Name:- Sowmya Bhattacharya

Class:- First Year Bcom. (F.M)

Roll Number:-1357

Subject:-Information Technology

Topic:-Internet

Subject Teacher:- Ms. Satya

Victoria

Submission Date:- 29th September

 Introduction

The concept of data communication - transmitting data between two different places, connected via
some kind of electromagnetic medium, such as radio or an electrical wire - actually predates the
introduction of the first computers. Such communication systems were typically limited to point to
point communication between two end devices. Telegraph systems and telex machines can be
considered early precursors of this kind of communication. The earlier computers used the technology
available at the time to allow communication between the central processing unit and remote terminals.
As the technology evolved new systems were devised to allow communication over longer distances
(for terminals) or with higher speed (for interconnection of local devices) that were necessary for the
mainframe computer model. Using these technologies it was possible to exchange data (such as files)
between remote computers. However, the point to point communication model was limited, as it did
not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems; a physical link was necessary.
The technology was also deemed as inherently unsafe for strategic and military use, because there were
no alternative paths for the communication in case of an enemy attack.
As a response, several research programs started to explore and articulate principles of communications
between physically separate systems, leading to the development of the packet switching model of
digital networking. These research efforts included those of the laboratories of Vinton G. Cerf at
Stanford University, Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock
at MIT and at UCLA. The research led to the development of several packet-switched networking
solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET, Telenet, and the X.25 protocols.
Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including unix-to-unix
copy (UUCP) and FidoNet. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by
limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a
protocol for internetworking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-
framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet Protocol Suite, the
concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of
internetworking began to form into the idea of a global network that would be called the Internet, based
on standardized protocols officially implemented in 1982. Adoption and interconnection occurred
quickly across the advanced telecommunication networks of the western world, and then began to
penetrate into the rest of the world as it became the de-facto international standard for the global
network. However, the disparity of growth between advanced nations and the third-world countries led
to a digital divide that is still a concern today.
Following commercialization and introduction of privately run Internet service providers in the 1980s,
and the Internet's expansion for popular use in the 1990s, the Internet has had a drastic impact on
culture and commerce. This includes the rise of near instant communication by electronic mail (e-mail),
text based discussion forums, and the World Wide Web. Investor speculation in new markets provided
by these innovations would also lead to the inflation and subsequent collapse of the Dot-com bubble.
But despite this, the Internet continues to grow, driven by commerce, greater amounts of online
information and knowledge and social networking known as Web 2.0.

