Internet Explorer 1

Microsoft Internet Explorer is a web browser application created by Microsoft primarily for Microsoft Windows. It was initially based on Spyglass Mosaic. At various points, Internet Explorer was also available for MacOS, Solaris, and HP-UX.

At its 1995 release, Internet Explorer competed with the Mosaic web browser and Netscape Navigator. Home Internet access was still somewhat new and competed against proprietary services like CompuServe, AOL, and Microsoft's own MSN.

Microsoft aggressively and abusively positioned Internet Explorer as part of their "browser war" to eliminate all competition. Microsoft fiercely pushed third party products to bundle Internet Explorer, and web sites to work only in Internet Explorer.

In 1998, Microsoft was hit with an antitrust suit, much of which involved their browser bundling.

By around 2004, Microsoft had destroyed most of their competition, dominated the browser market, and let IE stagnate until Mozilla.org released Firefox.

After Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft supplanted IE with "Microsoft Edge" which eventually switched to the Google Chrome rendering engine. Something that would have been unthinkable back then.

Internet Explorer is freely redistributable. But is archived here, as much software (stupidly) requires it.

Screenshots

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Release notes

Internet Explorer 1 was directly based on SpyGlass Mosaic. Version 1.0 only supported Windows 95.

IE 1 was bundled with some, but not all, Microsoft Windows 95 RTM distributions and included in the Windows 95 Plus! add-on CD. Unlike other bundled Windows 95 applications, there was no option to not install it, or to uninstall it.

Microsoft avoided paying licensing fees to SpyGlass by claiming Microsoft gave Internet Explorer away for "free". (Obviously, development costs came out of Windows 95 sales and other Microsoft products). This resulted in a lawsuit.

1.5 and 1.6 were developed as 32-bit applications that supported Windows NT 3.x and Windows 3.1 under Win32s. All later version of IE for these Windows versions were 16-bit only.

Installation instructions

The original release will not install on Windows 95 OSR2 (which has IE 3) or Windows 98 and beyond as they all contain newer versions built in.