I'm a bit nostalgic but I think IE3 was huge. I was still in high school but I remember staying up all night so that I could download it the moment it was avail

I'm a bit nostalgic but I think IE3 was huge. I was still in high school but I remember staying up all night so that I could download it the moment it was available. Up until IE3 was released, Netscape Navigator was virtually unchallenged. It was only a few months, but Netscape Navigator's big new feature was Javascript. IE3 came out with JScript support only a few months later and nullified much of Netscape Navigator's advantage there. It matched Navigator's support for plugins and HTML frames, which was important because a lot of sites were taking advantage of HTML frames at the time. If I remember correctly, it even loaded pages a lot faster than Netscape Navigator. Netmeeting and Windows Media Player also eventually came bundled with IE3 which provided a tiny glimpse of what a future web could offer, even if our paltry 14.4k and 28.8k modems couldn't deliver at the time. Also, ActiveX gets a bad wrap but mostly because of the lack of forethought that went into security and the fact that ActiveX was Windows-only. The underlying goal being able to add functionality to the browser using a "real" programming language was just ahead of its time. For what it's worth, ActiveX was a response to Java applets which attempted a similar goal but ultimately failed because of a lack of performance (i.e., people hate Java applets because they're slow). I don't remember ActiveX suffering from the same performance issues.