Technology · 2

Which web browser, released by Microsoft in August 1995 and bundled with Windows 95, rapidly eroded Netscape Navigator's dominant market share during the 'browser wars'?

Answer

Internet Explorer

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995 as part of the Windows 95 Plus! pack, then bundled it free with Windows 95 itself. By aggressively tying the browser to the world's most popular operating system, Microsoft grew IE's market share from near-zero to over 90% by 2002, effectively ending Netscape's dominance in what became known as the first browser war.

💡 Did you know?

Microsoft licensed the original code for Internet Explorer 1.0 from Spyglass, a company that had commercialised the NCSA Mosaic browser — meaning IE's earliest DNA traced directly back to a university lab.

Other options people guess

  • Opera
  • Netscape Navigator
  • NCSA Mosaic

Topics

  • 1990s
  • internet-history
  • browser-wars
  • world-wide-web
  • microsoft

Know your technology trivia?

Play a free Technology quiz and see how many you get right — no signup needed to start.

More Technology facts

Technology

What simple symbol, introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, allowed users to jump between web pages with a single click?

Berners-Lee originally wanted to call hyperlinks 'doclinks' — the catchier name 'hyperlink' came from the broader computing community and stuck forever.

Technology

What search engine, launched in 1994 as a human-curated web directory, was one of the first places people turned to find websites in the early years of the public World Wide Web?

Yahoo! originally stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle' — a tongue-in-cheek acronym its Stanford student founders invented after the fact to fit a name they already loved.

Technology

Which web browser, released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, became the first widely popular graphical browser and helped bring the web to everyday users?

Mosaic was so influential that the U.S. Congress credited it with 'transforming the internet from a government tool into a global public network' in a 1994 resolution.

Technology

After finding the moth causing a fault in Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947, what did the technicians do with the insect to document the incident?

A moth trapped inside Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947 became the first recorded 'bug'—researchers taped the actual insect into their logbook as evidence.

Technology

What name was given to the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, completed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945?

ENIAC consumed roughly 150 kilowatts of power — a load so large that legend holds it dimmed the lights across West Philadelphia when switched on.

Technology

What name was given to the feared computer bug that many believed would cause widespread system failures when the calendar rolled over to the year 2000?

The U.S. government spent an estimated $100 billion preparing for Y2K — more than the Apollo program's inflation-adjusted total — and the clock struck midnight largely without incident.