
Internet Explorer Browser Collection - Gwxz
https://www.my-internet-explorer.com/
======
userbinator
For some reason, that domain name arouses my suspicion... if I saw that in the
search results I'd probably think "SEO spam site" and skip over it.

One of the obvious things you can see between the versions is the gradual
trend of dumbing-down and flattening the UI, most apparent between 8 and 9.
The older versions' UI give the impression that they are very customisable and
_powerful_ , while the newer ones seem to be implicitly saying "you have no
control (anymore)." I'd love to use a browser with a newer rendering engine,
but retain the old UI.

I also noticed the sizes are a little weird:

    
    
        IE1: 2.88MB
        IE2: 17.9MB
        IE3: 232MB(!?)
        IE4: 357MB
        IE5: 640MB
        IE6: 105MB
        IE7: 78MB
        IE8: 147MB
        IE9: 207MB
        IE10: 218MB
        IE11: 166MB
    

I remember using those older versions of IE on systems with hard drives
smaller than that.

~~~
hajile
IE4 -- 11MB IE5 -- 56MB IE6 -- 13MB

Their sizes seem to be off (or including something extra). But there
definitely is a huge change in IE5 requirements. I'm guessing that's related
to the US v Microsoft antitrust bundling lawsuit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_4#System_req...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_4#System_requirements)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5#System_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5#System_and_hardware_requirements)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#System_req...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#System_requirements)

~~~
micmil
That seems likely. What's funny is how Edge (and eventually IE) became even
more entrenched in the system than before, yet nobody cares anymore. Almost
like the whole thing was a bunch of arm-waving by nerds and regulators that
wanted to pretend they knew what was going on.

~~~
ma2rten
IE is not the dominant browser anymore and Windows is not the dominant OS
anymore (if you consider mobile).

Instead Google got a huge fine in Europe now for being the default search
engine on Android.

------
izietto
As a long-time web developer, when I clicked on IE6 and I saw its screenshot I
felt queasy for a brief moment. Not joking.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
As a non-web developer all I felt was nostalgia.

~~~
izietto
I felt a bit of nostalgia too, but I think mainly for Windows XP UI. Maybe it
wasn't very polished but it looked pretty funny and friendly; it made you feel
like at home -- especially Windows XP Home Edition (ok ok I'm sorry...)

------
tonny747
It looks like it sourced its downloads from
[https://winworldpc.com/product/internet-
explorer/](https://winworldpc.com/product/internet-explorer/).

------
maaaats
Are the downloads the old, compiled code? The iexplore.exe in IE 1.5 says
modified in 1996. And it runs on my Windows in 2019. That's a feat!

(Can't find any pages to open, though, guess it's too old http and possible
tls stuff in the way?) Edit: Found some urls that worked

~~~
hadrien01
[http://example.com](http://example.com) should work, it doesn't force https

~~~
maaaats
Can't get it to work. But [http://matsemann.com](http://matsemann.com) works.
I think the difference is that my domain works even without a "Host" header.

Edit: Not quite correct that it works. My domain responds with a different
dummy-page in IE 1.5. I get the same dummy-page with curl

    
    
      curl http://matsemann.com -i --http1.0 -v -H 'Host:'
    

Difference being it's served as 200, while same command for example.com with
no host gives 404.

I think the web is just broken without host headers, as too much is running on
the same ips / through routers before touching the real underlying page.

~~~
Freak_NL
Host headers are explicitly required by the spec, and there are no clients
left that leave them out (including non-browser clients like curl and wget).
There is simply no reason to facilitate requests that have no Host header, so
servers receiving them quite rightly serve some kind of error response.

~~~
kibibu
Required by the HTTP 1.1 spec, not the HTTP 1.0 spec

------
creativeembassy
Internet Explorer 2, in 1995, had support for VRML. A full 20 years before the
Oculus Rift officially launched. I had never heard of that markup language and
had to Google it. Talk about being ahead of its time...

~~~
wink
Maybe my filter bubble, but VRML was kind of talked about in the late 90s
(when we got on the internet) but the implementation, features, and general
application state was more of a running joke. Also that's probably why it
faded so relatively quickly, nobody used it.

~~~
stiGGG
I remember the most famous techno club from my nearest city used that to
provide a virtual room tour on their website. I was too young then to get past
the bouncers and liked that feature :)

~~~
wink
That's really cool. I honestly don't remember seeing anything besides Hello
World examples and they didn't really impress me :|

------
kccqzy
It is weird that IE 5 listed Mac OS 5.2.3 in the operating system. That's
totally wrong for several reasons. First Mac OS was a name introduced since
version 8 or so, and before that it was called System. Second I don't really
think System 5.2.3 actually exists. Third and perhaps more importantly the Mac
versions of IE were done by a completely different team within Microsoft,
using a different rendering engine and having a different set of quirks. IIRC
the Mac version gained full PNG support many years before the Windows version
did; it was in fact the first browser to do so.

I wouldn't really consider IE for Mac together with IE for Windows. They are
more like two different products with a same name.

------
mugsie
It is missing 5.5 - I have memories of that being a kind of important version
...

