Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer (known before as Microsoft Internet Explorer) is a Internet browser by Microsoft. It has been part of the Microsoft Windows operating system since Windows 95 and could be installed on older Windows versions. Versions for non-Windows operating systems like Mac OS and Solaris were available, but have been discontinued.

Features

In it's early days, Internet Explorer played an important role in creating and establishing web standards.

(there have to be some more)

Criticism

Internet Explorer often has been criticized, for example because of the poor compliance to open web standards, support for proprietary extensions like in-page ActiveX controls and security issues. Especially Internet Explorer 6 has been an annoyance for web designers due to it's bad behavior on standard-compliant code and it's widespread usage due to it being included in Windows XP. Microsoft has attempted to rectify the major problems with releases since Internet Explorer 7 and 8. The current version for Windows XP is Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer 9 features support for some HTML5 and CSS3 elements, and is the last version to be supported on Windows Vista. Many had hoped Internet Explorer 9 would work on Windows XP, but it did not. A hack was made, but Microsoft sent out a cease-and-desist order and the creator took it down right away, nowhere to be seen again. As for Windows 7, Internet Explorer 10 is the last version to be supported on that operating system. It adds some HTML5 improvements and starts up faster than Internet Explorer 9, as well as on Windows 8.

Versions