3 ms·

IE started with Mosaic, no?

• jerrygoyal 4y ago
  a lot of work with great UX as well
• kryptiskt 4y ago
  It started with Spyglass, who were Mosaic licensees, but apparently wrote their own code. The story of Spyglass is told here https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html "Management made the decision to transition our business completely and pursue the market for web browsers. Tim Krauskopf, the founder and head of development, asked me to write a web browser. I started work on Spyglass Mosaic on April 5th, 1994. The demo for our first prospective customer was already on the calendar in May. I ended up as the Project Lead for the browser team. Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but we never used any of the code. We wrote our browser implementations completely from scratch, on Windows, MacOS, and Unix. We were not the first Mosaic licensee, but we were the last. Prior to us, a company called Spry took the Mosaic code and tried to sell "Internet in a Box". People still seem to get Spry and Spyglass confused because of the similar names." "Internet Explorer 2.0 was basically Spyglass Mosaic with not too many changes. IE 3.0 was a major upgrade, but still largely based on our code. IE 4.0 was closer to a rewrite, but our code was still lingering around -- we could tell by the presence of certain esoteric bugs that were specific to our layout engine. Licensing our browser was a huge win for Spyglass. And it was a huge loss. We got a loud wake-up call when we tried to schedule our second conference for our OEM browser customers. Our customers told us they weren't coming because Microsoft was beating them up. The message became clear: We sold our browser technology to 120 companies, but one of them slaughtered the other 119."