History of Computers - Internet Explorer

In 1995, Microsoft released its new graphical internet browser, Internet Explorer 1.0. This new browser was free and came with the popular line of Microsoft operating systems.

Overview

Since this browser was free and already installed in Microsoft operating systems, Internet Explorer quickly took over internet browsing. Version 1 of Internet Explorer was a reinvented version of the previous Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic browser, which came free with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. As more versions of Internet Explorer came out, support for cookies, HTML, Java, XML, RSS, and CSS was integrated into the browsers. Internet Explorer 10, the newest version of Internet Explorer specializes with moving in-between tabs and operating many things at once. It is also specially geared towards touch screen computers making it unique in design. ^[1]

Internet Explorer has since been replaced by Microsoft's Edge browser.^[2]

Significance

As one of the more secure, fast and user-friendly browsers, Internet Explorer has been the most widely used browser since 1999. Microsoft, with their free, easily accessible browser, left other companies like Netscape behind. Microsoft has quickly and intentionally monopolized the internet browsing market from 1999 to about January of 2009 when Mozilla Firefox took the lead as most used browser^[3]. However, now companies like Mozilla are taking back the market where Netscape has failed. Internet explorer is now the Third most used Internet browser with 22% of all internet users, behind Google chrome with 29.4 % and Mozilla Firefox with 42.0%. ^[4]