Microsoft Internet Explore

Internet Explorer arrived at a time when Netscape was the master of the game. Internet Explorer 1.0 debuted with the second version of Microsoft Windows 95 that was called, simply enough, "Windows 95 with Internet Explorer." When Windows 95 first made its appearance in July 1995 it included inbuilt support for dial-up networking and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) plus other key technologies for connecting to the Internet. However, it still depended on third party browsers, which at that time meant Netscape. With growing acceptance of the Internet, Microsoft suddenly realized the potential of bundling in its own browser and thus Internet Explorer (IE) was born. Internet Explorer technology was originally shipped as the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95. internet Explorer replaced the need for cumbersome, manual installation steps required by many of the existing shareware browsers.

Internet Explorer-2.0 arrived in November 1995 and was the first cross platform browser released by Microsoft and worked on both Macintosh and 32-bin Windows. Internet Explorer 2.0 technology introduced Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol as well as support for HTTP cookies. Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), and Internet newsgroups.
The next big Microsoft browser release was Internet Explorer 3.0 in August 1996, which had a completely rebuilt core and considered one of the best browsers of the time. This browser was designed for Windows 95 and included features that users immediately took to such as Internet Mail and News 1.0 and Windows Address Book. Later, Microsoft NetMeeting and Windows Media Player were also released. Internet Explorer could now display GIF and JPG files, play MIDI sound files and streaming audio files without the assistance of other applications. For Web programmers, though it was a different story altogether, since IE3 allowed for a choice of scripting languages and also Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Moving onwards, Internet Explorer 4 made its debut in 1997 and was designed for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Another major add-on to the release of IE4 was Outlook Express. Which would be installed in the default installation and was an upgrade from the previous Internet Mail and News application. This was the first offering from Microsoft to compete with Netscape Communicator in terms of a mail terms of a mail client being installed with a browser.

This was also a major release for Web programmers since the introduction of DHTML as a scripting language in IE4, Web pages could be designed more dynamically. Users could now expand menus with a click or drag images and objects around on a Web page. The Web started to look more like the applications and games that people were accustomed to and less like a static series of pages.

In September 1998, Internet Explorer 5 was released. DHTML functionality was improved with more features and with emerging Web commerce ideas.

Internet Explorer 6 was first released in 2001 with the release of Windows XP operating system. Later on, IE 6 was released for other Windows flavours. One of the major improvements in IE6 was the implementation of privacy and security functionality of the browser. Since privacy and security had become customer priorities, Microsoft implemented tools that support Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), a technology under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Internet Explorer has also been available for the Macintosh for a long time. Although Netscape Navigator was the browser bundled with the Mac OS for a long time, it stopped in 1997 when Internet Explorer became the default browser for the Mac. But with the release of Safari browser for the Mac OS, development of IE for the Mac was stopped.

Today, for any Windows user logging on to the Internet for the first time, the blue "e" icon sitting on the desktop is the gateway to the Internet with the default installation of Windows. To use any other browser, you will need to download or source it from somewhere and then install it: The little "e" on the other hand is ubiquitous, and all you need to do double-click.

So where do we go from here?

IE 7 which was scheduled for release along with Longhorn will now be released prematurely. Newer browsers such as Firefox (which we will be talking about soon) will be present, but let’s face facts, Internet Explorer is here to stay, never mind the antitrust lawsuits.