a developer’s dream, the two biggest being:

• The Web Developer Toolbar, an awesome set of shortcuts and utilities that help web developers… uh… develop the web.
• Firebug. The mother of all web development assistants. JavaScript debugger/console, DOM manipulator… well, you can read the front page of the site quicker than I can copy it. I can honestly say, without exaggeration, that if I did not have Firebug, my life would be significantly worse at the moment (mostly because I would’ve accomplished about 1/3 of what I’ve accomplished at work).

There are loads more addons; some helpful to developers, some just to regular users. The main point is, they’re made by users. They represent the needs and wants of the userbase, and they’re developed at no cost to Mozilla.

Now that I’m done with that introductory novel, we reach my main point: why is Microsoft not going this route?

While it would be optimal for us, they don’t necessarily need to make it open source like Firefox; just open it up. Give us a big flexible API, so that we can write plugins like we can for Firefox. To me, this seems like a no-brainer, and I’ll explain why.

Internet Explorer is already free with Windows, so no one would be able to use this to make “free versions” of IE (not that you’d be able to do that with a plugin anyway, but you get the point).

By far the main reason for IE’s domination is because it comes installed on the world’s most popular operating system. The vast majority of computer users are normal people, not geeks. They don’t give a shit about which browser is “better.” They want to look at webpages, and Windows comes with something that does just that. They’re not going to go trolling around for addons, meaning they won’t be blaming Microsoft for problems caused by user-developed addons. Opening up IE would likely have no direct effect on 90% of the user base.

These reasons are just to dispel naysayers. What’s the big reason FOR it? That should be obvious. If I could have Firebug in IE, I’d be hard-pressed to keep using Firefox for development. Sure, Firefox is more standards-compliant, but if I can develop my websites/webapps while seeing what 74% of the users are going to see (instead of 18%), and still use Firebug, I’m there. Same goes for most other people who list “addons” as their number one reason to use Firefox over IE.

Imagine Steve Ballmer at the press conference:
“You like Adblock? Greasemonkey? Foxmarks? Fine. You can use them on IE now.”

Microsoft could have this, all for the low low price of creating an API for IE and implementing an addons component.

My question: why aren’t they? Is there something here I’m missing? I would really love to hear from anyone with insight on this, because I’m completely lost. This is not something like Windows, where they are absolutely dominant and can do whatever they want (MUAHAHAHA). This is a market that they’ve lost 20% on in the past four years. From what I can tell, they stand to lose nothing from doing this, and they stand to gain back a big chunk of Firefox users who really just wanted plugins. What’s the cost here that I’m missing?