~~~
ChrisSD
5.5 was the last version that MS actually cared about IIRC. 6 had a few
meaningful additions and tweaks but it had become noticeable that MS wasn't
prioritizing development. And of course after 6 MS didn't care much at all
until competition came along...

------
chrismorgan
In 2012 I worked with a Windows 2000 Server machine that had IE5.5, and had to
make a UI for a simple task on it. I chose to go with HTA. I tried to make my
life easier by installing IE6, but failed to install it. It took me a while to
even _find_ an IE6 installer (the original links were all dead), and once I
finally did, I couldn’t install it (it asked the internet for something as
part of the process, and that part was broken).

~~~
24gttghh
If you could find what the installer was actually looking for, you could setup
a proxy server to rewrite the URL and point it to someplace that has it e.g.
locally.

~~~
chrismorgan
I have no idea whether what it sought was important or not. Half of the
difficulty in doing any debugging of _anything_ was that most tools even in
2012 were no longer supporting 2000. Even Wireshark may not have run there;
but I didn’t try it. I just gave up after a couple of hours of trying to get
it working, and stayed on IE5.5.

------
runciblespoon
Actually Internet Explorer 1.0 was a rebranded Spyglass browser . After
failing to get an exclusive license from Mosaic Netscape and failing to get an
exclusive license from the NCSA, Microsoft does get a non-exclusive license
for a browser from Spyglass, that was 'given away' with Windows as Internet
Explorer 1.0 around 1994. As such Microsoft deemed it unnecessary to actually
pay Spyglass. Mosaic Netscape was released in 1994, despite this factoid, in
1996 we have Bill Gates welcoming Netscape into the Industry.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120618054817/http://www.nation...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120618054817/http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Spyglass)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/gates-draws-roadmap-for-
intranet/](https://www.cnet.com/news/gates-draws-roadmap-for-intranet/)

------
crehn
That animated Windows logo in the IE status bar brings up a lot of memories.
Did it have any real purpose?

~~~
userbinator
It's a loading indicator. A far more obvious one than the tiny spinning
circles that seem popular today.

~~~
Cthulhu_
It makes sense; you want to make your app so that even the tiny spinning
circles aren't even visible. I added a feature to a webapp in a previous
project that would only start showing a spinner if loading a page or section
took >1 second. If it's any slower you'd see a flashing spinner, which is not
very nice.

------
pweezy
Browsing through the screenshots of each version on this site, I was struck by
how good the IE logo looked from the version 4 installer. I realized why when
I got to version 10, released some 15 years later. The flat "modern" update to
the logo is identical to the one from IE4, just with a lighter font weight.

------
Gwxz
Thanks for sharing your experience!

------
adighe
The fact that the archives are RAR makes this so much better!

------
heinrichhartman
I have good memories using IE3,4,5. With IE6 the UI took a turn for the worse.
The look of IE7 freaks me out.

Edge just looks like Chrome, which is acceptable to me.

~~~
acheron
Same. I remember arguing with a friend in late 2000 who still insisted on
using Netscape 4. I had given up on Netscape years before and stuck with IE
from around 3 through 5.5. I actually don't remember using 6 much on purpose.
I know I switched to Phoenix at v0.4 and never touched IE again, which was
apparently October 2002; IE6 had been at the end of 2001. It's possible I was
using IE6 for that yearish, though I didn't start using XP for awhile,
preferring to stick with Windows 2000.

------
usermac
Wow. Version 1 was August of 1995. I discovered the Internet in September.

~~~
pedrocx486
Two years after the infamous September that never ended. Kinda curious here,
but it being September so I guess college?

~~~
dspillett
_> it being September so I guess college?_

Yes. September was the month that many new users discovered the Internet for
the first time, because they were given access at University and other higher
education establishments, which had many and varied implications.

For instance there was an influx of beginner questions in Usenet groups,
questions to which the answer was "please read the FAQ before asking more
questions".

There was also just a general influx of activity: groups would see a bump in
user numbers and activity that didn't fall back off over time.

New users arrived all through the year of course, but in smaller numbers and
tended to be more technically proficient (and aware with network etiquette) to
start with because they had sought (and paid for) access for a reason, rather
than being given it and being told to go explore.

From 1993 onwards the public more generally were becoming a lot more aware of
the Internet and being told about the things it could potentially do for them,
so there was a more constant flow of new (often relatively non-technical)
users & activity rather than just a big glut each September, which is why that
year was referred to as "the September that never ended".

