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Internet Explorer Turns 15
An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Microsoft's Internet Explorer turned 15 years old on Monday. The company recently said it would launch the Internet Explorer 9 public beta version on September 15, 2010. The software giant launched the first version of the browser, Internet Explorer 1, on August 16, 1995. It was a revised version of Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed from Spyglass Inc."
don't be so fast to kill it, it's improved quite a bit recently... it's not like there's that much software around used in it's original form from 15 years ago...
yeah, pretty much. I think everyone who uses IE doesn't know they're using IE, and if they do, they probably don't care about how old it is. Everyone else doesn't use it. But think about it this way -- its not that IE is turning 15, its that the Browser Wars started about 15 years ago, and despite some lull in the middle, seem to be just as heated and relevant as ever.
The only thing that's really changed in 15 years is that Netscape faded into the shadows and went guerrilla as Mozilla, and Microsoft's attempts to wage conventional war against it just ended up providing Mozilla with more ammunition. Its now stronger than ever.
Like Vietnam, only lamer.
I remember being a college student back in 1993 running Mosaic and Pine from our university's Unix architecture. Ah, those were the days!
The upcoming version won't work on Windows XP - which is still very very popular.
Its like they're not even trying...
Microsoft licensed Mosaic under the promise of paying Spyglass royalties based on revenue. But then MS released it for free and Spyglass got nothing. This must be one of Microsoft's finest deals.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Do it Microsoft, I wont mind trying out IE9 on my Mac or Linux box.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I believe the earliest versions of these browsers didn't even have any CSS support.
Even now all browsers don't fully implement standards - there is still a lot of red on this chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(Cascading_Style_Sheets)
So a bit to go to the solved problem.
The only reason I bought Windows 7 Pro 64-bit was to feed my gaming addiction with support over 4GB of RAM and presumably being the next majorly supported platform. It was the least amount I could give to Microsoft to legally continue my habit (the XBox is over twice as much, and they get licensing fees, etc.) I only use it for a game PC and all the rest of my life is in Debian. I wish they'd sell a Windows, Gamer Edition that doesn't have the movie maker and all the other crap I'll never use. I'm still finding things that I need to remove that seem to be put in only to annoy the living shit out of me.
So while I "bought" it, I wouldn't consider the stripped hulk of what I now call Windows 7 something I "use".
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Even after 15 years, illegally tying MSIE to Windows is still happening. This anti-competitive activity has hurt standards, hurt competition, hurt the economy and held back the net.
There is even a form to report ongoing anti-trust violations, there are so many.
If M$ executives and employees would have ditched MSIE if security or performance were an issue. Opera and even Safari are far and above superior, if closed source is an obligation. Keeping MSIE in place AND keeping pieces of it throughout the OS show that there is no intention of MSIE being there to benefit the end-user in anyway. If we add up the cost over 15 years of all the MSIE malware in one column we will have an astronomical sum. If we then total the combined costs of all Opera, Netscape, Cameleon, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror malware in another column and subtract that total of non-MSIE costs from the MSIE costs, we will still have an astronomical sum. Based on quarterly malware damage, the sum is probably in the range of 100's to 10's of thousands of billions of dollars. The Apollo program to the moon itself only cost 25 billion and we got integrated circuits out of that. Even for the unrealistically low sum of 1 billion dollars, what kind of rocking Free Software distro, applications or infrastructure could have been created? Even building a full distro from scratch we could have a full kernel, drivers, utilities, desktop, services, and applications for less.
You can put a stop to this and advance technology, economy and security by not feeding the Windows monopoly any more market share. Tagging this one as "antitrust".
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Hehe, yup. Netscape 4 is FAR, FAR worse than IE 4 on its worst day. I still remember it and honestly I was more glad of its demise from the support list than I will be of IE 6's. IE 6 isn't a bad browser in and of itself, it just was allowed to stay around too long as Microsoft rested on their laurels. If IE 7 had come out in 2003 or 2004 no one would be complaining about IE in general or IE 6 in particular.
PNG is also about 14 or 15 years old, but IE still cannot handle its color correction chunks (gAMA, iCCP) properly:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/png-gammatest.html
Anyone who wonders why IE 6 became the de facto standard just needs to find a download of Netscape Communicator.
I don't get it. IE became the defacto standard because it was pre-installed on MS Windows. And MS Windows became the defactor standard because it comes with every computer pre-installed.
If, back then, the Netscape Communicator were pre-installed, the Netscape Communicator would have been the defacto standard. But Netscape didn't own an operation system. Yes, it's nice to have an operation system which with you can bundle stuff. It's good that besides ActiveX MS didn't really done anything with the IE. At least we are not living like in South Korea where you need to have IE with ActiveX to do any online banking.
What exactly did MS anyway with the 90% market share of IE? I can't remember any technology that was really needed back then. I think they were just happy to have the market share. Right now I can't see anything that the dominance of IE have left us.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I still have the 'I downloaded Internet Explorer" Tshirt that MS sent me for being one of the first 10,000 people to download IE 3, on Oct 31, 1996, IIRC.