Internet Explorer 5

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

Release notes

Internet Explorer 5 was bundled with Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows 2000. It could be installed on 95, NT 4, and Windows 98 First Edition. IE was also avaliable for Windows 3.1 and MacOS. NT 3.51 was only supported using the 16-bit version. A port to HP-UX and Solaris was also available.

IE 5.x did not include the Windows 95 "desktop update", however the desktop would work if IE 4 was installed first.

16-bit IE 5.0 was the last version for Windows 3.1 and NT 3.51.

The final version for Classic MacOS was 5.17, and the final version for MacOS X was 5.23. At this point, the Macintosh version was much different from the Windows version.