Internet Explorer

Description

Internet Explorer spent much of its life as the default window through which a large percentage of humanity saw the World Wide Web for the first time. At its peak in 2002 and 2003, about 95 percent of all web browsing occurred in Internet Explorer. It wasn’t the best browser. It wasn’t even always a good one. But for approximately a decade it was, for most people, the only browser they had ever used, and for many it was the only one they knew existed.

The browser was launched on August 16, 1995, as part of the Microsoft Plus! add-on package for Windows 95, just weeks after Bill Gates had circulated his now famous internal memo — “The Internet Tidal Wave” — declaring the internet the most important development Microsoft faced and naming Netscape Navigator as its primary competitive threat. Netscape at the time had about 80 percent of the browser market share. Microsoft’s response was IE and what followed over the next few years was the first browser war.

IE retired on June 15, 2022, having gone from cultural irrelevance to active joke to retirement in the span of about 10 years. What’s left of it lives within Microsoft Edge’s IE Mode where it still powers the legacy enterprise applications that still need it.

ORGINS AND the SPYGLASS LICense

Thomas Reardon began the Internet Explorer project at Microsoft in the summer of 1994. Rather than starting from scratch, Microsoft licensed the source code of Spyglass Mosaic — a commercial derivative of NCSA Mosaic, the browser that had first brought images and text together on the same web page. Microsoft paid Spyglass $2 million in advance plus a percentage of revenues related to the software.

The arrangement did not work out well for Spyglass. Because Microsoft bundled IE with Windows and gave it away for free, the “revenues tied to the software” dried up. By 1997, Spyglass was threatening a contractual audit. Microsoft settled the resulting dispute for $8 million — still a negligible sum given how much money rode on IE’s success.

IE 1.0 and 2.0 were almost universally badly reviewed. Version 3, released free of charge in August 1996, changed things. Microsoft bundled it with Windows 95, and distributed it alongside AOL software, which put it on the desktops of enormous numbers of new internet users. Version 3 added support for CSS, ActiveX controls, Java applets and Netscape plugins. The press coverage turned positive and within a year of IE 3’s release the browser had captured over 30 percent of the market – a major threat to Netscape’s position.

THE BROWSER War And Versions 4 And 5

Internet Explorer 4, released in September 1997, is where the browser war got serious. Microsoft so integrated IE into Windows 98 that the issue of whether the browser was a separate product or a Windows feature was the subject of legal dispute. Version 4 introduced Active Desktop, which allowed Web content to appear directly on the Windows desktop. It supported Dynamic HTML which made pages much more interactive. It bundled Outlook Express for email, and pushed the integration of the browser as an operating system feature that would define Microsoft’s strategy.

The integration was so thorough, that Netscape’s Jim Barksdale accused Microsoft of threatening to put Netscape out of business. Documents surfaced during subsequent litigation that revealed that Microsoft executives were discussing strategies to “embrace and extend” open web technologies — a phrase that later became synonymous with competitive suppression. Microsoft required PC manufacturers that wanted to ship Windows to include IE as the default browser and made it contractually prohibited to bundle Netscape instead.

IE 5, released in March 1999, was widely reviewed as technically excellent — genuinely faster than Netscape, with better CSS support and a more polished interface. By 1998 IE had taken over the market share of Netscape. By 1999 the browser war was all but over.

THE DOJ ANTITRUST CASE

On May 18, 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice and the attorneys general of 20 states filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft. The heart of the case was two things: Microsoft’s bundling of IE with Windows in such a way that manufacturers could not remove it, and Microsoft’s use of its monopoly on the operating system to destroy Netscape.

The trial resulted in some of the most memorable moments in tech legal history. Video evidence presented by the government seemed to show that Microsoft had edited a demonstration to hide the way it manipulated Windows to give IE an unfair advantage. Bill Gates’s videotaped deposition, in which he repeatedly questioned the meaning of words such as “compete” and “concerned,” caused laughter in the courtroom from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson when the government played excerpts in court.

