Developer(s) | Microsoft |
---|---|
Initial release | 2001 |
Stable release | |
Operating system | Solaris, HP-UX |
Platform | PA-RISC and SPARC |
Type | Web browser |
License | Proprietary |
Website | microsoft.com/unix/ie (archive.org) |
Internet Explorer for UNIX is a discontinued version of the Internet Explorer graphical web browser that was available free of charge and produced by Microsoft for use in the X Window System on Solaris or HP-UX. Development ended with a version of Internet Explorer 5 in 2001 and support for it was completely discontinued in 2002.
In May 1996, it was reported that Steven Guggenheimer confirmed that they were looking into porting Internet Explorer to run on UNIX-like platforms, but were looking into how exactly it should be done. [2] It was further reported that Steve Ballmer, then executive vice president of Microsoft, had shown an interest earlier in the month for a Microsoft browser to run on Unix as part of the strategy to wage the browser wars:
In pursuit of a larger share of the mammoth browser market, Microsoft has been dealing with PC and workstation makers to have its IE browser bundled with newly shipping hardware. Ballmer hinted, however, that not having a Unix browser was posing an obstacle to this OEM-based strategy to try and catch up with No. 1 browser maker Netscape Communications Corp., which holds some 85 percent of the worldwide browser market with its Navigator product line. "We might just have to get one of those", Ballmer said of a Unix-based browser. [2]
In June, Microsoft entered into a contract with Bristol Technology to develop a version of Bristol's porting application Wind/U (archived) to port IE for Windows to Unix. [3] At this time Bristol also had a contract with Microsoft allowing it access to Windows source code from September 1994 to September 1997. [3] [4] The project was officially announced by Microsoft at the end of July 1996 that a native version of IE for "Solaris and other popular variants of UNIX" would be finished by the end of the year, which would have "equivalent functionality as that provided in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0", thus "delivering on its commitment to provide full-featured Web browser support on all major operating system platforms" as well as "supporting and promoting open standards, including HTML, ActiveX and Java". [5]
However, following a dispute in March 1997 concerning each other's performance and because of contract negotiations with Bristol to access Windows source code after September 1997 failing, [4] [6] Microsoft reversed course and decided to directly port the Windows version in-house using the MainWin XDE (eXtended Development Environment) application from Mainsoft, [7] the main competitor to Bristol Technology. [3] (Microsoft would later also use MainWin to port Windows Media Player and Outlook Express to Unix. [8] ) Now well behind schedule, the 3.0 branch was apparently scrapped in favor of 4.0 (that was released for Windows half a year earlier), which used the new MSHTML (Trident) browser engine. A beta of the Solaris version was made available on November 5, 1997, [9] with a final version expected by March 1998.
Tod Nielsen, general manager of Microsoft's developer relations group, jokingly declared that he wanted to hold the launch of the browser at the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum in San Francisco due to the skepticism by those who believed the project was vaporware. [10] It was further reported that versions for HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Irix were planned [10] (note that at the time MainWin XDE 3.0 was only available for the "Solaris SPARC 2.51 platform", but MainWin XDE 2.1 was "available on Solaris SPARC 2.51, Solaris Intel 5.5.1, SunOS 4.1.4, Irix 5.3, Irix 6.2, HP UX 10.2 and IBM AIX 4.1.5".) [7] IE 4.0 for Unix on Solaris was released on March 4, 1998. [7] Later that year a version for HP-UX was released.
There are nine versions officially listed by Microsoft, listed below in bold. [11] [12] It is not known why Microsoft omitted references to the other ones from its official list.
Product | SSL | Platform | Version | Release date |
---|---|---|---|---|
4.0 Preview 1 | Solaris | 1997-11-05 [13] | ||
4.0/4.01 | 40-bit | Solaris | 4.71.2011.4 [11] | 1998-02-24 [14] |
4.0/4.01 | 40-bit | HP-UX | 4.71.2004.9 [11] | 1998-02-24 [14] |
4.0/4.01 | 128-bit | Solaris | 4.71.2011.4 [11] | 1998-02-24 [14] |
4.0/4.01 | 128-bit | HP-UX | 4.71.2004.9 [11] | 1998-02-24 [14] |
5.0 | 40-bit | Solaris | 5.00.2013.1312 [11] | 1999-02-02 [15] |
5.0 | 40-bit | HP-UX | 5.00.2013.1312 [11] | 1999-03-17 [16] |
5.0 | 128-bit | Solaris | 5.00.2013.1312 [11] | 1999-02-02 [15] |
5.0 | 128-bit | HP-UX | 5.00.2013.1312 [11] | 1999-03-17 [16] |
5.0 SP1 Beta | 128-bit | Solaris | 5.00.2013.2002 [11] | 2001-03-07 [17] |
5.0 SP1 Beta | 128-bit | HP-UX | 2001 [18] | |
5.0 SP1 | 128-bit | Solaris | 5.00.3314.1001 [19] | 2001-10-30 [19] |
5.0 SP1 | 128-bit | HP-UX | 5.00.3314.1001 [19] | 2001-10-30 [19] |
Notable items from the IE for Unix 5.0 Readme: [15] [16]
SPARC 5, Solaris 2.5.1 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4m; X11) | |
Any Ultra, Solaris 2.5.1 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4u; X11) | |
Any Ultra, Solaris 2.6 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; SunOS 5.6 sun4u; X11) | |
HP 9000 C-180, HP-UX 10.20 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; HP-UX B.10.20 9000/780; X11) | |
HP 9000 K-250, HP-UX 10.20 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; HP-UX B.10.20 9000/802; X11) |
The homepage for IE for Unix was removed from Microsoft's website in the third quarter of 2002 without explanation, replaced with the message: "We sincerely apologize, but Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX are no longer available for download." [20] It was noted however, that while the homepage had been removed, the actual download page remained up for a time. [21] The reason given by Microsoft's PR firm was that "low customer demand for this download did not justify the resources required for continued development". [22]
Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac OS X was the last browser the company released for a UNIX-related platform until the release of Microsoft Edge for macOS and Linux in 2020.