~~~
kalleboo
IIRC the Eternal September specifically referred to when AOL added Usenet
access, so it was users who didn't even know they were using the Internet

~~~
dspillett
That certainly rings a bell here too, though I remember the phrase coming to
be more general than trying to AOL users.

------
Kipters
I noticed the Edge page does not make any distinction between Spartan (current
EdgeHTML-based version) and Anaheim (future Chromium-based version). The
downloadable rar contains Anaheim though.

------
zapzupnz
No Mac versions, pocket versions, console versions yet. I loved the Mac
version back in the days before Safari, it was actually a pretty fantastic
browser for the time.

~~~
Gwxz
The Mac version included in the archive IE2-IE5

------
etaioinshrdlu
I would just like to point out that IE up til 5.0 ran on Unix including
Solaris. Isn't that a bit mind blowing?

------
kermitismyhero
This is like the software equivalent of Red Letter Media's video library.

------
AriaMinaei
Weeks of my life have been wasted working around the incidental complexity of
IE6. Yet, it was a very sad day when I heard they're killing off Edge.

This tweetstorm of mine[0] is relevant:

I'm sad they are killing it off. Like really, really, sad. Edge is a feat of
engineering. Like operating systems, and other major browsers. These things
are rare. And they're way too advanced to just kill off.

I remember IE9 being the very first browser to bet on the web being a gaming
platform (not counting Flash here). Chrome was the fastest for
documents/GDocs-style apps, but nothing beat IE9 in multimedia performance.

I remember learning about layout thrashing and how it causes re-paint and
jank. There was an infinite zoom demo somewhere on the internet that worked by
resetting width/height on wheel events. Webkit/Gecko/Presto would render it at
like 2 fps. Trident? 60 fps with lots to spare.

Interactive audio, pre Audio API was impossible in all other engines. I
remember they had rewritten Cut The Rope in JS, but had to use Flash for
audio. Reason was, calling el.play () on a fully loaded <audio> tag was laggy
on all browsers. All except IE9 of course.

I remember they did not support 3D transforms. But the 2D stuff would run the
smoothest on IE9. No scaling artifacts; no aliased edges; IOW, actually usable
in a multimedia setting.

You cannot have interactive content without smooth animation and responsive
audio. This vision, of seeing the web as a multimedia platform, was unique to
IE. As in, they were the first one actually delivering on it.

In fact, IE9 was so good, the dev team behind it so talented, it only served
to show how all that talent had gone to waste all those years between IE6 and
8. (One out of many examples of financial incentive stifling talent and
innovation.)

And it wasn't only technical talent either. Their developer outreach program
was special. They sponsored a whole bunch of projects, from rewriting popular
mobile games in JS, to original web-based experiences, showcasing what had
only just then become possible to do on the web.

That outreach program showed that the open web can be more than a static
platform of paper-esque documents. Rather it can be a safe medium of
interactive content, allowing ever more complex ideas to be communicated. This
was powerful, and inspiring.

Back to the technical side, the vast majority of innovations in EdgeHTML will
never be incorporated into Blink. The architectures surely are too different.
Edge's innovations will simply bitrot in a close-sourced codebase waiting to
be EOLed.

I can't imagine how disappointed the team must be. Years of their best
work—truly great work—thrown out. Just like that. To my fellow engineers at
Edge: You all did an amazing job. And you deserved better.

Last thing I'd say even if obvious: Use Firefox. Contribute to Firefox. Tell
your friends to use Firefox. You'd be fighting the monoculture, AND getting
the best browsing experience out there.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/ariaminaei/status/1072516777937129473](https://twitter.com/ariaminaei/status/1072516777937129473)

~~~
frosted-flakes
One of my favourite bits of IE was its high contrast support, which no other
browsers had. It actually modified the styles of individual elements (rather
than using a global color filter overlay like Chrome), so it performed really
well, matched the OS high contrast theme, and could also be adjusted by
developers with prefixed media query.

I was glad to hear that Microsoft will be adding it to the new Edge[0]. You
can read about how it works in this excellent explainer[1].

[0] [https://techdows.com/2019/03/chrome-to-get-native-caret-
brow...](https://techdows.com/2019/03/chrome-to-get-native-caret-browsing-and-
high-contrast-mode.html)

[1]
[https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/maste...](https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/master/Accessibility/HighContrast/explainer.md)

