The Glorious History of Internet Explorer

Love it or hate it, you will have to appreciate IE’s staying power. Having been around for 16 years, it is still the browser market leader. Here are some interesting facts about Internet Explorer:

IE 1.0

• IE 1.0, based on Mosaic, was released together with the Windows 95 Plus! Pack in 1995
• Used on Windows 95, IE 1.0 was only slightly more than 1 MB in size.
• IE 2.0 was the very first cross-platform browser that supported both Windows and Mac.
• Released in 1995, IE 2.0 had support for JavaScript, frames & cookies
• At the end of the first week of IE 3’s release in 1996, more than 1 million copies of the browser were downloaded.
• IE4 which came in 1997 introduced Microsoft's Trident layout engine, which is still in use today in Internet Explorer.
• Released in 1999, IE 5 was the first browser to support bi-directional text.
• IE 5 introduced XMLHttpRequest which enables building AJAX applications.
• The XMLHttpRequest object was not completely functional until as late as version 1.0 of Gecko released on June 5, 2002.The XMLHttpRequest object became a de facto standard amongst other major user agents after it was implemented in Safari 1.2 in February 2004 & Opera 8.0 in April 2005 (Source: Wikipedia). Chrome wasn't even around at that time.
• IE6, released in 2001, was the most widely used web browser during its tenure. At its peak in 2002 and 2003, it attained a total market share of nearly 90%. IE 6 sounded the death knell for Netscape Navigator.
• Coming in 2006, IE 7 delivered the Web 2.0 experience.
• IE 8.0, which came in 2009, focused on secure browsing. It introduced a bunch of new features like web slices, accelerators, automatic Tab crash recovery and inline search within pages.
• After 2 beta releases which had millions of downloads, IE9, the oldest among popular browsers, promises to give the rest a run for their money.

Related:
Timeline of web browsers