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. It helped to influence early implementations of successor projects such as KDE and GNOME desktop environment, which largely replaced CDE following the turn of the century.
Internet Explorer is a deprecated series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were used in the Windows line of operating systems. While IE has been discontinued on most Windows editions, it remains supported on certain editions of Windows, such as Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC. Starting in 1995, it was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year. Later versions were available as free downloads or in-service packs and included in the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows. Microsoft spent over US$100 million per year on Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people involved in the project by 1999. New feature development for the browser was discontinued in 2016 and ended support on June 15, 2022, in favor of its successor, Microsoft Edge.
Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.
Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.
NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, and one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. Its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web. Mosaic is the first browser to display images inline with text instead of in a separate window. It is often described as the first graphical web browser, though it was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise, and ViolaWWW.
Unix System V is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. System V Release 4 (SVR4) was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed as Unix System Unification, which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated to SysV.
This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.
Internet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform to browse web pages. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows. Later versions diverged, particularly with the release of version 5, which included the cutting-edge, fault-tolerant and highly standards-compliant Tasman layout engine.
Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is a discontinued software package produced by Microsoft which provided a Unix environment on Windows NT and some of its immediate successor operating-systems.
Microsoft developed 11 versions of Internet Explorer for Windows from 1995 to 2013. Microsoft also developed Internet Explorer for Mac, Internet Explorer for UNIX, and Internet Explorer Mobile respectively for Apple Macintosh, Unix, and mobile devices; the first two are discontinued but the latter runs on Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) is the fifth, and by now, discontinued, version of the Internet Explorer graphical web browser, the successor to Internet Explorer 4 and one of the main participants of the first browser war. Its distribution methods and Windows integration were involved in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case. Launched on March 18, 1999, it was the default browser in Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 2000 and Windows ME and can replace previous versions of Internet Explorer on Windows 3.1x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 and the original release of Windows 98. Although Internet Explorer 5 ran only on Windows, its siblings Internet Explorer for Mac 5 and Internet Explorer for UNIX 5 supported Mac OS X, Solaris and HP-UX.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (IE4) is the fourth, and by now, discontinued, version of the Internet Explorer graphical web browser that Microsoft unveiled in Spring of 1997, and released in September 1997, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for the classic Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It".
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (IE3) is the third, and by now, discontinued, version of the Internet Explorer graphical web browser which was announced in March 1996, and was released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS. It began serious competition against Netscape Navigator in the first Browser war. It was Microsoft's first browser release with a major internal development component. It was the first more widely used version of Internet Explorer, although it did not surpass Netscape or become the browser with the most market share. During its tenure, IE market share went from roughly 3–9% in early 1996 to 20–30% by the end of 1997. In September 1997 it was superseded by Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 (IE2) is the second, and by now discontinued, version of Internet Explorer (IE), a graphical web browser by Microsoft. It was unveiled in October 1995, and was released on November 22, 1995, for Windows 95 and Windows NT, and on April 23, 1996, for Apple Macintosh and Windows 3.1.
The Veritas Volume Manager is a proprietary logical volume manager from Veritas.
The following tables compare general and technical information between a number of notable IRC client programs which have been discussed in independent, reliable prior published sources.
Internet Explorer 9 or IE9 is the ninth version of the Internet Explorer web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on March 14, 2011, as the ninth version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 as a major out-of-band version that was not tied to the release schedule of any particular version of Windows, unlike previous versions. It is the first version of Internet Explorer not to be bundled with a Windows operating system, although some OEMs have installed it with Windows 7 on their PCs. Internet Explorer 9 is the last version that is called Windows Internet Explorer. The software was rebranded simply as Internet Explorer starting in 2012 with the release of Internet Explorer 10.
Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995.
Mainsoft is a software company, founded in 1993, that develops interoperability software products for Microsoft Windows and Linux/Unix platforms.
Last Updated: October 29, 2001