Remember the days of double clicking on the Internet Explorer icon, hearing those notorious dial tones, and well, having time to get up and go make a sandwich or pour yourself a drink? Well, sadly (kind of sadly) those days have come to an end with the ‘death’ of Internet Explorer. And people have responded appropriately. Let’s take a look at some interesting tidbits about this portal to the world wide web.
If you can even imagine a worse version of Internet Explorer, it’s important for you to know that there were in fact two poor versions. It was actually Internet Explorer 3.0 that turned out to be the big hit, mostly because it came free with Windows 95. Before IE 3.0 Netscape Navigator was the main browser, but it was a huge headache making Internet Explorer all the more enticing.
Microsoft purposely made Internet Explorer difficult to get rid of. If you ever tried to uninstall Internet Explorer in hopes that a new internet browser might work a little quicker then you know exactly what we’re talking about. Not only did the uninstallation cause your operating system to slow down, but it also caused problems with other programs since so many of those programs required the browser to successfully operate.
After Internet Explorer wiped out Netscape Navigator, there was pretty much zero competition. In fact, from 2002 – 2003 Internet Explorer was operating at roughly 95% usage. Just for comparison, Google Chrome (that we all know and love) is at roughly 70% usage.
Here is a tidbit about Internet Explorer we can all celebrate: Internet Explorer paved the way for free internet browsers. That’s right, kids, internet browsers weren’t always free; in fact, it wasn’t until Internet Explorer was integrated into the Windows operating system (fo’ free!) that other browsers decided they should follow suit.
Most of us can agree that shortcuts are pretty great, right? Well, that’s just another thing we can thank Internet Explorer for! Well, shortcuts of the computer variety. These shortcuts were made popular with Internet Explorer 5.0, which was the first version to support this file type.
When Internet Explorer 4 was released there was a massive party to celebrate. The morning after said party, Netscape Navigators came to work and spotted quite a sight. The sight in question? A giant Internet Explorer logo was sitting in the fountain in front of their corporate offices.