Internet Explorer 3

1. Features
2. Screenshots
3. Download links

World Wide Web service with its online experience like hypertext links, surfing, web pages as a combination of text and images / multimedia brought Internet to general public. As to general public, it all very much revolves around the web browser. The first web browser ever, WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus) had many of the features later to be considered as standard for web browsers, but it was an experiment, accessible and known to very few. The rest of users might expect more likely only a text-mode interface experience through a text-based web browsers like Line Mode Browser.

The turning point for the World Wide Web and all Internet was the advent of Mosaic, a graphical web browser, in 1993. First for Unix and then for Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Mosaic was not the first web browser for Windows though and it could not supersede Cello, the first and initially the only web browser for Windows.

Microsoft Windows was the fastest growing major platform for PC in the first half of 1990s. But Microsoft did not seem to recognize the importance of the web browser then. So the main competition under Windows at that time was among several versions of Mosaic and Cello. This competition gave birth to Netscape web browser, which became the dominant software of its kind for several years. This success and great public attention attracted by World Wide Web by 1995 made Microsoft to join in the efforts.

Internet Explorer 1 was just a first experiment. Internet Explorer 2 was intended to push the Internet Explorer case - it was made available to all Windows users for free, even commercial companies. But Netscape positions were not much undermined, Internet Explorer 2 being distinctly weaker in many features is among the reasons for that. Only after the release of Internet Explorer 3.0 Microsoft browsers began to close Netscape in qualities.

Internet Explorer 3 was not the first Microsoft attempt to find technical and marketing model as were Internet Explorers of 1 and 2. And it was not the first Microsoft modern web browser, the first for Microsoft to beat and surpass Netscape and all other web browser competitors as Internet Explorer 4 was. But Internet Explorer 3 still was the first in some things: the first commercial browser with Cascading Style Sheets / CSS support, the first Microsoft web browser without Spyglass source code and the first Microsoft web browser to gain a significant usage share, 20-39% by the end of 1997 { 1 }. Still, Internet Explorer 3 was a transitional, intermediate piece of software between the early browsers and the modern ones. As to its modern state, there is an interesting detail: Internet Explorer 3 can run under 32-bit Windows 7, unlike generally the 4.0-6.0 Explorers.

Features

HTML ( with tables and frames ) support is quite strong ( More ... ). Internet Explorer 3 lets some HTML tricks to be used without extra strain, like HTML table borders without CSS.

CSS support in Internet Explorer 3 is weak:

• endoframe.com/css/ie3.html
• w3.org/Style/CSS/msie

Internet Explorer 3 also supports VBScript, ActiveX (more than 1,000 Controls), Java applets, inline multimedia, VRML and a Microsoft's reverse-engineered version of JavaScript named JScript. All of the versions and capabilities corresponding the level of the times.

Internet Explorer 3 was released for several platforms: x86(16/32 bit), 68k, PPC, MIPS, Alpha AXP. And several operating systems: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, System 7 / Mac OS 7, Mac OS 8. There was an effort to create an Internet Explorer 3 version for Sun Solaris, but it was slow and eventually dropped in favour of Internet Explorer 4.0 for Solaris.

Internet Explorer 3 had several accompanying, more or less integrated applications:

• Internet Mail and News. An e-mail and news client, later replaced / renamed in IE4 as Outlook Express 4.0.
• Windows Address Book. Single list of contacts that can be shared by multiple programs.
• Microsoft Comic Chat. A text chatting program that used cartoon avatars to display text and emotion.
• RealPlayer. A media player capable of streaming media over the Internet.
• Later, Microsoft NetMeeting. A VoIP and multi-point videoconferencing client and Windows Media Player.
• And probably most important of all - Microsoft Java Virtual Machine - enabling support for Java applets in Internet Explorer 3.

Screenshots

Download links

Keeping and running multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same machine is not provided for by Microsoft. Although there had been a solution found to it, by a web developer Joe Maddalone ( More ... ). Since then there exist several packages with standalone IEs, ordinarily including multiple versions of Internet Explorers to download free of charge.

• Download a pack, containing 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5, 6.0 versions of Internet Explorer.
• Visit a page with links to download a pack, containing 1.0, 2.01, 3.0, 3.01, 3.03, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 versions of Internet Explorer.

Running Internet Explorer of 4.0 - 6.0 versions may be a problem under even 32-bit Windows 7. So, for the best experience, 32-bit Windows XP SP3 is required.

Footnotes

{ 1 } Usage share information source links:

• zdnet.com/news/browser-wars-high-price-huge-rewards/128738
• edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/08/browser.idg

Operating systems

• Windows

More

• Internet Explorer 3. Screenshots
• Netscape 3. Screenshots