The last version of the Internet Explorer project appeared in year 2008 and it was called IE 8. This version was, for a long period of time, in the Beta state.
The Internet Explorer project appeared for the first time, in the summer of 1994.
However, the first version was made definitive in 1995 and was called IE 1.0. This Internet Explorer version was launched by Microsoft themselves in August, the same year, starting from a version with small modifications of the Mosaic project, a similar browser, part of a package called Microsoft Plus. This package had more extra programs and several facilities that were extremely new in those times.
The Microsoft Company was accused several times in 1998 because it tried to sell in the same package both Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system, which they also produced. The charges were sustained during the trial “United States of America versus Microsoft”. However, the results of this trial did not subject those from Microsoft to any constraint regarding the commercializing of the aforementioned package and they still held the liberty of selling the browser with any operating system, with the condition that the operating system is produced by the Microsoft company.
The first browser that was able to support, albeit only partially, the CSS technology, or the Cascade Style Sheet, was also Internet Explorer, the third version, which was launched in 1996 in August.
Over 100 people worked for more than three months at the development of the project Internet Explorer 3.0.
Also, IE 3 was the version that adopted the blue “e” as a logo for the Microsoft browser, a logo that is now known virtually by everybody.
Whilst the first Internet Explorer project was in work, its name was another one, namely O’Hare. This name was a code name inspired by the name of a famous American airport.
XMLHttpRequest, which helped a lot in the development of a whole new set of technologies later called Ajax, was implemented during the project for Internet Explorer 5 too. This generic set can display the internet content without the necessity of some extra actions such as Click or Refresh. This way, interactivity was increased between the user and the web page, together with the search speed, the working speed and so many other aspects that contributed to the development of what we now call the navigation process.
Until 1999, when Internet Explorer 5 was launched, its previous version had a huge popularity. That version had a market share of up to 60%, thus having a popularity way higher than the one recorded by the famous browser at the end of the 20th century – Netscape Navigator.
The settings of a browser were controlled for the first time in Internet Explorer 4. At that moment, the engineers from Microsoft made a group policy through which some settings could be controlled by the user. The main purpose, which was beneficial particularly in the large companies in which Internet Explorer was used, was to protect the data and prevent the employees and the users from making personal settings that would breach the organization’s policy.