FrontPage Versions and Timeline

November, 1995 - Vermeer FrontPage 1.0
(Version 1.0)



Mini Review: Believe it or not, FrontPage 1.0 ran on Windows 3.x and Windows NT 3.5.1. This required installing a Win32 subsystem for Windows 3.x, which was fraught with installation errors.

This version was very limited, and it didn't even support tables. The program also had a nasty little issue - if this version saw some HTML that it didn't like, it just deleted it!
Surprised

June, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage 1.1
(Version 1.1)

Mini Review: FrontPage 1.1 was Microsoft's first release for the FrontPage family of products. It supported tables, thankfully, and it supported frames, even though Microsoft's Internet Explorer still didn't. Embarassed

October, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage 97
(Version 2)

Mini Review: FrontPage 97 dropped the need for the _vti_shm folder and started inserting FrontPage bot code into the HTML. (This was an important update.)

January, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 1.0 for Macintosh
(Version  2)

Mini Review: Microsoft FrontPage 1.0 for Macintosh was basically a port of FrontPage 97 for Apple computers. This didn't do all that well in the Apple market because it faced a deeply entrenched customer base of Apple users that were already using Adobe's products, and subsequently it was the only version of FrontPage that Microsoft created for the Macintosh.

September, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0

Mini Review: This was a version of FrontPage that shipped with Internet Explorer 4.0; it was essentially and editor-only version of FrontPage - all of the web management features were removed. Microsoft did not make another version of FrontPage Express.

December, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 98
(Version 3)

Mini Review: This was the last version of FrontPage that as a separate editor and explorer, but arguably a very popular version and the beginning of FrontPage's short-lived reign as one of the most-used HTML authoring tools.

March, 1999 - Microsoft FrontPage 2000
(Version 4)

Mini Review: This was the first version of FrontPage integrated the editor and web management features, which was a huge milestone. This was also an extremely popular version, and continued FrontPage's short-lived reign as one of the most-used HTML authoring tools.

June, 2001 - Microsoft FrontPage 2002
(Version 5 [≈10])

Mini Review: This version marked the beginning of FrontPage's demise as one of the most-used HTML authoring tools. Tools like Dreamweaver began to seriously eat away at FrontPage's customer base as Dreamweaver and other tools became more powerful and developer-friendly while FrontPage suffered from an identity crisis by sticking to simpler authoring and alienated web developers.

October, 2003 - Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003
(Version 6 [≈11])

Mini Review: On a sad note, this is the last of the FrontPage family of products - Microsoft is now only making Expression Web. FrontPage 2003 is still my all-time-favorite version of FrontPage. There's a great balance of powerful functionality and ease-of-use.

Posted: May 30 2006, 15:35 by Bob | Comments (0) RSS comment feed |
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