15 Years Separate Mosaic and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

On March 5 2008, at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft permitted the first public tasting of Internet Explorer 8. Designed as the successor of Internet Explorer 7, IE8 debuted into beta at the end of the past month with a build aimed at web content developers and designers. Microsoft is currently building the second beta of IE8, and making headway towards the final version of the browser. According to the Redmond company, a deadline for the delivery of IE8 is by no means set in stone, but the early stages of the Internet Explorer browser are easy to trace. The fact of the matter is that Internet Explorer goes back before version 1.0 in Windows 95, all the way to Mosaic.

"On April 22, 1993 the initial version of the Mosaic web browser was released. Mosaic was the first web browser that had broad adoption as well as the first web browser that supported images embedded together with the marked up text," revealed Nicholas Allen, Microsoft Program Manager. Today, April 22, 2008, is the 15th anniversary since the launch of Mosaic.

"Mosaic had been developed over a few months by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and initially released for UNIX platforms. Releases for Windows and Macintosh happened by the end of the year. In the following year Mosaic was commercialized by a company called Spyglass, and the people and technology involved variously ended up starting competing browser projects called Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer," Allen added.

The Redmond company licensed Spyglass Mosaic, on which it built Internet Explorer version 1.0 for Windows 95. At that time, the browser was packaged with the Microsoft Plus offering for Windows 95. 13 years later, Microsoft is developing the eighth version of IE, and owns the lion's share of the browser market, despite consistent inroads made into its territory by Mozilla's open source Firefox.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 1 is available for download here.

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