Internet Explorer: Journey of Microsoft Internet Explorer: IE to IE9

IE ruled the web market for over a decade. It made its debut on August 16, 1995 with Netscape Navigator dominating the web market in those days. In about a year, IE managed to get the hold on the market over Netscape Navigator with the fact that Netscape came with a nominal fee while Microsoft offered its browser for free.

The first IE was released one month after the release of Windows 95. It was a simple web browser of 1 MB(megabyte) solely for web surfing with no graphics, no downloading features! The picture below was the first icon of IE
First IE desktop icon

In November 1995, three months after the initial release of IE, Microsoft launched IE2. IE2 supported Macintosh and Windows and was the first cross-platform browser. IE2 also came with upgraded features like access to news groups and support for JavaScript, frames, cookies, and Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which allowed to send private documents via the Internet.

Web browser became more technologically advanced with release of IE3. IE3 added new dimension with features like Windows Media Player, Windows Address Book and Internet Mail. IE3 could play streaming audio files, MIDI sound files, and display GIF and JPEG files without relying on other applications and was a big hit. IE4 and IE5 released in 1997 and 1998 respectively saw more advanced interactive and animated features using dynamic HTML.

With era of XP came IE6 in 2001. IE6 was focused on security and privacy features in addition to features of Print Preview, Auto Image Resize. IE7 released in October 2006, was further advanced in security with addition of phishing filters which warned users if they were on a Web site designed to scam them out of their personal information.

IE8 released in March 2009, saw new features like tabbed browsing which was a user-friendly feature of Mozilla Firefox (successor to Netscape Navigator), who had emerged as challenger till now for IE. In addition to these, IE8 came up with smarter address bar, accelerators, web slice and greater stability with crash recovery and tab isolation.

Microsoft is now looking forward to IE9 that will be supporting HTML 5. that will allow developers to create web sites that would have previously required Adobe Flash or Silverlight to run. It will also allow developers to build applications that can be used offline.

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Journey of Microsoft Internet Explorer: IE to IE9

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