There is no such thing as an eternal king, and so it is with software. Don't you see how many software products that once controled the forces of nature, lost their direction in the tide of mobile Internet, and finally faded out of the stage of The Times.

The popularity of the past may have faded in the present, but can the today's hot products still stand? It depends as much on how the product develops itself as it does on the course of history - and on those who are against the tide, even if they try harder, in vain.

5G is coming, the information age will turn, and the software application ecology will usher in a new revolution. At this moment, let's take a look back at the software that was once very popular, but now has fallen into the era.Let's see.

Microsoft's browser

If you've been following browsers, you should know that Microsoft's Edge browser has abandoned its own kernel for the same Chromium core as Google.The Chromium Edge browser is currently in Beta testing, and if you install it manually, it will replace the Edge browser that comes with Windows 10. That means the default browser for Windows 10 will be Chromium core.

The Edge browser is switching to the Chromium kernel

If there are no surprises, the Chromium kernel-based Edge browser will be available for the next big Windows 10 update.This means that Microsoft has abandoned the development of its own browser kernel, and Microsoft's browser has essentially become Chrome's vest.Recall once all-powerful IE, this can not help but make a person sigh extremely.

Why does Microsoft's browser end up in the Chrome jacket?This is closely related to the development of the mobile Internet.The Windows bundling strategy was responsible for IE's dominance in previous years, which drove netscape to the wall.However, after entering the era of mobile Internet, the power of discourse brought by desktop operating system begins to gradually fade away, and ordinary consumers gradually get used to using mobile devices to connect to the Internet. However, Chrome, to a large extent, takes advantage of this opportunity to successfully rise to the top.

Starting with android 4.4, WebView is based on Chromium, just as Windows bundles IE

We know that android has become the most popular mobile operating system in the world, and the WebView framework for rendering online content in android is the same as the Chrome browser, both derived from the Chromium open source project.As a result, a large number of mobile web pages tend to be optimized for Chromium. In addition to the weight of Google services in the whole Internet environment, front-end developers increasingly give priority to Chromium kernel compatibility. Chromium replaced IE as the DE facto compatibility standard.

While Google prides itself on promoting Web standardization, it continues to trick front-end developers into doing things like identifying "-webkit-", causing compatibility problems with other browser kernels.Chromium, as an open source project, is extremely mature due to its years of development and the maintenance of the open source community.This makes it a thankless task to build your own browser kernel without using Chromium -- there's no advantage over Chromium in terms of compatibility or performance.After IE fell out of fashion, Microsoft tried to continue to develop its own kernel and Edge browser based on EdgeHTML rendering kernel and Chakra JS parsing engine，but it still ended in nothing.

While Edge is here to stay, Microsoft's browser has lost its kernel. As for Edge, in addition to the rise of Chrome through the mobile Internet, Edge has also suffered from some shortcomings in its own products.

Arguably, the decline of Microsoft's browser stems both from its failure to grasp the changing times -- Microsoft lost its voice in the mobile market after the collapse of Windows Phone -- and from the fact that its new product, the Edge, was not built well enough.Currently, the browser market is basically dominated by Chrome. Will Chromium be the next IE? We'll see.

To be continued.