 |
| 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.
Timeline of web browsers