5 ms·

Wasn't it Microsoft and Outloook OWA that started XHttpRequest?

by therealx 7y ago

rusk 7y ago
Yes but utterly failed to capitalise on it
- flomo 7y ago
  Lots of intranet stuff used it, or anywhere they could mandate IE.
  - rusk 7y ago
    Look, I was there. In 2003 post dot-com the web was still very static and very transactional. It had become uncool and was perceived as being quite stale. Microsoft had implemented this proprietary extension that was mimicked in other browsers but nobody was using it. Dynamic HTML as it was known back then wasn’t catching on precisely because there were so many incompatible variants. Google was the first large company for some years to start pursuing talent purely on technical merit, they put these in a room together and the opportunities were recognised. Up to that point XMLHttpRequest was an unknown proprietary browser extension. Google used it to inject dynamism into gmail in a way that was never evident in Outlook. This was the genesis of Web 2.0 and everybody started scrambling to use the browser as a platform again. The web was cool again. EDIT - despite what they may have become, and despite the many ways that the web has been “broken” since, we have so much to thank google for. EDIT - so hard to believe this all happened 15 years ago. It’s ancient history at this stage, but seems so recent to me.
    - rusk 7y ago
      EDIT - 2004 of course was when gmail was released, but I specifically remember 2003 as the time they were becoming recognised as a fiersome heavyweight. Just 4 years earlier they were a plucky startup with a search engine that actually gave pretty decent results.
    - flomo 7y ago
      I like this storyline, because it means myself and some other random webdev folks were a step ahead of Top Google Geniuses because we asked "is your intranet IE only? if so, we have some tricks." Or more likely, AJAX techniques were being widely used to the point where Mozilla had to violate their whole ethic about not supporting proprietary IE extensions and even named their shit after an unrelated COM object. Then Google showed the public what could be done, but the truth was a lot of us were already doing it.
      - rusk 7y ago
        Sorry man its just how I remember things ... I do remember there we’re talented guys doing things, and I did some DHTML myself but “webmaster” was a tough niche at the time. Apart from some novel technology demonstrations I honestly can’t remember any significantly popular dynamic websites before that time ... But yeah, Firefox had its big push around that time too so I guess that had a lot to so with thimgs as well ...
ganeshkrishnan 7y ago
That's correct. It was on IE 4 I think

Wasn't it Microsoft and Outloook OWA that started XHttpRequest?

rusk 7y ago

Yes but utterly failed to capitalise on it

flomo 7y ago
Lots of intranet stuff used it, or anywhere they could mandate IE.
- rusk 7y ago
  Look, I was there. In 2003 post dot-com the web was still very static and very transactional. It had become uncool and was perceived as being quite stale. Microsoft had implemented this proprietary extension that was mimicked in other browsers but nobody was using it. Dynamic HTML as it was known back then wasn’t catching on precisely because there were so many incompatible variants. Google was the first large company for some years to start pursuing talent purely on technical merit, they put these in a room together and the opportunities were recognised. Up to that point XMLHttpRequest was an unknown proprietary browser extension. Google used it to inject dynamism into gmail in a way that was never evident in Outlook. This was the genesis of Web 2.0 and everybody started scrambling to use the browser as a platform again. The web was cool again. EDIT - despite what they may have become, and despite the many ways that the web has been “broken” since, we have so much to thank google for. EDIT - so hard to believe this all happened 15 years ago. It’s ancient history at this stage, but seems so recent to me.
  - rusk 7y ago
    EDIT - 2004 of course was when gmail was released, but I specifically remember 2003 as the time they were becoming recognised as a fiersome heavyweight. Just 4 years earlier they were a plucky startup with a search engine that actually gave pretty decent results.
  - flomo 7y ago
    I like this storyline, because it means myself and some other random webdev folks were a step ahead of Top Google Geniuses because we asked "is your intranet IE only? if so, we have some tricks." Or more likely, AJAX techniques were being widely used to the point where Mozilla had to violate their whole ethic about not supporting proprietary IE extensions and even named their shit after an unrelated COM object. Then Google showed the public what could be done, but the truth was a lot of us were already doing it.
    - rusk 7y ago
      Sorry man its just how I remember things ... I do remember there we’re talented guys doing things, and I did some DHTML myself but “webmaster” was a tough niche at the time. Apart from some novel technology demonstrations I honestly can’t remember any significantly popular dynamic websites before that time ... But yeah, Firefox had its big push around that time too so I guess that had a lot to so with thimgs as well ...

ganeshkrishnan 7y ago

That's correct. It was on IE 4 I think