Is Microsoft Purposely Degrading Internet Explorer To Bully Users Into Upgrading?

This user has personally experienced some bizarre outages of late. Just sayin'... JL

Wolf Richter reports in Wolf Street:

Desperate measures to solve a festering market-share debacle? IE has dropped to 4th place with a 10% share. A few years ago, before the arrival of Chrome, IE was the number one browser.
Desperate measures to solve a festering market-share debacle?
Having spent years burning through any remaining goodwill among its users still clinging to Internet Explorer, Microsoft is apparently having problems getting them to use its Edge browser that is part of Windows 10. Even after about 15 months and three upgrades, the market share of Edge is still minuscule.
Over the past 30 days on wolfstreet.com, per Google Analytics, our readers used these five browsers the most:

1. Chrome (41.4%)
2. Safari (27.2%)
3. Firefox (13.7%)
4. Internet Explorer (10.1%)
5. Edge (3.0%)

The bottom one is Microsoft’s new miracle browser that people refuse to use. And IE has dropped to 4th place with a 10% share. A few years ago, well, many years ago, before the arrival of Chrome, IE was the number one browser, having crushed Netscape during the First Browser War (being bundled with Windows did the trick).
According to Net Market Share, Edge 12, 13, and 14 combined have a market share of 5.2%. Everyone has slightly different market-share numbers. But at that level – whether it’s 3% or 5% doesn’t matter – Edge is an also-ran, something statistically insignificant, abandoned by burned-out IE users.
So Microsoft appears to go to extremes to force Windows users who still cling to their IEs to upgrade to Windows 10 and switch to Edge.
It had already gone to extremes to get Windows 7 users – a reasonably happy crowd, unlike the Windows 8 crowd – to upgrade for “free” to Windows 10. The inescapable desktop harassment-and-interdiction campaigns from Microsoft finally stopped a few months ago, and Windows 7 users could go about their business unmolested. The survivors all knew: If someone is trying to push you that hard to “upgrade” to a “free” program that took years and thousands of people to put together, it’s a sign that you are the product, and you’re going to get sold.
But when Microsoft threw in the towel on its Windows 10 harassment-and-interdiction campaign, at about that time, IE, never particularly stable, became very unstable. And it has gotten worse since.
I use Chrome, Firefox, and IE all day long, in Private Browsing mode, doing different things with different browsers, on two different computers, to make it confusing for internet tracking programs to collect my browsing and personal data. I want someone else to be the low-hanging fruit.