Internet Explorer Turns 15 271
An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Microsoft's Internet Explorer turned 15 years old on Monday. The company recently said it would launch the Internet Explorer 9 public beta version on September 15, 2010. The software giant launched the first version of the browser, Internet Explorer 1, on August 16, 1995. It was a revised version of Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed from Spyglass Inc."
Re:IE turns 15... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Spyglass got pwned! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IE turns 15... (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps not, but most people are still using XP, hardly anybody has moved to Vista or Windows 7.
I would agree that "hardly anyone" might apply to Vista, but it most certainly does not apply to Windows 7.
Re:IE turns 15... (Score:3, Informative)
On an Atom 330 with nVidia's ION, Windows 7 is more than usable.
Re:Happy birthday IE. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Safari was out before Firefox. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the first public beta of Safari was January 7th 2003 according to Wikipedia. The first public point release of Firefox (or rather, Phoenix as it was called at the time before the great renaming controversy) was Phoenix 0.1 which was released in September 2002. So Firefox/Phoenix preceded Safari by about 3-4 months.
Firefox came out with many very usable, relatively stable point releases that I was using as my regular web browser long before it was at 1.0 (it is certainly true that Safari 1.0 preceded Firefox 1.0 by several years, but you know how open source projects are about labeling something "1.0"). In particular, by the 0.6/0.7 releases in late 2003, it was the default browser in some Linux distributions, and my regular web browser for daily use.
Re:IE turns 15... (Score:3, Informative)
I would agree that "hardly anyone" might apply to Vista, but it most certainly does not apply to Windows 7.
Why not? Windows 7 users are still a definite minority.
Re:please please no (Score:3, Informative)
And IE 5.5 for Mac wasn't the same as IE 5.5 for Windows. jDeepbeep was wrong about the version, but he's right about the developer nightmare point.
Re:IE turns 15... (Score:3, Informative)
In a large number of cases, because its a corporate machine where the corporation has a critical webapp that breaks when you try to run it on anything other than IE6. There's a LOT corporations out there like that.
Re:IE for other platforms (Score:3, Informative)
Whoever modded this troll never had to code in the IE 5.5 era. The Windows and Mac versions had the same version number but were different programs with different deviances from the standards.
Completely true. And somehow, Netscape of that era was even worse -- you'd frequently have some rendering bug in Netscape X which was fixed again in Netscape X.1 and broken again in X.2.
Cross browser development in that era sucked. Good luck getting something to render even close to the same on all the various versions of IE and Netscape. Although it seems like a terrible piece of software now, at the time, the dominance of IE6 was like a cool glass of water, because even though you were writing broken non-standard HTML to get something to render the way you wanted on IE6, at least you weren't having to browser sniff and then choose between ten different broken versions of the same page.
Re:It's hard to believe... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't get it. IE became the defacto standard because it was pre-installed on MS Windows. And MS Windows became the defactor standard because it comes with every computer pre-installed.
Ah no:
1) Netscape came pre-installed by some (most?) OEMs at that time. I don't have numbers on this but it was hard to find a computer that didn't have it.
2) Netscape was out first; a lot of people were settled into using Netscape before there even really was an IE. Netscape started with the dominant market position.
3) While Netscape for a while was superior, later versions of Netscape were terrible -- as in, not as good as the previous versions of Netscape. Eventually even people who hated IE of that era (including me) started using it just because they were so damn tired of how buggy Netscape had become.
I don't deny that Microsoft had a big and unfairly used advantage in having the dominant operating system, but in the grand scheme of things, that amounts to Microsoft trying to slip Netscape roofies while Netscape was busy firing a shotgun at itself as fast as it could.
Re:IE turns 15... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:IE's Real Problem (Score:3, Informative)
Er, the CTO of Opera software [opera.com] (and inventor of CSS) would beg to differ....
Denigrate web standards of yore if you must, but please don't make shit up. Thanks.