Internet Explorer 2 added support for tables and cookies - both features that Netscape had already added. It also added support for newsgroups. Visual-wise, it remained unchanged.cwathen wrote:What was the radical improvement with IE2? It looked exactly the same and appeared to have much the same functionality. Indeed, I've often wondered quite what *is* different between the two versions.Internet Explorer 2 was a radical improvement over IE1, while IE3 introduced us to the layout we all know, which would stick until IE7 was released twelve years later.
However Internet Explorer 3 was the first major browser to support CSS, plus it now supported framesets. Plus it was now the first browser Microsoft gave away for free and the first one that was bundled with Windows as part of Windows 95 OSR2.
Active Desktop is all well and good but its very dependent on a working Internet Explorer. Its been dropped altogether in Windows Vista, strangely enough. Its replacement would seem to be that sidebar that's installed by default.I agree that IE4 was a bit ahead of it's time, most people simply didn't have connections good enough to exploit the kind of content which it supported. Which is probably why it's still useable today.When IE4 came out in 1997 the active desktop feature was ahead of its time, it worked best with the-then broadband equivalent of the time. IE5, 5.5 and 6 upped web support standards and not a lot else. Internet Explorer then went on hiatus for six years.