Welcome (Back) to the Age of Windows/Web Browser Integration (Premium)

We all thought that Microsoft learned its lesson when it tried and failed to integrate Internet Explorer with Windows in the late 1990s. But what's old is new again: in Windows 11, the software giant has taken major steps to make its more recent web browser, Edge, central to the user experience whether users want it or not. And the parallels between then and now are starting to get more obvious.

I told this story in my Programming Windows series, which later morphed into my magnum opus book, Windows Everywhere. But it’s worth revisiting here because of how familiar Microsoft’s strategy of the late 1990s resembles what it’s doing today.

Entering 1995, Microsoft and Windows were riding high. Windows 3.1 was the most popular operating system in personal computing history and its successor, Windows 95, was set to trigger another and even bigger explosion in PC growth, cementing Microsoft’s dominance. On the side, the software giant was preparing for a more technically sophisticated and future-proof Windows version called NT, with vague plans for it to replace its MS-DOS-based forebearers as soon as possible. And when it came to apps, only native Windows apps mattered in the 1990s: Microsoft was consolidating all its disparate programming environments into a single IDE (integrated development environment) that would go on to be named Visual Studio, making it easier than ever for developers to target its lucrative software platforms.

But then the World Wide Web (WWW or web) happened, first with dial-up connectivity and then with broadband and the speeds needed to drive its own new growth market. While Microsoft was busy integrating an old-school online service called The Microsoft Network (MSN) into Windows 95, smaller and faster new competitors like Netscape were pioneering a new world of websites, apps, and services that it felt were the next wave, one that would replace Windows and native apps.

Microsoft was slow to realize the danger and potential of the web, but then-CEO Bill Gates turned things around very quickly, and by the time Windows 95 shipped, the company had completely pivoted to the web, with the aim of integrating web technologies into Windows and making Windows the best-possible Internet client. And at that moment in late 1995, there was nothing more key to this strategy than Microsoft creating its own web browser, called Internet Explorer (IE), giving it away for free, and integrating it ever more deeply into Windows.

IE started off in an incomplete state and its late arrival meant that it could not be included in the initial shipping version of Windows 95. But both quickly changed. IE 2.0 was bundled with Windows NT 4.0 in 1996, and it was released for Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 too. But it was Microsoft’s integration plans that would later get it in antitrust trouble in both the U.S. and Europe: future versions of IE would no longer be standalone applications. Instead, IE would become the basis for al...