Ememrgence of the World Wide Web

Between 1984 and 1988 CERN began installation and operation of TCP/IP to interconnect its major
internal computer systems, workstations, PCs and an accelerator control system. CERN continued to
operate a limited self-developed system CERNET internally and several incompatible (typically
proprietary) network protocols externally. There was considerable resistance in Europe towards more
widespread use of TCP/IP and the CERN TCP/IP intranets remained isolated from the Internet until
1989.
In 1988 Daniel Karrenberg, from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, visited Ben
Segal, CERN's TCP/IP Coordinator, looking for advice about the transition of the European side of the
UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran over X.25 links) over to TCP/IP. In 1987, Ben Segal had
met with Len Bosack from the then still small company Cisco about purchasing some TCP/IP routers
for CERN, and was able to give Karrenberg advice and forward him on to Cisco for the appropriate
hardware. This expanded the European portion of the Internet across the existing UUCP networks, and
in 1989 CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections.[24] This coincided with the creation of
Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), initially a group of IP network administrators who met regularly to carry
out co-ordination work together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative in
Amsterdam.
At the same time as the rise of internetworking in Europe, ad hoc networking to ARPA and in-between
Australian universities formed, based on various technologies such as X.25 and UUCPNet. These were
limited in their connection to the global networks, due to the cost of making individual international
UUCP dial-up or X.25 connections. In 1989, Australian universities joined the push towards using IP
protocols to unify their networking infrastructures. AARNet was formed in 1989 by the Australian
Vice-Chancellors' Committee and provided a dedicated IP based network for Australia.
The Internet began to penetrate Asia in the late 1980s. Japan, which had built the UUCP-based network
JUNET in 1984, connected to NSFNet in 1989. It hosted the annual meeting of the Internet Society,
INET'92, in Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand gained a global Internet
connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET in 1992.[25]
 Uses of internet
Since the 1990s, the Internet's governance and organization has been of global importance to
commerce. The organizations which hold control of certain technical aspects of the Internet are both
the successors of the old ARPANET oversight and the current decision-makers in the day-to-day
technical aspects of the network. While formally recognized as the administrators of the network, their
roles and their decisions are subject to international scrutiny and objections which limit them. These
objections have led to the ICANN removing themselves from relationships with first the University of
Southern California in 2000,[38] and finally in September 2009, gaining autonomy from the US
government by the ending of its longstanding agreements, although some contractual obligations with
the Department of Commerce continue until at least 2011.[39][40][41] The history of the Internet will
now be played out in many ways as a consequence of the ICANN organization.
In the role of forming standard associated with the Internet, the IETF continues to serve as the ad-hoc
standards group. They continue to issue Request for Comments numbered sequentially from RFC 1
under the ARPANET project, for example, and the IETF precursor was the GADS Task Force which
was a group of US government-funded researchers in the 1980s. Many of the group's recent
developments have been of global necessity, such as the i18n working groups who develop things like
internationalized domain names. The Internet Society has helped to fund the IETF, providing limited
oversight.

E-mail and Usenet

Main articles: e-mail, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, and Usenet
E-mail is often called the killer application of the Internet. However, it actually predates the Internet
and was a crucial tool in creating it. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing
mainframe computer to communicate. Although the history is unclear, among the first systems to have
such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.[42]
The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one
report[43] indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after ARPANET's
creation. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail address
format, using the @ sign to separate user names from host names.[44]
A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over
alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be
passed this way between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet, as well as
to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP. See the history of SMTP protocol.
In addition, UUCP allowed the publication of text files that could be read by many others. The News
software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott in 1979 was used to distribute news and bulletin
board-like messages. This quickly grew into discussion groups, known as newsgroups, on a wide range
of topics. On ARPANET and NSFNet similar discussion groups would form via mailing lists,
discussing both technical issues and more culturally focused topics (such as science fiction, discussed
on the sflovers mailing list).
During the early years of the Internet, e-mail and similar mechanisms were also fundamental to allow
people to access resources that were not available due to the absence of online connectivity. UUCP was
often used to distribute files using the 'alt.binary' groups. Also, FTP e-mail gateways allowed people
that lived outside the US and Europe to download files using ftp commands written inside e-email
messages. The file was encoded, broken in pieces and sent by e-mail; the receiver had to reassemble
and decode it later, and it was the only way for people living overseas to download items such as the
earlier Linux versions using the slow dial-up connections available at the time. After the popularization
of the Web and the HTTP protocol such tools were slowly abandoned.

From gopher to the WWW

Main articles: History of the World Wide Web and World Wide Web
As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the increasing need to be
able to find and organize files and information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive
list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in
being able to accommodate all the existing data types and in being able to grow without bottlenecks.
One of the most promising user interface paradigms during this period was hypertext. The technology
had been inspired by Vannevar Bush's "Memex"and developed through Ted Nelson's research on
Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's research on NLS. Many small self-contained hypertext
systems had been created before, such as Apple Computer's HyperCard. Gopher became the first
commonly-used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of
hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way.

