History of Internet Explorer: Second stage
Version 4, released in October 1997, was shipped with Windows 98
and was modified to integrate more closely with Microsoft
Windows. It included an option to enable "Active Desktop" which
displayed World Wide Web content on the desktop itself and was
updated automatically as the content changed. The user could
select other pages for use as Active Desktops as well. "Active
Channel" technology was also introduced to automatically obtain
information updates from websites. The technology was based on
an XML standard known as Channel Definition Format (CDF), which
predated the currently used web syndication formats like RSS.
This version was designed to work on Windows 95, Windows 98, and
Windows NT, and could be downloaded from the Internet, free of
charge. It supported Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Outlook Express 4.0
also came integrated into the browser and replaced the aging
Microsoft Internet Mail & News product that was released with
previous versions.
In September 1998, Microsoft released version 5 of Internet
Explorer. Bi-directional text, ruby text and direct XML/XSL
support were included in this release, along with enhanced
support for CSS Level 1 and 2. The actual release of Internet
Explorer 5 happened in three stages. Firstly, a Developer
Preview was released in June 1998 (5.0B1), and then a Public
Preview was released in November 1998 (5.0B2). Then in March
1999 the final release was released (5.0). In September it was
released with Windows 98. Version 5.0 was the last one to be
released for Windows 3.1x or Windows NT 3.x. Internet Explorer
5.5 was later released for Windows Me in July 2000, and included
many bug fixes and security patches.
Version 6 was released with Windows XP in October 25, 2001. It
mainly focused on privacy and security features, as they had
become customer priorities. Microsoft implemented tools that
support P3P, a technology under development by the W3C.