Product type Application Web Browser Vendor Microsoft Release date 1996 Minimum CPU 80386 DX or better User interface GUI Platform Windows Download count 273 (87 for release) Downloads Download name IE 3 was bundled with Windows 95 OSR 2.0. It was not until about 7 years later that Netscape/Mozilla was able to reverse engineer and implement their own version of NTLM. Organizations that adopted NTLM therefore automatically locked out all other web browsers. Internet Explorer 3.0 also adds NTLM authentication, A proprietary method of using Windows NT domain login credentials to authenticate with web servers and proxy servers. They could also do anything, including reformat your hard drive. The disadvantage was this made them 32-bit Windows, IE, and Intel x86 CPU specific. The advantage was they were much faster and more response than scripting as they used compiled CPU native machine code, often written in C/C++, and native Win32 API. It also added ActiveX, a way to embed custom applets. Starting with version 3, IE was re-written as a set of modular DLLs that third party applications could call programmatically, with the central IE executable reduced to a loader stub.
But is archived here, as much software (stupidly) requires it. Internet Explorer is freely redistributable. Something that would have been unthinkable back then. In 1998, Microsoft was hit with an antitrust suit, much of which involved their browser bundling.īy around 2004, Microsoft had destroyed most of their completion, dominated the browser market, and let IE stagnate until released Firefox.Īfter Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft supplanted IE with "Microsoft Edge" which eventually switched to the Google Chrome rendering engine.
Microsoft fiercely pushed third party products to bundle Internet Explorer, and web sites to work only in Internet Explorer. Microsoft aggressively and abusively positioned Internet Explorer as part of their "browser war" to eliminate all competition. Home Internet access was still somewhat new and competed against proprietary services like CompuServe, AOL, and Microsoft's own MSN. At various points, Internet Explorer was also available for MacOS, Solaris, and HP-UX.Īt its 1995 release, Internet Explorer competed with the Mosaic web browser and Netscape Navigator. It was initially based on Spyglass Mosaic. Microsoft Internet Explorer is a web browser application created by Microsoft primarily for Microsoft Windows.