This NeXT Computer was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web
server.
In 1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee invented a network-based implementation of the
hypertext concept. By releasing his invention to public use, he ensured the technology would become
widespread.[47] For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the
Millennium technology prize in 2004. One early popular web browser, modeled after HyperCard, was
ViolaWWW.
A potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic web
browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc
Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications
Initiative, a funding program initiated by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of
1991 also known as the Gore Bill.[50] Indeed, Mosaic's graphical interface soon became more popular
than Gopher, which at the time was primarily text-based, and the WWW became the preferred interface
for accessing the Internet. (Gore's reference to his role in "creating the Internet", however, was
ridiculed in his presidential election campaign. See the full article Al Gore and information
technology).
Mosaic was eventually superseded in 1994 by Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which replaced
Mosaic as the world's most popular browser. While it held this title for some time, eventually
competition from Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely displaced it.
Another important event held on January 11, 1994, was The Superhighway Summit at UCLA's Royce
Hall. This was the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and
academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialogue about the Information
Superhighway and its implications."
24 Hours in Cyberspace, "the largest one-day online event" (February 8, 1996) up to that date, took
place on the then-active website, cyber24.com. It was headed by photographer Rick Smolan. A
photographic exhibition was unveiled at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American
History on January 23, 1997, featuring 70 photos from the project.

Search engines
Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet.
The first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 by
WAIS and Gopher. All three of those systems predated the invention of the World Wide Web but all
continued to index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared. There
are still Gopher servers as of 2006, although there are a great many more web servers.
As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow
people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before
WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in
1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s,
both Web directories and Web search engines were popular—Yahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista
(founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to
give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998), which had developed new
approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-
thoughts to search engines.
Database size, which had been a significant marketing feature through the early 2000s, was similarly
displaced by emphasis on relevancy ranking, the methods by which search engines attempt to sort the
best results first. Relevancy ranking first became a major issue circa 1996, when it became apparent
that it was impractical to review full lists of results. Consequently, algorithms for relevancy ranking
have continuously improved. Google's PageRank method for ordering the results has received the most
press, but all major search engines continually refine their ranking methodologies with a view toward
improving the ordering of results. As of 2006, search engine rankings are more important than ever, so
much so that an industry has developed ("search engine optimizers", or "SEO") to help web-developers
improve their search ranking, and an entire body of case law has developed around matters that affect
search engine rankings, such as use of trademarks in metatags.
The sale of search rankings by some search engines has also created controversy among librarians and
consumer advocates.[56] As of June 3, 2009, Microsoft launched its own search engine. Bing [1]
became immediately popular with the masses searching the internet. It has multiple sites belonging to
separate countries e.g. the United States version is different to the Australian version. In the US, Bing
ranked 17th among all websites out of over 450,000 websites, up from 5120 the week before the
official launch when the website was merely a placeholder. Within the Search Engines category, Bing
ranked 4th out of the search engines tracked by Hitwise and Bing Image Search ranked 15th for the
week ending June 6, 2009.
Dot-com bubble
Suddenly the low price of reaching millions worldwide, and the possibility of selling to or hearing from
those people at the same moment when they were reached, promised to overturn established business
dogma in advertising, mail-order sales, customer relationship management, and many more areas. The
web was a new killer app—it could bring together unrelated buyers and sellers in seamless and low-
cost ways. Visionaries around the world developed new business models, and ran to their nearest
venture capitalist. While some of the new entrepreneurs had experience in business in economics, the
majority were simply people with ideas, and didn't manage the capital influx prudently. Additionally,
many dot-com business plans were predicated on the assumption that by using the Internet, they would
bypass the distribution channels of existing businesses and therefore not have to compete with them;
when the established businesses with strong existing brands developed their own Internet presence,
these hopes were shattered, and the newcomers were left attempting to break into markets dominated
by larger, more established businesses. Many did not have the ability to do so.
The dot-com bubble burst on March 10, 2000, when the technology heavy NASDAQ Composite index
peaked at 5,048.62[57] (intra-day peak 5,132.52), more than double its value just a year before. By
2001, the bubble's deflation was running full speed. A majority of the dot-coms had ceased trading,
after having burnt through their venture capital and IPO capital, often without ever making a profit.