In November 1999, Jackson ruled that Microsoft was guilty of maintaining monopoly through anticompetitive behavior. In June 2000 he ordered the company to be split into two separate entities — one for operating systems, one for other software. The ruling was dramatic but didn’t hold. The appeals court overturned the breakup order in 2001, saying Jackson had made procedural mistakes, among them that he had spoken to reporters during the trial. On appeal, the conviction on monopolization stood but the remedy was sent back for reconsideration.

The DOJ under the new Bush administration settled in November 2001, forcing Microsoft to open up its application programming interfaces to third-party companies and submit to three years of oversight. Microsoft continued to bundle IE with Windows. Many antitrust scholars later argued that the case, though it did not break up Microsoft, left enough room in the market for Google to develop without being crushed in the browser. The argument that “without antitrust enforcement, that’s why we have Google” circulated among lawyers close to the case for years afterwards.

PEAK DOMINance and the IE6 Problem

Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001 with the release of Windows XP and soon took over the market. By 2002-2003 its share hit 95 percent. With Netscape dead and no serious competition in sight, Microsoft cut down the browser team, slowed down development, and ceased issuing major releases. IE6 would not get a successor until IE7 in 2006 — a gap of five years during which the web became dramatically more complex and IE6 quietly became a serious problem.

Web standards evolved. CSS techniques advanced. Browsers such as Firefox and Opera came along and implemented the specifications correctly. IE6 did not keep pace. Its box model calculations were different from any other browser, which meant that CSS layouts that appeared correct everywhere else broke in IE6. It did not support alpha transparency in PNG images, so developers had to resort to GIF workarounds or JavaScript hacks. Its JavaScript engine was slow and inconsistent. It had a category of security vulnerabilities related to ActiveX — a technology that allowed arbitrary code to run inside the browser with minimal user confirmation — that made it a primary vector for malware, spyware, and drive-by downloads.

For web developers the years from about 2003 to 2008 meant debugging every feature twice: once for standards-compliant browsers, once for IE6. Entire cottage industries sprang up around IE6 compatibility hacks, conditional CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript polyfills to fill in the gaps of features IE6 did not have. A web developer who was describing their workflow in those years without expletives required unusual restraint. Some developers eventually published tools to simply detect IE6 users and redirect them to a page explaining they needed a different browser.

Microsoft’s own position got complicated. In 2008, even a Microsoft engineer publicly pleaded with users to stop using IE6 and upgrade. By 2014, Microsoft Australia was running a campaign in which they called IE6 a 10-year-old browser that had “overstayed its welcome.”

THE FIREFOX CHALLENGE AND Versions 7 Through 9

Mozilla Firefox was released in November 2004 and has more than 100 million downloads in a year. It provided tabbed browsing, extension support and improved CSS compliance compared to IE6. For the first time since the collapse of Netscape, developers had a credible alternative to recommend. Firefox’s growth was the first real sign that IE’s market share might be eroded.

Microsoft responded with IE7 in 2006, which improved CSS support and added a tabbed interface. IE8 in 2009 introduced better standards compliance and InPrivate browsing. IE9 in 2011 finally caught up on many of the web standards and added hardware acceleration — it was the first IE version that did not draw widespread developer contempt.

IE9 was also the last version available for Windows XP. Microsoft’s decision to link browser versions to operating system upgrades meant that the tens of millions of users still running XP remained stuck with IE8, which remained in the market share statistics long after most developers would have liked to drop support for it.

GOOGLE CHROME AND THE Long Decline

Google Chrome was released in September 2008. It was faster than IE, more stable and updated constantly — a model completely different from IE’s periodic major releases. As of May 2012, Chrome had taken over IE as the most used browser in the world. IE’s share dropped below 50 percent in September 2010; in 2019 it was about 2 percent.

