Internet Explorer
discontinued web browser by Microsoft
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a retired series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were used in the Windows line of operating systems. While IE has been discontinued on most Windows editions, it remains supported on certain editions of Windows, such as Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC. Starting in 1995, it was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year. Later versions were available as free downloads or in-service packs and included in the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows. Microsoft spent over US$100 million per year on Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people involved in the project by 1999. In 2015, Microsoft Edge was released to succeed Internet Explorer 11 as Microsoft's primary web browser. New feature development for Internet Explorer was discontinued the following year, and support for the browser officially ended on June 15, 2022, for Windows 10 Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) editions.
Although Internet Explorer has fallen out of general use after retirement, it was once the most widely used web browser, attaining a peak of 95% usage share by 2003. This came after Microsoft used bundling to win the first browser war against Netscape, which was the dominant browser in the 1990s. Its usage share declined with the launches of Firefox (2004) and Google Chrome (2008) and with the growing popularity of mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS that do not support Internet Explorer.
The public source identifies “Internet Explorer” as discontinued web browser by Microsoft. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Internet, Explorer and discontinued.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1575. VIAF identifies the subject as 177507367. The Library of Congress control number is n96018990. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 1999, 2015 and 2022.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Internet Explorer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.