6 ms·

Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.

by ng12 10y ago

DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
That just isn't true (and I worked on Chakra while at Microsoft). I think you're thinking of J++ (Microsoft's version of Java, not JavaScript). Now JScript (Microsoft's version of ECMAScript) does have some minor differences in the dialect, but that was only because the ECMA standard was at a standstill back then. Mozilla had no problems extending their implementation to match either.
- fdupoo 10y ago
  Why does ms have it's own version of all these languages?
  - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    They're just extensions in the same way that GCC has its own extensions for C and C++. J++ was created to counter shortcomings in the design of early Java language versions that Sun was not keen to re-integrate back into the Java language. That itself isn't bad (as other JVM-compatible languages exist, like Scala and Groovy) except that J++ then needed Microsoft's own Java VM with its own platform-specific runtime extensions - and that's what the Sun lawsuit was about. I agree it was badly handled by Microsoft, and in the end Microsoft just ditched Java and reinvented J++ as C# and the .NET Framework - which is where we are today. As for JScript: before JavaScript was standardised there were extensions being added by everyone (Netscape had their own, as did Microsoft). I think Microsoft extended JScript in a very conservative way: the main change is the addition of the `new ActiveXObject` wrapper for COM objects which made AJAX possible, and also made JScript useful for automating Windows (and server-side JavaScript with ASP/JScript predates Node.js by 13 years!) - to my knowledge JScript itself didn't add any syntactical changes and provided you didn't use ActiveXObject your code would run without issue in other JavaScript engines. Note that this isn't the same thing as DOM extensions in Internet Explorer, of which there were many. I think it's worth pointing out that when IE6 was released in 2001 it was by-far, the most W3C-compliant web-browser in existence: for CSS2.1, Netscape's then compliance level was abyssal, and even beating out Opera at the time too.
kbenson 10y ago
I think that's another case of assuming bad intentions. Once Microsoft had a slightly differently behaving version of JavaScript that was in use by hundreds of millions of people, including many enterprise environments with internally developed and bought solutions that required Internet Explorer and it's version of JS and ActiveX to function who more often than not were also large Microsoft customers, the idea of breaking all the existing functionality just to be compliant with a standard becomes a non-starter. Were there people in the company that liked this situation? Probably. That doesn't mean it had to come about through malice. It's easy to see how a similar situation with Chrome or Safari could occur if they had greater than 90% of market share. The only reason we are where we are today is because there's much less of a single dominant player in the browser space, so using standards are incentivized. P.S. Yes, MS got their market share through shipping the browser with the OS. While it may have led to a monopoly in the browser space (or close to a monopoly, depending on how you want to look at it), I think it's hard to say any one of us wouldn't have made the same decision to bundle them were we in the position of selling the OS and also putting out a browser.
- mamon 10y ago
  For one, every Linux distribution comes with either Firefox or Chromium preinstalled. Is that monopolistic behaviour? Should EU require Linux developer to provide "Choose your web browser" wizard popping up on every new Linux install, similar way it is on Windows?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Microsoft's behavior was illegal not because of bundling alone, but because of bundling a product (IE) in a different market with a product which was a monopoly (Windows) in what was held to be (based on additional Al evidence beyond mere bundling) an attempt to leverage a monopoly in one market to monopolize a different market. So, no, it's not like any Linux distribution bundling a third-party browser like Firefox or Chromium, since none of those distributions have a monopoly to leverage to start with.
    - 10y ago

Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.

by ng12 10y ago

Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.

DaiPlusPlus 10y ago

That just isn't true (and I worked on Chakra while at Microsoft). I think you're thinking of J++ (Microsoft's version of Java, not JavaScript). Now JScript (Microsoft's version of ECMAScript) does have some minor differences in the dialect, but that was only because the ECMA standard was at a standstill back then. Mozilla had no problems extending their implementation to match either.

fdupoo 10y ago
Why does ms have it's own version of all these languages?
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  They're just extensions in the same way that GCC has its own extensions for C and C++. J++ was created to counter shortcomings in the design of early Java language versions that Sun was not keen to re-integrate back into the Java language. That itself isn't bad (as other JVM-compatible languages exist, like Scala and Groovy) except that J++ then needed Microsoft's own Java VM with its own platform-specific runtime extensions - and that's what the Sun lawsuit was about. I agree it was badly handled by Microsoft, and in the end Microsoft just ditched Java and reinvented J++ as C# and the .NET Framework - which is where we are today. As for JScript: before JavaScript was standardised there were extensions being added by everyone (Netscape had their own, as did Microsoft). I think Microsoft extended JScript in a very conservative way: the main change is the addition of the `new ActiveXObject` wrapper for COM objects which made AJAX possible, and also made JScript useful for automating Windows (and server-side JavaScript with ASP/JScript predates Node.js by 13 years!) - to my knowledge JScript itself didn't add any syntactical changes and provided you didn't use ActiveXObject your code would run without issue in other JavaScript engines. Note that this isn't the same thing as DOM extensions in Internet Explorer, of which there were many. I think it's worth pointing out that when IE6 was released in 2001 it was by-far, the most W3C-compliant web-browser in existence: for CSS2.1, Netscape's then compliance level was abyssal, and even beating out Opera at the time too.

kbenson 10y ago

I think that's another case of assuming bad intentions. Once Microsoft had a slightly differently behaving version of JavaScript that was in use by hundreds of millions of people, including many enterprise environments with internally developed and bought solutions that required Internet Explorer and it's version of JS and ActiveX to function who more often than not were also large Microsoft customers, the idea of breaking all the existing functionality just to be compliant with a standard becomes a non-starter. Were there people in the company that liked this situation? Probably. That doesn't mean it had to come about through malice. It's easy to see how a similar situation with Chrome or Safari could occur if they had greater than 90% of market share. The only reason we are where we are today is because there's much less of a single dominant player in the browser space, so using standards are incentivized. P.S. Yes, MS got their market share through shipping the browser with the OS. While it may have led to a monopoly in the browser space (or close to a monopoly, depending on how you want to look at it), I think it's hard to say any one of us wouldn't have made the same decision to bundle them were we in the position of selling the OS and also putting out a browser.

mamon 10y ago
For one, every Linux distribution comes with either Firefox or Chromium preinstalled. Is that monopolistic behaviour? Should EU require Linux developer to provide "Choose your web browser" wizard popping up on every new Linux install, similar way it is on Windows?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Microsoft's behavior was illegal not because of bundling alone, but because of bundling a product (IE) in a different market with a product which was a monopoly (Windows) in what was held to be (based on additional Al evidence beyond mere bundling) an attempt to leverage a monopoly in one market to monopolize a different market. So, no, it's not like any Linux distribution bundling a third-party browser like Firefox or Chromium, since none of those distributions have a monopoly to leverage to start with.
  - 10y ago