The Windows Club wishes “A Very Happy Birthday to Internet Explorer”. Today, August 16, 2013 marks the 18th birthday of Microsoft’s much loved and sometimes hated web browser Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer turns 18 today. The first version of Internet Explorer i.e., IE 1 was officially launched 18 years ago on August 16, 1995.
We have come a long way, tweeted IE.
After seeing many ups and downs over the years, Internet Explorer has regularly given its most advanced version to the web. While last few versions of Internet Explorer came up with dramatic improvements, IE Version 6 made it one of the most reviled browsers worldwide with its countless security issues.
The first version of Internet Explorer was based on Mosaic which was Microsoft’s web browsers licensed from Spyglass Inc. The market share of IE increased dramatically when IE 3.0 came along with Windows smothering the web browser Netscape which was the leading web browser then.
The market dominance of Internet Explorer started declining in 2004 with the inception of Netscape’s completely morphed version Firefox. It came as an open source free web browser and gained immense popularity oppressing the problematic and plagued IE 6.
After a couple of years Microsoft again started working on functionality of Internet Explorer and launched IE 7 with too many bug fixes and functional improvements. IE 7 came with many new features and impressive stability and security. Since then things have been only getting better with every version, with Internet Explorer being now considered to be among the fastest and most secure browsers for Windows.
Internet Explorer 11 will arrive with Windows 8.1.