30 years ago, AT&T gave Internet Explorer the default advantage
The telecommunications giant needed a browser. Netscape Navigator dominated the market, but Microsoft was keen to make up lost ground.A promotion and distribution agreement was announced on July 25, 1996, with a further announcement in October. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Under the deal, AT&T WorldNet software was included in versions of Windows 95 supplied to PC manufacturers, with Internet Explorer 3 designated as the service's default browser.
- ▪The telecommunications giant needed a browser.
- ▪Netscape Navigator dominated the market, but Microsoft was keen to make up lost ground.A promotion and distribution agreement was announced on July 25, 1996, with a further announcement in October.
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Under the deal, AT&T WorldNet software was included in versions of Windows 95 supplied to PC manufacturers, with Internet Explorer 3 designat
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/07/30/30-years-ago-att-gave-internet-explorer-the-default-advantage/5279373 |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:15:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T09:18:32.317Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T09:18:32.317Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | I0D85UkKqiRI · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); OFFBEAT 30 years ago, AT&T gave Internet Explorer the default advantage Netscape still ruled the browser market, but Microsoft had Windows 95, WorldNet, and a very valuable foothold Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published thu 30 Jul 2026 // 10:15 UTC It is 30 years since AT&T handed Microsoft a valuable foothold in the browser wars by making Internet Explorer 3 the default for its WorldNet service.Windows 95 was barely a year old when AT&T set out to challenge…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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