Wow. Version 1 was August of 1995. I discovered the Internet in September.
Two years after the infamous September that never ended. Kinda curious here, but it being September so I guess college?
Internet Explorer Browser Collection
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#22For 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 i…
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_5#System_and... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#System_req…
I wonder if IE 6 could lean more on existing libraries (renderers etc) in the OS itself; maybe the IE 6 version for older systems than Windows XP were comparable in size to IE 5?
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#23No 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.
None of the Unix versions either. I have IE5 on a PA-RISC PrecisionBook here and it's not bad, but it took a little digging to find.
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#24Are 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
Yeah they should be; both Microsoft and Intel have a big reputation when it comes to backwards compatibility in their operating systems and instruction sets. It's only been fairly recently that they're starting to break with that, notably with Edge. Not sure about Windows yet, but, wouldn't be surprised if eventually they just put an older windows VM in there - if they haven't already.
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#25That animated Windows logo in the IE status bar brings up a lot of memories. Did it have any real purpose?
It's a loading indicator. A far more obvious one than the tiny spinning circles that seem popular today.
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.
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://example.com should work, it doesn't force https
Can't get it to work. But 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…
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.
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#27For 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 i…
One of the attractions of Chrome when it first came out was that it had less chrome, that most of the precious screen real estate could be devoted to showing the content of the web page, or at least to ads. I'd guess IE9 was a reaction to that.
When we only had 640 vertical pixels, it was a huge change not to have 150 of them taken up with rows of icons and bookmarks by default. Now we have the space to get those controls back, but we're used to not having them.
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#28It is missing 5.5 - I have memories of that being a kind of important version ...
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...
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#29In 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).
Re: Internet Explorer Browser Collection
#30For 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 i…
> the newer ones seem to be implicitly saying "you have no control (anymore)."
Since all those toolbars can still be made visible in newer versions, I think MS's choice to hide them is more about a minimalist aesthetic than actually removing control.