5 ms·
Of course, the old IE box model is what everyone else overrides the default to match nowadays. Maybe they were on to something!
by harlanlewis 10y ago
Of course, the old IE box model is what everyone else overrides the default to match nowadays. Maybe they were on to something!
- PeCaN 10y agoA lot of old IE things were pretty nice¹. The only real problem was the abysmal support for actual standards, along with a myriad of weird bugs. ¹ See: XMLHttpRequest, innerHTML, box model, CSS filters, CSS behaviors², VML, etc ² Well, behavior: was probably a terrible idea, but it did allow hacking oldIE to support an awful lot of CSS3.
- ethbro 10y agoIncidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?
- Analemma_ 10y ago> was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management? "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Seriously, what a dumb question. The answer is "neither": at the time of its release, IE6 was great. It was way better than its only real competition, Netscape 6, which hadn't seen updates in years. Yes, it had bugs, but all software does. If Microsoft had just given it regular updates, it would've been fine. The issue with IE6 was not that it was bad ab initio, it was that Microsoft abandoned development when they felt they had no competition, so it slipped farther and farther behind web standards.
- sillysaurus3 10y agoPlease don't call questions dumb. It discourages thoughtful conversation. There's a guideline somewhat related to this: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
- slededit 10y agoUnfair questions should be called out. Perhaps "dumb" isn't the most appropriate term, but I do think its fair to challenge the premise of the question. To prevent this leaves a whole rhetorical category immune from challenge.
- kefka 10y agoNo, there are very dumb question/statements. And it is indeed correct to call them out. Why is it dumb? Because it packs in an assertion that is implied true, without asking. An appropriate answer is "Mu". Or 'unask the question'.
- elbear 10y agoYou can use a word or words that is not offensive to express the same point. Like how you explained the use of the word.
- kefka 10y agoStupidity is offensive. Your point?
- elbear 10y agoOffence is taken not given. I can understand you can feel offended or frustrated when someone behaves in a way you call stupid. However, you could give them the benefit of a doubt and assume they made a mistake or they didn't know better.
- ethbro 10y agoNot sure why the snark. I think it's a fair question. Since you take issue with the phrasing, I'll enlarge it to "development & management of IE up to 2006." They did give it regular updates throughout that period; those updates just never targeted web standards. I'm honestly wondering whether that was through explicit desire (it's a valid business strategy), willful misdirection (not prioritizing "the web"), or management incompetence (inability to deliver desired standards compliance). I've never read / heard anything definitive to explain which of those happened.
- gsnedders 10y agoThere was never any team tasked with working on Trident after IE6 shipped till IE7 work restarted; as far as I'm aware, it was always the case that the IE shell was developed relatively separately to Trident, so those who did do all the work (esp. for later XP SPs) probably scarcely had any knowledge of the Trident codebase to really start trying to fix bugs.
- tacos 10y agoIE was the centerpoint of a lot of turf wars between Jim Allchin and Brad Silverberg. Lots of tech was mishandled as nobody could agree what was personal, what was business and what was consumer. A browser had to reach all three, Microsoft tried to apply its existing technologies that talked to all three audiences in a haphazard fashion, and even the government decided it had to stick its thumb into the pie.
- spinlock 10y agoAs an observer I always assumed it was purposeful. MS was _not_ a company that conformed to other people's standards. After all, they're just now putting a POSIX compliant shell in their OS. They were playing a monopoly game not trying to offer an alternative.
- matwood 10y agoI don't think it was purposeful. When IE6 was released, it won. It was so much better than the alternatives that MS simply didn't have to do anything, so they didn't. The antitrust thing was also in full swing, so bundling/unbundling was in question. The web version of Outlook was one of the, if not the first AJAX application. IIRC, IE added XMLHttpRequest to support web Outlook.
- manigandham 10y agoThere's a question on Quora with some great answers from the original team members that shows what happened with IE: https://www.quora.com/How-did-Internet-Explorer-up-until-version-9-get-to-be-so-bad-relative-to-Chrome-Safari-and-Firefox https://www.quora.com/How-did-Internet-Explorer-up-until-ver...