It’s the early 90’s and the internet is known and used by only a few selected people in educational and scientific institutions around the world. It seems crazy now; but Microsoft’s Bill Gates had prophesied that the internet wouldn’t take off and lacked importance. Whoops.

1995. Microsoft realised they’d missed a trick and so licensed some code from another company to build Internet Explorer. It came as a free add-on on to Windows 95 and this is likely to be where the problems started. Being included for free meant that it became the default option for anyone wanting to use the internet – without technical knowledge you had to use it to download a different browser so why bother? IE 1 was just as good as all the others... and it was free!

IE2, 3,4,5 and 5.5 all followed quickly after the  initial launch.  By 1999 Microsoft was spending 100 million dollars a year on IE and had 1000 developers working on it. Up to this point Microsoft was relatively respected by the internet community – the browser worked pretty well and supported most of the things people wanted to do.

Late 1999 and IE6 is released. It was seen as the answer, the best browser out there by far. It’s inclusion with XP for free resulted in the word internet being defined as IE for the majority. IE6 wasn’t a bad browser. It was pretty good for its day. A few niggles; however nothing anyone shouted about too loudly.

Suddenly... nothing. To all intents and purposes, Microsoft halted developing Internet Explorer. We’ll never know why they stopped working on IE but they did. At this point usage of IE6 was up to an average of 97%. This caused those in the industry to hold off developing systems for other browsers. Internal systems for companies were only being developed for IE6 at this point – it was a nice cheap option which made work smooth for the IT guys (Windows would keep IE6 up to date without any more work). WIN.

Then...IE started to fall from grace. Websites pushed to use modern technology which IE could not support. As other browsers started to take hold, IE still sat dormant. Almost all other browsers obeyed the “new rules” but IE was stuck in the past. The misalignment between IE’s capabilities and website developer’s vision began, and with it the frustrations grew. Website developers had to start building websites for the new modern browsers (easy and straight forward) and then make the sites work on IE6 (neither easy nor straightforward). This in effect doubled the workload!

The Impact? Website development took longer and cost more £... (Not to mention the lawsuits-which I won’t go in to).

2006 came and Microsoft released IE7; half shiny and new and half old and nasty. This version of IE had various modes to attempt to seduce IE6 websites into working within its IE7 frame; and although inconsistent in its successes, at least IE was alive and kicking again!

IE8 soon followed suit after some much needed support and the removal of many nasty bugs from its predecessor. However, MS had a real problem; the internet community didn’t (and still don’t) like IE but most casual users employ it by default and are quite happy with it. So it is the focus of many campaigns to get people to use another browser; any other browser, just not IE.

IE9 is coming out this year and promises to drag IE back up to the level of Firefox; Chrome, Opera and Safari. To be fair it does look good. Not as good as some of the new Chrome and Firefox work but still good. However, there is a key sticking point. It doesn’t work on XP. All XP users will be forced to upgrade to Vista, Windows 7 or just stick with buggy IE8 (so again we have to start making sites work for different browsers). XP is nearly 10 years old which is a lifetime in the software world but you try telling that to the 51% of internet users out there... All new browsers and IE8... and so the cycle of IE hatred continues.