Online population forecast

A study conducted by JupiterResearch anticipates that a 38 percent increase in the number of people
with online access will mean that, by 2011, 22 percent of the Earth's population will surf the Internet
regularly. The report says 1.1 billion people have regular Web access. For the study, JupiterResearch
defined online users as people who regularly access the Internet from dedicated Internet-access devices,
which exclude cellular telephones.

Mobile phones and the Internet

The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, launched in
Finland in 1996. The viability of Internet services access on mobile phones was limited until prices
came down from that model and network providers started to develop systems and services
conveniently accessible on phones. NTT DoCoMo in Japan launched the first mobile Internet service,
i-Mode, in 1999 and this is considered the birth of the mobile phone Internet services. In 2001 the
mobile phone email system by Research in Motion for their Blackberry product was launched in
America. To make efficient use of the small screen and tiny keypad and one-handed operation typical
of mobile phones, a specific document and networking model was created for mobile devices, the
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). Most mobile device Internet services operate using WAP. The
growth of mobile phone services was initially a primarily Asian phenomenon with Japan, South Korea
and Taiwan all soon finding the majority of their Internet users accessing resources by phone rather
than by PC.[citation needed] Developing countries followed, with India, South Africa, Kenya,
Philippines and Pakistan all reporting that the majority of their domestic users accessed the Internet
from a mobile phone rather than a PC. The European and North American use of the Internet was
influenced by a large installed base of personal computers, and the growth of mobile phone Internet
access was more gradual, but had reached national penetration levels of 20–30% in most Western
countries.[citation needed] The cross-over occurred in 2008, when more Internet access devices were
mobile phones than personal computers. In many parts of the developing world, the ratio is as much as
10 mobile phone users to one PC user.
 Web Browser
A web browser or Internet browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing
information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks
present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources.
Although browsers are primarily intended to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to
access information provided by Web servers in private networks or files in file systems. Some browsers
can be also used to save information resources to file systems.

The history of the Web browser dates back in to the late 1980s, when a variety of technologies laid the
foundation for the first Web browser, WorldWideWeb, by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That browser
brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies.
Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart developed the concept of hypertext long before Berners-Lee and
CERN. It became the core of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee does acknowledge Engelbart's
contribution.
The introduction of the NCSA Mosaic Web browser in 1993 – one of the first graphical Web browsers
– led to an explosion in Web use. Marc Andreessen, the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, soon
started his own company, named Netscape, and released the Mosaic-influenced Netscape Navigator in
1994, which quickly became the world's most popular browser, accounting for 90% of all Web use at
its peak (see usage share of web browsers).
Microsoft responded with its browser Internet Explorer in 1995 (also heavily influenced by Mosaic),
initiating the industry's first browser war. By bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft was
able to leverage its dominance in the operating system market to take over the Web browser market;
Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% by 2002.Internet Explorer has 60% browser usage
share as of April 2010 according to Net Applications.
Opera first appeared in 1996; although it has never achieved widespread use, having 2% browser
usage share as of April 2010,[4] it has a substantial share of the fast-growing mobile phone Web
browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on several other
embedded systems, including Nintendo's Wii video game console.
In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a
competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into
Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly
after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7.4% of browser use.
[3] As of April 2010, Firefox has a 25% usage share.
Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; as of October 2009, it has a dominant share of
Apple-based Web browsing, accounting for just under 5% of the entire browser market as of April
2010.[4] Its rendering engine, called WebKit, is also running in the standard browsers of several mobile
phone platforms, including the iPhone OS, Google Android, Nokia S60 and Palm WebOS.
The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Google's WebKit-based Chrome, first released
in September 2008. As of April 2010, it has a 7% usage share
Function
The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This process
begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), for example http://en.wikipedia.org/,
into the browser. The prefix of the URI determines how the URI will be interpreted. The most
commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as
https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web
browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example,
mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application and news: URIs are passed to
the user's default newsgroup reader.
In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will
display it. HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an
interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that
can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often
have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an
unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts
the user to save the file to disk.
Interactivity in a web page can also be supplied by Javascript, which usually does not require a plugin.
Javascript can be used along with other technologies to allow "live" interaction with the web page's
server via AJAX.
Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the
URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by
the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.

