IE 4 Was the version of
browser that got
Microsoft in trouble. It started the notion of an "
Active Desktop".
IE4 was the first browser that could be represented as a
COM Object (and could thus be used on your desktop window, in any sort of application, etc, as long as you called an instantiation of it). IE 4.0 was packaged with Windows 98 (for whatever reason), and thus gained a large dominence, due to it's tight integration with Windows. (Something that
Netscape could do, if they really wanted to).
The Good Thing behing
IE 4 was that you could choose to have it pre-loaded. What happened there was that IE would take only a few
seconds to load, because it's major components were already in
memory. It just had to draw the
window, instantiate the IE
COM object in itself, and then boom, it was ready to use in a
second or so. Netscape could have done the same
thing, if they really tried. They would just have to
implement the IE COM interfaces, and all would be
good. As an object, IE is truely an OS service available to all applications.
Look at the IE 4 (codenamed Trident),
executable: It should be like only a few K. You think that it's because they did a LOT of
compression on it? No, not at all:
iexplore.exe is really just a
stub exe for the COM calls.
At the time,
IE 4 was a huge competitor to
NS 4.x. IE 3 (which shipped with earlier versions of 98, and later versions of 95), was pitiful, and looked more like it's
Mosaic roots. Go to Help, about IE, and you will see that it mentions the
NCSA at
UIUC for the work they did on
Mosiac, and that IE is based on it.
IE 4.0 introduced
widespread dynamic HTML, which Netscape did not truely support at the time. Altough IE's object model does in fact differ from
NS's, a few simple
hacks, and code that you write can be run in either. IE 4.0 also allowed
code writers to write items with
VBScript (and JScript), using updated engines provided from
MS.
All in all, IE4 was a killer browser, especially in
active desktop mode. It was far surpassed by
IE 5.0, however, it did reign for several years. The concept of Internet Channels died somewhere in the marketing, and that never really made it to fruition (the technology saw some sucess in newer versions of the
Pocket PC, with more mobility features)
IE 4.0 (and subsequently
IE 5.0) also marked the first difference in engine for the
Mac version from the PC version. You can tell this difference, as the Mac version has a few different object model quirks not present in the
Windows exe.