4 ms·

I think you forget that in it's time IE was massively innovative. It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX.

by 21 8y ago

btilly 8y ago
They did it by ironic accident. Bill Gates wanted their browser to be the best, but also wanted it not good enough to replace desktop apps. However the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. The Outlook team was told to make a web version. They got the IE team to add XMLHttpRequest for their use, everyone implemented what they needed to, then went home and forgot about it. Then Google recognized what the feature allowed, and used it in gmail and maps. The rest of the internet said, "Wait, what, you can DO that?" Studied it, popularized the technique as AJAX and the rest is history.
- sdegutis 8y ago
  This origin story of XMLHttpRequest being an afterthought explains why the class name has inconsistent capitalization which interestingly enough I never noticed until now.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    Many style guides for CamelCase recommend not writing acronyms in all caps past a certain length. It's possible that Microsoft's style guide at the time set three characters as the limit.
  - btilly 8y ago
    You can find verification of it in the various references provided in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12067185/why-is-it-called-xmlhttprequest https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12067185/why-is-it-calle.... In particular https://web.archive.org/web/20170424220609/http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20170424220609/http://www.alexho... is a snapshot of an explanation from the person who actually created the feature.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  Gmail was not even close the the first Ajax based email not by MS. Oddpost which later became Yahoo mail (Yahoo bought them to upgrade their mail) preceded Gmail by a few years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost
  - btilly 8y ago
    That may be, but the original articles that I saw making AJAX the new hotness referred to gmail and Google maps. Furthermore I remember gmail's keyboard shortcuts being a shock to a lot of people. Me included.
SippinLean 8y ago
And IE4 added webfonts, still doesn't mean that IE6 & 7 were the least standards-compliant browsers of their time, in contrast to modern day Chrome.
magicalist 8y ago
> It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX ...in 1999. Then IE6 was released in 2001, and then Microsoft scrapped the Internet Explorer team and didn't release another browser for 5 years, leaving us with 90%+ of users stuck on IE6 bugs and non-standard features. That's what the GP is talking about.
- saurik 8y ago
  ... which occurred during/after the anti-trust case against them (which led to Bill Gates stepping down as CEO). If we wanted to be honest with our commentary, you would have to realize that to compare apples to apples, you have to compare Chrome to IE 3-5, not IE 6.
tinus_hn 8y ago
XMLHttpRequest was nice but hardly necessary, you could do same thing with frames. Just another little trick so Outlook Web Access would suck on the standards browsers. Oh, and of course it required ActiveX for no reason but to limit it to the Windows platform.

I think you forget that in it's time IE was massively innovative. It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX.

by 21 8y ago

I think you forget that in it's time IE was massively innovative. It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX.

They did it by ironic accident. Bill Gates wanted their browser to be the best, but also wanted it not good enough to replace desktop apps. However the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. The Outlook team was told to make a web version. They got the IE team to add XMLHttpRequest for their use, everyone implemented what they needed to, then went home and forgot about it. Then Google recognized what the feature allowed, and used it in gmail and maps. The rest of the internet said, "Wait, what, you can DO that?" Studied it, popularized the technique as AJAX and the rest is history.

sdegutis 8y ago
This origin story of XMLHttpRequest being an afterthought explains why the class name has inconsistent capitalization which interestingly enough I never noticed until now.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Many style guides for CamelCase recommend not writing acronyms in all caps past a certain length. It's possible that Microsoft's style guide at the time set three characters as the limit.
- btilly 8y ago
  You can find verification of it in the various references provided in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12067185/why-is-it-called-xmlhttprequest https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12067185/why-is-it-calle.... In particular https://web.archive.org/web/20170424220609/http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20170424220609/http://www.alexho... is a snapshot of an explanation from the person who actually created the feature.
tokyodude 8y ago
Gmail was not even close the the first Ajax based email not by MS. Oddpost which later became Yahoo mail (Yahoo bought them to upgrade their mail) preceded Gmail by a few years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost
- btilly 8y ago
  That may be, but the original articles that I saw making AJAX the new hotness referred to gmail and Google maps. Furthermore I remember gmail's keyboard shortcuts being a shock to a lot of people. Me included.

SippinLean 8y ago

And IE4 added webfonts, still doesn't mean that IE6 & 7 were the least standards-compliant browsers of their time, in contrast to modern day Chrome.

magicalist 8y ago

> It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX ...in 1999. Then IE6 was released in 2001, and then Microsoft scrapped the Internet Explorer team and didn't release another browser for 5 years, leaving us with 90%+ of users stuck on IE6 bugs and non-standard features. That's what the GP is talking about.

saurik 8y ago
... which occurred during/after the anti-trust case against them (which led to Bill Gates stepping down as CEO). If we wanted to be honest with our commentary, you would have to realize that to compare apples to apples, you have to compare Chrome to IE 3-5, not IE 6.

tinus_hn 8y ago

XMLHttpRequest was nice but hardly necessary, you could do same thing with frames. Just another little trick so Outlook Web Access would suck on the standards browsers. Oh, and of course it required ActiveX for no reason but to limit it to the Windows platform.