Features
Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones
support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols.
Browsers which include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay
Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".
All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either
in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include
pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.
Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can
quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all
major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Mozilla Firefox, web feeds are
formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in
the feed. In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of
the feed.
Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide
additional features.
User interface
Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:
• Back and forward buttons to go back to the previous resource and forward again.
• A refresh or reload button to reload the current resource.
• A stop button to cancel loading the resource. In some browsers, the stop button is merged with
the reload button.
• A home button to return to the user's home page
• An address bar to input the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the desired resource and
display it.
• A search bar to input terms into a search engine
• A status bar to display progress in loading the resource and also the URI of links when the
cursor hovers over them, and page zooming capability.
Major browsers also possess incremental find features to search within a web page.
 Internet explorer
The first Internet Explorer was derived from Spyglass Mosaic. The original Mosaic came from NCSA,
but since NCSA was a public entity it relied on Spyglass as its commercial licensing partner. Spyglass
in turn delivered two versions of the Mosaic browser to Microsoft, one wholly based on the NCSA
source code, and another engineered from scratch but conceptually modeled on the NCSA browser.
Internet Explorer was initially built using the Spyglass, not the NCSA source code[1] The license to
Microsoft provided Spyglass (and thus NCSA) with a quarterly fee plus a percentage of Microsoft's
revenues for the software.
The browser was then modified and released as Internet Explorer. Microsoft originally released Internet
Explorer 1.0 in August 1995 in two packages: at retail in Microsoft Plus! add-on for Windows 95 and
via the simultaneous OEM release of Windows 95. Version 1.5 was released several months later for
Windows NT, with support for basic table rendering, an important early web standard. Version 2.0 was
released for both Windows 95 and Windows NT in November 1995, featuring support for SSL,
cookies, VRML, and Internet newsgroups. Version 2.0 was also released for the Macintosh and
Windows 3.1 in April 1996. Version 2 was also included in Microsoft's Internet Starter Kit for
Windows 95 in early 1996, which retailed for 19.99 USD and included how-to book and 30 days of
internet accesses on MSN among other features.

Internet Explorer 3.0 was released free of charge in August 1996 by bundling it with Windows 95,
another OEM release. Microsoft thus made no direct revenues on IE and was liable to pay Spyglass
only the minimum quarterly fee. In 1997, Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit, in
response to which Microsoft settled for US $8 million.[4] Version 3 included Internet Mail and News
1.0 and the Windows Address Book. It also brought the browser much closer to the bar that had been
set by Netscape, including the support of Netscape's plugins technology (NPAPI), ActiveX, frames, and
a reverse-engineered version of JavaScript named JScript. Later, Microsoft NetMeeting and Windows
Media Player were integrated into the product and thus helper applications became not as necessary as
they once were. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were also introduced with version 3 of Internet Explorer.

Version 4 released in September 1997, was shipped with Windows 95 OSR (OEM Service Release) 2.5,
and the latest beta version of Windows 98 and was modified to integrate more closely with Microsoft
Windows. It included an option to enable "Active Desktop" which displayed World Wide Web content
on the desktop itself and was updated automatically as the content changed. The user could select other
pages for use as Active Desktops as well. "Active Channel" technology was also introduced to
automatically obtain information updates from websites. The technology was based on an XML
standard known as Channel Definition Format (CDF), which predated the currently used web
syndication formats like RSS. This version was designed to work on Windows 95, Windows 98, and
Windows NT, and could be downloaded from the Internet, free of charge. It supported Dynamic HTML
(DHTML). Outlook Express 4.0 also came integrated into the browser and replaced the aging
Microsoft Internet Mail & News product that was released with previous versions. Version 5 came out
in March 1999, following Microsoft's release of Internet Explorer 5.0 Beta versions in late 1998 . Bi-
directional text, ruby text and direct XML/XSLT support were included in this release, along with
enhanced support for CSS Level 1 and 2. The actual release of Internet Explorer 5 happened in three
stages. Firstly, a Developer Preview was released in June 1998 (5.0B1), and then a Public Preview was
released in November 1998 (5.0B2). Then in March 1999 the final release was released (5.0). In
September it was released with Windows 98. Version 5.0 was the last one to be released for Windows
3.1x or Windows NT 3.x. Internet Explorer 5.5 was later released for Windows Me in July 2000, and
included many bug fixes and security patches. Version 5.5 was the last to have Compatibility Mode,
which allowed Internet Explorer 4[5] to be run side by side with the 5.x.[With IE6, there was a quirks
mode that could be triggered to make it behave like IE5.5 version 6 was released with Windows XP in
August 27, 2001. It mainly focused on privacy and security features, as they had become customer
priorities. Microsoft implemented tools that support P3P, a technology under development by the W3C.

