It was 29 years ago this week that Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer. It was almost an afterthought, just one of the components in the Windows 95 Plus pack, along with additional themes and a 3D pinball game. But things change, to say the least.
Insurance in case this Internet thing catches on
The initial Internet Explorer was a pretty halfhearted browser, being not much more than a Microsoft-rebranded build of Spyglass Mosaic for Windows. It was an insurance policy in case this Internet thing caught on. Notably, Microsoft did not initially bundle it with the operating system. Windows NT 4.0, released in 1996, included Internet Explorer. But Windows 95 did not, at least not in its original retail release. Some OEMs included it from the start, and later Windows 95 versions, released through OEMs, did include Internet Explorer.
Bundling IE with Windows was an idea that Win95 programmer Benjamin Slivka originally proposed in an internal e-mail on Aug 15, 1994. It wasn’t unprecedented. IBM’s OS/2 Warp came bundled with a web browser, largely so people didn’t have to resort to running a 16-bit Windows browser on it.
Initially, Internet Explorer was less important to Microsoft’s overall strategy than MSN, Microsoft’s own competitor to AOL. Windows 95 did include MSN, something I recommend hacking out if you build a retro Win95 box. It’s not like you can use the service anymore even if you wanted to.
Bill Gates’ order that the browser be shipped with Windows came down in May 1995 in a memo titled The Internet Tidal Wave. It was too late to change plans for the initial version released in August, but by November, Microsoft was bundling the browser with Windows.
How Internet Explorer was underwhelming at first
The first time I saw Internet Explorer was in August 1995, in a small computer lab at the University of Missouri. Its journalism school had been running a digital newspaper for several years, initially as a dial-up service in the pre-internet days. Microsoft partnered with the University of Missouri to launch the news portion of MSN, and as part of the partnership, Microsoft sent several Compaq Deskpro PCs running the retail release of Windows 95 with office 95 and the Plus pack.
It was at once a remarkable and unremarkable experience. The first version of Internet Explorer was just okay. Netscape was the darling web browser at the time, and nothing else out there, including Internet Explorer, could match it.
But there was something electric going on. Generation X went to college, discovered the Internet, and decided this thing was way too important to not have at home. Bill Gates had seen the potential for delivering news and other information to the home using technology, and wondered if that could be a profitable venture. Then he completely missed the perfect vehicle for it. I think he was too busy fawning over Quicken.
The runaway success of Netscape got Bill Gates’s attention, so Microsoft started giving Internet Explorer away for free, bundling it with the operating system, and doing whatever else they could to spur adoption. Everything except pay royalties to Spyglass, that is. Since they were giving the browser away, they argued they didn’t owe royalties. Spyglass sued, and they settled for $8 million in January 1997.
The rise of Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer 2.0 wasn’t much of anything special either, but Internet Explorer version 3 really closed the gap with Netscape. During that generation, which one was better probably was a matter of personal preference.
But it was Internet Explorer version 4 that started drawing converts from Netscape in droves. I avoided it, because it dug its claws so deep into the operating system that it significantly slowed the operating system down, so I didn’t care if Netscape was only 80% as good. I didn’t like the drag on performance. But I don’t think I was in the majority on that opinion.
It was either at version 5 or version 5.5 that I gave in and switched for a while. A growing number of websites wouldn’t render correctly in Netscape at that point, and Internet Explorer had keyboard shortcuts for almost everything. Netscape had some, but not as many, and I found myself using the ones that Netscape lacked very regularly. By then, Internet Explorer was the dominant browser and it wasn’t close anymore.
Playing on foreign territory
In 1997, when Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple, Internet Explorer was part of the deal. One condition Apple gave was making Internet Explorer the default browser on Mac OS. Microsoft not only released Internet Explorer for Windows 95 and NT, but also for Windows 3.1 and 3.11, Mac OS, and even HP-UX and Solaris. Microsoft dropped support for HP-UX and Solaris in 2002.
It was in September 1998 that IE passed Netscape in market share for the first time.
Internet Explorer and the Department of Justice
Microsoft got sued for using Windows’ dominant market position to force Internet Explorer into a dominant market position. Microsoft avoided break up largely by running out the clock. It was Clinton’s justice department that brought the suit, but the suit was not resolved by the time George W Bush assumed office, and Bush’s justice department dropped the matter. If the outcome of the 2000 election had been different, it is possible Microsoft may have been split up at that time.
I guess one could say the free market fixed the problem, but it had to take extreme measures to do so.
Internet Explorer’s long goodbye
It took several years for Internet Explorer to fall out of favor. When it was clear Netscape had no future as closed commercial software, its then-owner, AOL, opened up the source code. The first Mozilla browser didn’t do so well, but there were a few initiatives to remove the email client and HTML editor and other components and reduce it to a back-to-basics web browser. Firefox grew out of that initiative, and it gained significant market share at Internet Explorer’s expense. Google Chrome came along and unwound those gains, so Chrome is the one that generally gets the credit for sending Internet Explorer to oblivion, but it was Firefox that opened the door for that.
Version 11 was the final Internet Explorer release using the Trident engine, before Microsoft retired it in favor of Microsoft Edge. It went end of life on June 15, 2022. It was an inglorious end for a web browser that was so dominant that it drew scrutiny from regulatory agencies, and it very nearly led to Microsoft being broken up over antitrust concerns.
Now Google Chrome is drawing the same type of concerns that its owner is abusing one dominant market position to create another. And here I am using Firefox, insisting it’s better anyway, even if only a tiny minority agree with me. It’s funny how history repeats itself.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I’ve been using Firefox since shortly after it was released, I remember I had a secondary PC with Windows 98 and an overclocked Pentium II, and I remember falling in love with the browser, I could already use themes, moving away from the predominant gray of 9x, in addition to the useful tabs, even when Chrome was released, Still using Frefox as my main browser.
My main browser these days is Brave (which brings together the best of Chrome, its engine, but without the predatory rest), but Firefox continues to be my second browser always.
Furthermore, I don’t miss Internet Explorer at all, except for the E symbol that marked generations, including mine, which Edge successfully replaced.