23 April 2024, Name-day for Jerzy, Wojciech. Anniversaries.

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Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer; abbreviated to MSIE or, more commonly, IE), is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used, and still most widely used web browser (to the present day, until today), since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6. That percentage share has since declined in the face of renewed competition from other web browsers - Mozilla Firefox most of all. Microsoft spent over $100 million a year on IE in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people working on it by 1999.

The latest release is version Internet Explorer 8, which is available as a free update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or later, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or later, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008, and is planned for inclusion with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Up until Internet Explorer 7, the IE logo was a blue 'e' with a matching blue ring around it. IE 7 and 8 have a new logo, with the blue 'e' with a golden ring around it.

Internet Explorer was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 in 1995. Later versions were available as free downloads, or in service packs, and included in the OEM service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows.

Other versions available since the late 1990s include an embedded OEM version called Internet Explorer for Windows CE (IE CE) available for WinCE based platforms and is currently based on IE6. Internet Explorer for Pocket PC, later rebranded Internet Explorer Mobile for Windows Mobile was also developed, and remain in development alongside the more advanced desktop versions.

IE versions, over time, have had widely varying OS compatibility, ranging from being available for many platforms and several versions of Windows to only a few versions of Windows. Many versions of IE had some support for an older OS but stopped getting updates. The increased growth of the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s means that current browsers with small market shares have more total users than the entire market early on. For example, 90% market share in 1997 would be roughly 60 million users, but by the start of 2007 90% market share would equate to over 900 million users. The result is that later versions of IE6 had many more users in total than all the early versions put together.

Main source: Wikipedia, GNU FDL