Internet Explorer 2.0

Internet Explorer 2.0
	Version of Internet Explorer
Version	2.0
Compatible with	Windows 3.1x; Windows NT 3.1; Windows NT 3.5x; Windows 95; Windows NT 4.0; Mac OS 7; Mac OS 8; Mac OS 9
Release date	1995-11-27
Support end
About
Replaces
	Internet Explorer 1 (Windows 95); Internet Explorer 1.5 (Windows 3.1/NT 3.x)
Replaced by
	Internet Explorer 3 (Windows 95/NT 4.0/Mac OS); Internet Explorer 2.1 (Windows 3.1x/NT 3.51)

Internet Explorer 2.0 is the second version of Internet Explorer released in late 1995 for Windows 95 and Windows NT, and in late April 1996 for Mac OS 7 and Windows 3.1x that introduced support for new features such as SSL (Secure Socket Layer), HTTP Cookies, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). An integrated e-Mail and news client also surfaced. Through OLE drag-and-drop was supported in IE, a PPP network stack was included for operating systems which did not contain such functionality. Also, a bookmark import utility was introduced to migrate users' bookmarks from Netscape.

This version comes pre-installed with Windows NT 4.0 and the OSR1 release of Windows 95 (and OSR2.x if the hardware is not compatible with the included future releases of Internet Explorer), but is also available for versions of Windows 95 without or with an earlier version of Internet Explorer. A 16-bit version was available for Windows 3.1x, Windows NT 3.1 and Windows NT 3.5x. It does not require Win32s to be installed for Windows 3.1x, unlike its predecessor (version 1.5).

Internet Explorer 2 is the last version to support Windows NT 3.1. The succeeding version 3.0 required Windows NT 3.5 or newer. However, from version 3.0 onwards, they were 16-bit only, even for the 32-bit NT 3.x, as Microsoft initially planned to fully drop IE support for NT prior to 4.0 to push its sales. However, due to a huge number of customer complaints, they stepped back from this plan. At this point was seemingly cheaper to make the existing 16-bit variant compatible with NT 3.5x rather than backport the 32-bit version from NT 4.0 to NT 3.5x.^[2]

Changes compared to 1.x[edit | edit source]

Internet Explorer 2.0 32-bit for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 added support features such as

inline videos and sounds (avi with Microsoft RLE compression f.e.)
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (however, VRML was a plugin and has to be separately installed)
HTTP keep-alive and no-cache pragma
multithreaded HTTP requests (resulting in faster loading times)
PlaceHolder Mode (broser automatically enters in a placeholder mode and loads the text first and then loading graphics)
OLE drag and drop support (f.e. drag inline images of websites to the Windows 95 desktop)
HTML v3 standard and proprietary extensions of Netscape to HTML v2 (e.g. support for frames)
included News (NNTP) reader and E-Mail (SMTP/POP3) client (separated to Internet Mail and News as of Version 3)
Cookies
SSL encryption with RSA, DES and RC4
STT support (Secure Transaction Technology, a secure payment protocol developed by Microsoft and Visa that never really took off^[3])
PPP network stack
Bookmark-importer for Netscape

Some of these improvements were only added to the 16-bit variant as of Version 2.1. 2.01 for 16-bit did not yet support background sounds to provide an example.