On traditional PCs, the only platform on which it has ever had a significant share, it is ranked 7th at 0.62%, after 360 Safe Browser. Estimates for Internet Explorer's market share in 2023 are about 0.25% across all platforms, or, by StatCounter's numbers, ranked 10th after 360 Safe Browser.

Its usage share has since declined with the launches of Firefox (2004) and Google Chrome (2008) and with the growing popularity of mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS that do not support Internet Explorer. This came after Microsoft used bundling to win the first browser war against Netscape, which was the dominant browser in the 1990s. Internet Explorer was once the most widely used web browser, attaining a peak of 95% usage share by 2003. New feature development for the browser was discontinued in 2016 in favor of its successor, Microsoft Edge. Microsoft spent over US$100 million per year on Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people involved in the project by 1999. Later versions were available as free downloads or in- service packs and included in the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows. Starting in 1995, it was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year.

While IE has been retired on most Windows editions, it remains supported on certain editions of Windows, such as Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC. Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a 'retired' (or deprecated for most Windows editions) series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were used in the Windows line of operating systems.

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