Happy Birthday Internet Explorer 6

A milestone in Internet history passed last weekend without so much as a mention from the IT press. In August 2001, Internet Explorer 6 was released, alongside Windows XP, and this weekend they both celebrated their 5th birthday.

Now, in computing terms, 5 years is a long time. For example, if we look back to the previous 5 years from 1996 - 2001 the amount of change is incredible.

On the operating system front, we see the move from Windows 95 - Windows NT4, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and ending up with where we are today at Windows XP. All in all, 6 possible changes to the desktop in the previous 5 years. In the last five years, no change.

The slowdown on the browser front has been just as marked. August 1996 marked the release of IE3, taking over from IE2 (which was a year old at the time) along with Netscape 2.01. Between 1996 and 2001 we had 8 major releases of Netscape and 4 major releases of IE, which eventually won the 'browser wars'. Between 2001 and 2006, IE6 has had 2 bug fix updates to improve security, but no new features have been added.

If you want to see what web browsers looked like in 1996, download NCSA Mosaic (on which IE was based) here

The difference between browsers in 1996 and 2001 is staggering. The difference between 2001 and 2006 is not. There is no doubt that the difference between the two periods is the level of competition. For most of the 'naughties' IE has had nothing to compete with, so has stagnated. Those in the industry also suspect an ulterior motive. Every improvement to the browser technology gives companies like Google a bigger stick to hit Microsoft with. Microsoft is not winning the battle for the Internet itself - why create tools to give its competitors an edge?

However, there is a light on the horizon. After years of teething problems from its separation from Netscape, Firefox (originally named Firebird, to indicate the phoenix rising from the ashes) is gaining momentum, and now has 27% share of the browser market. Amongst those in the know, Firefox is the browser of choice, being faster, smaller, supporting web standards better, supporting more features (tabbed browsing for example), being more extensible and generally better in most respects than IE6. This has led to Firefox grabbing nearly 30% of the browser market, as can be seen in the following graph.



Microsoft are working hard on IE7 to stop FF gaining too much market share, and this will be released as a 'critical update', meaning it will automatically spread to a high percentage of the PC population, which some regard as a slightly underhand move.

What happens in the next 5 years is up to us all. With no competition, we can look forward to a few security updates to IE7, and perhaps not much more. However, if we all keep an open mind, and consider browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari as realistic (and often better) alternatives to Internet Explorer, then perhaps the browser wars II will develop and lead to another massive shift in how we use the Internet.

Your browser needs you.


Firefox - Opera - Safari