Resistance is Futile

Microsoft continues to integrate Internet Explorer into its other product lines, including its Office and BackOffice family of products.  Microsoft Outlook 98 – like it’s cousin Outlook Express – uses Internet Explorer’s HTML parsing and rendering engine.  Therefore, if you install Outlook 98 onto a computer without version 4 or higher, Internet Explorer gets installed, as well.  Office 2000 extends this practice by including and using Internet Explorer 5 technologies.  This foundational approach makes sense.  Why reinvent the wheel (or in this case why re-write the code) if it already exists?  On the other hand, this also means that security issues that affect Internet Explorer more often than not also affect products which use its codebase.  This only adds to the already mounting challenges of maintaining a safe and secure operating environment.

 Internet Explorer 4 continues to be a popular browser.  Nearly two years after its release it is still the most popular version in use today.  It is feature-rich, user-friendly and highly configurable.  On March 18, 1999, Microsoft capitalized on version 4’s success with the release of Internet Explorer 5.  Before it was even released, over 2 million copies of the beta version were downloaded.  Version 5 isn’t too much of a departure from version 4.  It does add a some very nice features, but like its predecessors, it, too has security vulnerabilities.  In fact, it’s a pretty safe assumption that all future versions of Internet Explorer – as with any web browser – will be affected by one or more security issues.

So there you have it.  The history thus far of Internet Explorer.