November, 1995 - Vermeer FrontPage 1.0
(Version 1.0)
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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!
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June, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage 1.1
(Version 1.1)
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Mini Review: FrontPage 1.1 was Microsoft's first release for the FrontPage family of products. It thankfully supported tables, and it supported frames, even though Microsoft's version of Internet Explorer at the time did not support frames.
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October, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage 97
(Version 2)
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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.)
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January, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 1.0 for Macintosh
(Version 2)
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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 FrontPage 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.
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September, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0
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Mini Review: This was a version of FrontPage that shipped with Internet Explorer 4.0; it was essentially an editor-only version of FrontPage; all of the web management features were removed. Microsoft did not make another version of FrontPage Express.
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December, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 98
(Version 3)
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Mini Review: This was the last version of FrontPage that featured a separate editor and explorer, but it was arguably a very popular version and it signaled the beginning of FrontPage's short-lived reign as one of the most-used HTML authoring tools.
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March, 1999 - Microsoft FrontPage 2000
(Version 4)
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Mini Review: This was the first version of FrontPage that integrated the editor and web management features, which was a huge milestone. This was also an extremely popular version, and it continued FrontPage's short-lived reign as one of the most-used HTML authoring tools.
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June, 2001 - Microsoft FrontPage 2002
(Version 5 [Office 10])
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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, novice-friendly authoring that alienated web developers.
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October, 2003 - Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003
(Version 6 [ Office 11])
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Mini Review: On a sad note, this was the last of the FrontPage family of products - Microsoft dropped FrontPage in favor of 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. (Note: Several years later, Microsoft cancelled the Expression Web family, thereby ending this line of products from Microsoft.)
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