BetaWiki:Featured article/2024-04
Internet Explorer is a web browser designed by Microsoft as its first venture into the web browser market. The initial version of the browser was incarnated from Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft licensed for a modest quarterly fee and a share of the non-Windows product revenues. As Microsoft decided to distribute Internet Explorer "free of charge" with their Windows operating system, they were able to avoid most royalties. Due to the browser's inclusion starting from the Windows 9x series and beyond, it sparked a three-year-long antitrust lawsuit that lasted until November 2001. The browser quickly overtook Netscape in the first browser war and retained ~95% of its market share until the early 2000s, when popular alternative browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome came to market, sparking the second browser war.
Internet Explorer was notorious for disobeying set web standards by the W3C until version 9, when Microsoft took a new commitment to HTML5 and web standards. Microsoft ceased active development of Internet Explorer after Windows 8.1 was released in 2013, making Internet Explorer 11 the final version of Internet Explorer. It was eventually replaced by Microsoft Edge in 2015.