3 ms·

I remember it very differently. It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk

by yoz 11y ago

I remember it very differently. It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk of MS suddenly devoted itself to getting Really Good At The Internet, and within a few months produced the best web browser on the market (IE 3, the first mainstream browser to implement CSS) and the best JVM (far faster than Sun's own at the time). IE continued to be the best browser until Firefox came out. (Yes, you can argue for Seamonkey, but it took years for it to be usably stable.) Every version of IE up to and including 6.0 was more standards-compliant than the equivalent Netscape release. I was doing all kinds of web development on both Linux and Windows NT back then. I never got used to Windows for web hosting, but I far preferred developing against MS SQL Server than any other DB, due to its features and documentation.

ploxiln 11y ago
I'll admit I didn't really get started until 2000, and I'd also push the end-range to around 2009. And I did use the Mozilla Suite back then (pre Seamonkey naming). The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of years by then...) They used their own formats, which were not publicly documented or even really designed. If you had to use any single Microsoft thing, you practically had to use it all. Samba and later OpenOffice changed the situation but were really a lot of reverse-engineering and bug-for-bug-compatibility work, and of course Microsoft kept moving the goalposts with new versions and new bugs. The resentment comes from the lock-in. You had to pay a lot of money and deal with licenses (or pirate and deal with cracks) just to experiment. You had to deal with the surprisingly flaky file sharing and dhcp client etc. You had to deal with the fact that there wasn't a good terminal or shell, that the compiler was not trivial to download and install and invoke from a script, etc. If you have the freedom to choose the "convenience" of the Microsoft user-oriented products or not, it's not such a big deal that Microsoft everything sucked for networking related development. But if the lock-in gets you somehow, you really resent it. EDIT: and I almost forgot! microsoft calling linux a "cancer", funding lawsuits over linux kernel code, trying to make it harder for linux to support ACPI based systems - more underhanded lock-in to their crap
- dump100 11y ago
  Uptill IE 5, it was was there for Mac, and Linux was never mainstream till the time, for it to be evil to not support it.
- grayrest 11y ago
  > pre Seamonkey naming Maybe you predate me but when I jumped on the Mozilla bandwagon at Gecko 0.7.1 the internal name for the suite was Seamonkey. It was only after Firefox that the group maintaining the suite started using the internal name as the public branding.
- rkeene2 11y ago
  > The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This is not true, there was IE for several UNIX operating systems.

by yoz 11y ago

ploxiln 11y ago

I'll admit I didn't really get started until 2000, and I'd also push the end-range to around 2009. And I did use the Mozilla Suite back then (pre Seamonkey naming). The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of years by then...) They used their own formats, which were not publicly documented or even really designed. If you had to use any single Microsoft thing, you practically had to use it all. Samba and later OpenOffice changed the situation but were really a lot of reverse-engineering and bug-for-bug-compatibility work, and of course Microsoft kept moving the goalposts with new versions and new bugs. The resentment comes from the lock-in. You had to pay a lot of money and deal with licenses (or pirate and deal with cracks) just to experiment. You had to deal with the surprisingly flaky file sharing and dhcp client etc. You had to deal with the fact that there wasn't a good terminal or shell, that the compiler was not trivial to download and install and invoke from a script, etc. If you have the freedom to choose the "convenience" of the Microsoft user-oriented products or not, it's not such a big deal that Microsoft everything sucked for networking related development. But if the lock-in gets you somehow, you really resent it. EDIT: and I almost forgot! microsoft calling linux a "cancer", funding lawsuits over linux kernel code, trying to make it harder for linux to support ACPI based systems - more underhanded lock-in to their crap

dump100 11y ago
Uptill IE 5, it was was there for Mac, and Linux was never mainstream till the time, for it to be evil to not support it.
grayrest 11y ago
> pre Seamonkey naming Maybe you predate me but when I jumped on the Mozilla bandwagon at Gecko 0.7.1 the internal name for the suite was Seamonkey. It was only after Firefox that the group maintaining the suite started using the internal name as the public branding.
rkeene2 11y ago
> The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This is not true, there was IE for several UNIX operating systems.