IE10 in 2012 and IE11 in October 2013 were both technically capable browsers that had better reviews than their predecessors. IE11 passed most of the tests for compatibility with the HTML5 specification and its JavaScript engine had improved significantly. But the brand had too much damage accumulated. Web developers who had spent years developing workarounds for IE quirks remembered those years. Jokes were made that the main purpose of IE was to download Chrome. Some were only half joking.

IE11 is the final version released by Microsoft. In 2015, Microsoft shipped Windows 10 with a new browser called Edge — originally built on a proprietary engine called EdgeHTML — and positioned it as IE’s successor. IE11 stayed on Windows 10 for compatibility purposes but stopped getting feature updates.

RETIREMENT AND IE MODE

Microsoft officially declared the retirement of IE on May 19, 2021. Support for Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 Semi-Annual Channel editions has ended June 15, 2022. Users who attempted to open IE after that date were redirected to Microsoft Edge.

The retirement was widely commented upon. Social media was divided between nostalgia and mockery. Web developers who had spent years writing IE-specific code were publicly celebrating. A few real eulogies came for what the browser had meant in the mid-1990s, when downloading IE3 and dialing up to see the web for the first time was a genuinely significant experience.

However, IE did not completely die out. Microsoft built IE Mode into Edge, which allows the browser to render pages using the Trident engine of Internet Explorer 11 instead of the Blink engine of Chromium. Administrators set certain URLs to be opened in IE Mode using group policy. Microsoft committed to supporting IE Mode through at least 2029 — because a meaningful number of enterprise applications, particularly in manufacturing, government, healthcare and banking, were built specifically for IE and use ActiveX components or rely on IE’s non-standard behaviors. Rebuilding those applications is expensive, and 2029 provides organizations with more time to do it.

IE Mode is the way that Internet Explorer keeps on existing without, technically, existing. Trident, the rendering engine that powered IE from version 4 onwards, still runs inside Edge on Windows machines across corporate networks around the world. The browser retired. The engine lives on.

VERSION HISTORY

IE 1.0 — August 1995: Released with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. Licensed from Spyglass Mosaic. Basic functionality; no significant market presence.

IE 2.0 — November 1995: Added SSL, cookies, VRML and support for Internet newsgroups. Released for Windows 3.1 and Macintosh in April 1996.

IE 3.0 — August 1996: Introduces CSS, ActiveX controls, Java applets, Netscape plugins compatibility, JScript (reverse-engineered JavaScript). Bundled free with Windows 95. First version to have serious market share.

IE 4.0 — September 1997: Deep integration with Windows 98. Active Desktop, Dynamic HTML, Outlook Express integration. Introduction of Trident rendering engine. Central to the DOJ antitrust case.

IE 5.0 — March 1999: Widely acclaimed for speed and CSS improvements. Shipped with Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000. First version to support XML.

IE 5.5 — July 2000: Minor update. Additional CSS Enhancements, Print Preview Enhancements.

IE 6.0 — August 2001: Shipped with Windows XP. Dominant for five years. Security vulnerabilities, CSS inconsistencies, and ActiveX exploitation made it the single most criticized piece of software in web development history.

IE 7 — October 2006: Tabbed browsing, RSS support, better CSS support, phishing filter. First new version since IE6 after a five-year gap.

IE 8 — March 2009: InPrivate browsing (incognito mode), Compatibility View, improved JavaScript performance. Last version available on Windows XP.

IE 9 — March 2011: Hardware-accelerated graphics, significant enhancements to the support of HTML5 and CSS3, chakra JavaScript engine. First version to gain wide developer respect in years. Not available on Windows XP.

IE 10 — October 2012: Enhanced support for HTML5, support for touch interface for Windows 8. Shipped with Windows 8, released for Windows 7.

IE 11 — October 2013: WebGL, WebSockets, improved F12 developer tools, SPDY protocol support. Final major release. Available for Windows 7 up to Windows 10. Support ended June 15, 2022.