4 ms·

I was born in the mid 90's and didn't start programming until college, so I missed out on all the 'evil Microsoft' fun and am probably missing something - but I

I was born in the mid 90's and didn't start programming until college, so I missed out on all the 'evil Microsoft' fun and am probably missing something - but I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it. But for example - Mac's and i-Devices's all come bundled with Safari, why doesn't Apple also have this bad rep?

Majromax 7y ago
> I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it. The root issue was that Microsoft preinstalled the (free) Internet Explorer at a time when other web browsers were commercial. Netscape Navigator in particular was free for personal use, but Netscape wanted a fee for business use. That was the original sin of the monopoly: Microsoft used its dominance in the operating system market to take over the browser market at a stroke. They compounded on this with "embrace, extend, and extinguish" practices, where they would introduce and maintain IE-only web extensions to the detriment of existing and upcoming standards. You still see the modern legacy of this with Internet Explorer 'compatibility mode' hacks, since it turned out that Microsoft itself became stuck in its own morass.
- yazan94 7y ago
  Yeah as an enterprise web developer, I definitely have met my share of frustrating requirements to support ancient versions of IE. But that's definitely an interesting choice that I don't think I fault Microsoft for making - if you own the platform, why not extend your control into other popular apps running on the platform (word processors, databases, browsers, etc.). Pretty logical step to make imo, though their underhanded tactics were probably also to blame for the US Supreme Court monopoly case.
maxsilver 7y ago
As someone who was around for the "evil Microsoft" era, I am also frustrated by this. There's no reason Apple should be allowed to force Safari exclusively on iOS. We had an entire anti-trust decision about this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... It should be bog-standard-illegal, and Apple deserves an equally bad rep for this.
neilv 7y ago
I think what you're saying here is analogous to "Al Capone? That was before my time, but wasn't he the guy who fibbed a bit on his tax return? Don't a lot of people do that?"
yardie 7y ago
There is that. There is a lot of other things that put them in the bad monopoly category. * Using secret API calls to make sure their software ran faster than the competition. If you had a database server or spreadsheet application you could had a myriad of choices in the early 90s but the fastest, stablest one was always from Microsoft. * OEMs could not change the default browser. Even when given money to install an alternative the default OOB browser was required to be IE. Early Macs had no browser at all and at <5% of the PC universe they had no monopoly status. Before Safari Apple used MSIE as the first browser. Firefox and Webkit weren't ported over until ~2005. And long before the Apple App store the only application on iOS1 and 2 was the browser. It didn't have apps as we know it today. It would be hard to prevent them from including the browser since it shipped with the device day 1.
- yazan94 7y ago
  I see, I knew a bit about the browser wars and the some of the shady stuff there, but I didn't realize they sabotaged stability of competitor programs. Thanks for explaining it

Majromax 7y ago

> I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it. The root issue was that Microsoft preinstalled the (free) Internet Explorer at a time when other web browsers were commercial. Netscape Navigator in particular was free for personal use, but Netscape wanted a fee for business use. That was the original sin of the monopoly: Microsoft used its dominance in the operating system market to take over the browser market at a stroke. They compounded on this with "embrace, extend, and extinguish" practices, where they would introduce and maintain IE-only web extensions to the detriment of existing and upcoming standards. You still see the modern legacy of this with Internet Explorer 'compatibility mode' hacks, since it turned out that Microsoft itself became stuck in its own morass.

yazan94 7y ago
Yeah as an enterprise web developer, I definitely have met my share of frustrating requirements to support ancient versions of IE. But that's definitely an interesting choice that I don't think I fault Microsoft for making - if you own the platform, why not extend your control into other popular apps running on the platform (word processors, databases, browsers, etc.). Pretty logical step to make imo, though their underhanded tactics were probably also to blame for the US Supreme Court monopoly case.

maxsilver 7y ago

As someone who was around for the "evil Microsoft" era, I am also frustrated by this. There's no reason Apple should be allowed to force Safari exclusively on iOS. We had an entire anti-trust decision about this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... It should be bog-standard-illegal, and Apple deserves an equally bad rep for this.

neilv 7y ago

I think what you're saying here is analogous to "Al Capone? That was before my time, but wasn't he the guy who fibbed a bit on his tax return? Don't a lot of people do that?"

yardie 7y ago

There is that. There is a lot of other things that put them in the bad monopoly category. * Using secret API calls to make sure their software ran faster than the competition. If you had a database server or spreadsheet application you could had a myriad of choices in the early 90s but the fastest, stablest one was always from Microsoft. * OEMs could not change the default browser. Even when given money to install an alternative the default OOB browser was required to be IE. Early Macs had no browser at all and at <5% of the PC universe they had no monopoly status. Before Safari Apple used MSIE as the first browser. Firefox and Webkit weren't ported over until ~2005. And long before the Apple App store the only application on iOS1 and 2 was the browser. It didn't have apps as we know it today. It would be hard to prevent them from including the browser since it shipped with the device day 1.

yazan94 7y ago
I see, I knew a bit about the browser wars and the some of the shady stuff there, but I didn't realize they sabotaged stability of competitor programs. Thanks for explaining it