You don't win a marathon by suddenly just finding yourself at the finish, your arms raised high. It takes one step after the other. Resisting this reality just makes you feel bad for no reason.

In more detail, what there is to celebrate is not the static reality that IE is now at some specific market share, and it will stay there forever. What is celebrated is that IE's market share is down, and this gives hope that people are moving away from IE not just now, but also in future, so that IE will be less of a contender over time. This seemed rather a hopeless prospect a few years ago, and now it does not. Hence the celebration.

It can still be a handy reference if it explains something well that would take too much space to explain in a scholarly paper. Then the encyclopedia page is a valid reference because I've read it and claim that it is accurate - that the page happens to come from an encyclopedia is completely irrelevant to that. If page 4 of a Donald Duck cartoon for some strange reason should happen to contain the best explanation in the world of the algebraic properties of Toric Grobner bases, and you need a background reference for that, then that is what you *should* cite, provided that you have the necessary background to recognize that it is indeed a good and correct explanation.

A hard rule like not citing encyclopedias comes from an educational environment where some teachers do not trust their students to vouch for any source in that way. It is not for competent people in the real world.