14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer 8, Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3.0 are the latest versions of web browsers from Microsoft, Opera and Mozilla, designed for the Windows operating system, finalized, in development, or even cross-platform. As of May 2008, Internet Explorer and Firefox were dividing the vast majority of the audience of the browser market between them with IE taking the lion's share, while Opera has yet to pass the 1% milestone according to data from Net Applications. The current race between IE8, Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3.0 on Microsoft's proprietary operating system comes 15 years after the first browser for Windows was released.
"The first web browser for Windows was released 15 years ago by Thomas Bruce of the Cornell Legal Information Institute. June 8th marked the 15th anniversary of the 0.1 release, with a succession of followup releases soon after. Cello 0.2 was released on June 14th, 0.3 on June 16th, 0.4 on June 18th, 0.5 on June 24th, and 0.6 on June 30th. Fortunately, there were no more days left in June or else the web browser fad may have caught on. Cello quickly went into disuse and ceased being updated less than a year later," revealed Nicholas Allen, Program Manager at Microsoft.
More specifically, on June 8 1993, the first Beta Cello 0.1was released for Windows 3.1. Cello was designed as a basic HTTP/HTML browser, whose features included configurable colors and fonts, the Gopher client (associated with the homonym protocol), FTP accessibility, SLIP/PPP support, Graphics and PostScript capabilities, and even local area networks configuration options. Now, make no mistake about it. Cello is not the first web browser, it's only the first for Windows.
15 years later, Opera has just made available the final version of Opera 9.5. Mozilla released Release Candidate 3 for Firefox 3.0 this week, and is wrapping up the successor of Firefox 2.0 for launch on June 17. And Microsoft is hard at work on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 which will be dropped in August. For now, only IE8 Beta 1 is up for grabs.