In a May 7, 2003 Microsoft online chat, Brian Countryman, Internet Explorer Program Manager,
declared that on Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer would cease to be distributed separately from
the operating system (IE 6 being the last standalone version);[12] it would, however, be continued as a
part of the evolution of the operating system, with updates coming bundled in operating system
upgrades. Thus, Internet Explorer and Windows itself would be kept more in sync.
New feature work did continue in 2003 during the development of Windows Vista; a preview release
was released at the Professional Developers Conference in October 2003 which contained an updated
Internet Explorer with a version number of 6.05. New features noted by reviewers included a
Download Manager, pop-up blocker, add-on manager and a tool to clear browsing history.[13] With the
exception of the download manager, which was eventually discarded, these features all appeared in
builds of Internet Explorer included with preview builds of Windows XP Service Pack 2 a few months
later.
Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was released in August 2004 after a number of delays, also
contained a number of security-related fixes, new restrictions on code execution, and user interface
elements that aimed to better protect the user from malware. One notable user interface element that
was introduced was the "information bar". Tony Schriner, a developer on the Internet Explorer team,
explained that the information bar was introduced to reduce the possibility that the user might mis-click
and allow the installation of software they did not intend, as well as to simply reduce the number of
pop-ups displayed to the user. Most reviews of this release focused on the addition of the pop-up
blocker, as it had been seen as a major omission at a time when pop-up ads had become a major source
of irritation for web users.
On December 19, 2005, Microsoft announced that it would no longer support Internet Explorer for the
Macintosh, and recommended using other Macintosh browsers such as Safari.
[From 2006 to 2009 Internet Explorer market share slowly declined, and the policy change (announced
in 2003) of only releasing new versions with new versions of the Windows operating system was
reversed with plans for IE7. Five years after the 2001 release of IE 6, in 2006, beta versions of Version
7.0 were released, and version 7 was released that October (the same month as Firefox 2.0). Internet
Explorer was renamed Windows Internet Explorer, as part of Microsoft's rebranding of component
names that are included with Windows. It was available as part of Windows Vista, and as a separate
download via Microsoft Update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003
Service Pack 1.[17] Internet Explorer 7 can also be downloaded directly from Microsoft's website.[18]
Large amounts of the underlying architecture, including the rendering engine and security framework,
have been completely overhauled. Partly as a result of security enhancements, the browser is a stand-
alone application, rather than integrated with the Windows shell, and is no longer capable of acting as a
file browser. The first security advisory was posted only one day after the day of release,[19] but it
turned out to be a security problem in Outlook Express, not in Internet Explorer 7.[20] The first
vulnerability exclusive to Internet Explorer 7 was posted after 6 days.[21] Since 2009 Version 8.0 was
released, with the first public beta release having been released on March 5, 2008. IE8 offered better
support for web standards than previous versions, with plans for improved support for RSS, CSS, and
Ajax[22][23], as well as full compliance for Cascading Style Sheets 2.1. It is also the first version to
successfully pass the Acid2 test. In addition, Internet Explorer 8 includes new features such as
WebSlices and an improved phishing filter.