Microsoft Corporation has announced that it will soon end development on Internet Explorer, the ubiquitous web browser that is bundled with every Windows PC.

“We realized that since we own the market, we have been sitting on our laurels and letting the world go by”, says Lloyd Fahrber, the lead Internet Analyst at Microsoft. “I mean, Look at Firefox. That group is really innovating. The plug-ins, the speed that it renders. It’s all good!”

“The current plan is that we are going to take a well known rendering engine and redesign it to be a bit slower and less useful, similar to what Apple did with Safari and KHTML”, said Brien Wells, an Internet Project Manager at Microsoft. “We figured that we need to buy out the intellectual property of a rendering engine and then make it available for sale from our MSN marketplace. That way, our customers will be coerced into buying it every time they turn on their computer. We will set up the page to automatically install the new browser as soon as possible and then bill the credit card we have on file.”

“When we have over 80% of the market again, we can legitimately claim that the reason we own the market would be because we really do have the best browser”, says Fahrber. “There is no way the Federal Government can force anti-trust rules on us because we will have gotten there fair and square. We will have the credit card transactions to prove it!”