![]() ![]() (If we had done a crummy job, Internet Explorer would never have gained significant market share, and the DOJ would have had to find some other pretext to sue Microsoft.) In May 1998, the United States Department of Justice filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft, with the rising success of Internet Explorer as Exhibit #1 in its case. IE 3.0 was the first browser to implement CSS, and IE 4.0 (9/1997) was the first browser to implement Dynamic HMTL: the foundation of all interactive web pages still today. But when we released IE 3.0 in 8/1996, it won all the (trade) press reviews, and its market share soared to over 30% within a year. We shipped three versions of IE in 22 months and I - along with many other team members - worked 80-100 hour weeks for 17 of those months.ĭespite being pre-installed on every Windows 95 PC beginning in 8/1995, IE gained only a few percentage points of browser market share. Netscape posted the first beta release of “Navigator” (coincidentally) a few days after I pulled together the IE team, and Navigator quickly became the most popular web browser. Netscape was the early winner in the “Browser Wars”. Thomas Reardon licensed the NCSA Mosaic code base from Spyglass in December, and in early January we mapped out an 8-week development plan for “O’Hare” (the international gateway to the world for the City of Chicago, and our web browser would be the gateway to the World Wide Web for Windows 95). I quickly grabbed 6 people and we went to work. In early October, my manager John Ludwig asked me to assemble a team and build a web browser for “Chicago” (the code name for Windows 95). This was before “firewalls”, so there were many precautions to be followed! I ordered an internet tap for my office and started exploring the In The Beginning One of my co-workers had an “Internet Tap” in his office: a standard RJ45 wall plate, connected directly to the Internet (rather than the internal corporate network). I first “surfed” the World Wide Web in June 1994, at Microsoft. So this is a perfect time to reflect back on my role in the creation of the world’s most popular web browser (1998-2012). On May 20th, 2021, Microsoft announced the end of Internet Explorer. As sales of smart phones and tablets quickly outstripped the sales of personal computers, IE became irrelevant (there are an estimated 1.7B Windows computers vs. ![]() Why? Because Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer believed in Windows Windows Windows, so he walked away from web browser leadership, and Google took up that mantle with its Chrome web browser. IE soared to 95% market share by 2004, but the last Macintosh version of IE was released in 2003, and Microsoft never released IE for Apple’s iOS/iPhone/iPad nor Google’s Android operating system. By the time we shipped IE 3.0 in August 1996, I had grown the team to 67 people, and IE 3 was the world’s best web browser. I quickly filled out the team with software design engineers and program managers (6 total), and we got to work. I created the web browser project “O’Hare” within the Windows 95 team in early October 1994. In this blog post today, Microsoft confirmed that IE is history. : Internet Explorer Has Officially Retired ![]()
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