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tech-historian

If you want some IE nostalgia, here's a visual history of IE starting in 1995 (v1.0):

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/internet-explorer

Factoid: There were versions of IE for both Mac and Solaris.

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IE5 for Mac was very great! The first version to implement tabs if I am not mistaken.

I always thought tabs were an Opera invention, or maybe one of those IE shells like Maxthon or Neoplanet? IE5:mac was a fantastic browser though and was widely regarded as having the best CSS1 conformance of its time, as well as some cool features like an eBay auction tracker sidebar that seem quaint today but were very useful to me at the time: https://alistapart.com/article/ie5mac/

On the flip side, the only time I can remember hearing an entire crowd boo Stebe Jovs was when he announced that IE 4.5 would ship as the default browser in Mac OS 8: https://youtu.be/WxOp5mBY9IY?t=142

IE5 for Mac was quite good. It handled transparent PNGs correctly around a decade before its Windows counterpart and was just generally more pleasant to develop for.

I always wondered why Tasman never got backported to Windows to act as a next-gen replacement for Trident.

Firefox (or the Mozilla browser that became Firefox) gave us our modern idea of tabbed browsing. If I remember correctly, it was initially an experimental feature buried in the settings, but it quickly became a popular mainstream feature that Safari and IE adopted.

Opera had an earlier version of tabbed browsing, but it was tacked on to their existing Windows MDI interface.

In the 90s, MS Visual Studio 6 had a 3rd-party plug-in that would add tabs to their existing MDI interface.

Borland's Delphi and C++ Builder may have been the first apps to provide a true tab-based document handling in the early-mid 90s.

Factoid addendum: there was also IE for HP-UX

Yes!

And here's a 1999 Wayback Machine archive of the IE for Unix site on microsoft.com:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991128115223/http://www.microso...

"Internet Explorer 5 for UNIX offers the most complete support of Internet standards and technologies, including XML and DHTML"

Wow, I didn't know the term Intellisense is that old. Thought that was a Jetbrains thing.

Please forgive my pedantry, but the suffix `-oid` means `-like`, i.e. not a fact. I should start calling minor-facts "factlets" lol https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Diminutive+suffix

In UK English usage I'd say it means a "minor fact". Compare planetoid, meteoroid, for other examples of -oid being used specifically to indicate a diminutive or minor form of something.

You can possibly blame Steve Wright, Radio 2 talk show host/DJ for popularising the term with that meaning in the UK.

> A factoid is either a false statement presented as a fact, or a true but brief or trivial item of news or information.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

Keep scrolling! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid#Versus_factlet

The proverbial ship had sailed on this one. Factlet would be a conspicuous alternative.

Favor the meaning people actually use and let the history of factoid be an interesting factoid.

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