18 ms·

The Era of the Trident Engine

415 points by ttepasse 7y ago

dwb 7y ago
I remember using page transitions as a teenager to emulate PowerPoint in a programmable info-screen thing for the school library. Baby's first PHP. Lots of copy-and-paste cos I didn't really understand the fuss about writing functions. Good times, RIP.
- Keverw 7y ago
  Oh yeah, Powerpoint Jeopardy! I remembered we did that in high school science class once. Totally forgot about powerpoint being able to link buttons to different slides but in that case I do think it was a lot of copy and pasting.
sandworm101 7y ago
That introduction is why tech journalists shouldn't dabble in amateur history. I sounds like something from a 1960s highschool textbook: oversimplified and dripping in passive-aggressive politics.
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  Your comment is needlessly insulting and very patronizing without actually providing any substance or even a single point of contention.
teilo 7y ago
Every one of these "innovations" was invented by Microsoft alone, without any dialog or input with or input from the standards committees. Their intent was clear: to subvert web standards in any way they possibly could in order to force people to Windows. And in large part they succeeded. Treating them as advances that were, sadly, not adopted by the rest of the web takes a lot of chutzpah.
- gruez 7y ago
  Sounds like what chrome is doing now.
- Rexxar 7y ago
  That's was the standard way of doing things at the beginning of the web : Let browsers experiment things then standardize what's working. Every body was doing this. The problem with Microsoft was aggressive pricing and forced default installation, it was not the technical side of the browser.
  - teilo 7y ago
    This is not true. It was only Microsoft's innovations that were tied to a specific operating system. Other browsers were cross platform. Even Microsoft's short-lived IE for Mac was not really IE. ActiveX nearly destroyed the web, and as recently as a few years ago there were still enterprises digging themselves out of the proprietary mess they developed themselves into.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      It's unreasonable to blame ActiveX for this. NPAPI was not implicitly portable in some fashion, it was still just native code being embedded in the browser, with no particular guarantee of quality and no guarantee that a Win32 NPAPI plugin had Mac and Linux ports. The ActiveX API was also well-specified and debuggable in a way NPAPI was not, and it was possible to embed it in other runtime environments like Office documents and Visual Basic applications relatively easily, because COM was truly wonderful technology (even if using it was, at times, very painful). It's not a coincidence that Firefox made heavy use of COM for a long time (though they've rightly been removing it). Having used COM and ActiveX extensively, despite their flaws they were vastly superior technologies compared to NPAPI and they were a pleasure to work with. The security model was bad but again none of the competitor technologies were any better. I shipped large-scale native apps that successfully embedded ActiveX controls (like the flash player) and this was reasonable specifically because of how good the APIs were. Even after NPAPI and ActiveX made an exit, the web still was infected by swf files and unity games and what have you. Those things are all either dead now or on life support because it turns out browser vendors don't want to maintain them and they're not portable.
ksec 7y ago
>MHTML was proposed as an open standard to the IETF but somehow it never took off. I had always wished MHT replaced PDF. But due to the rivalry at the time Firefox refuse to support MHT ( even to this day ). Webkit has WebArchive which as far as I know isn't support outside of Apple's ecosystem. I dont actually buy the argument it was Vista that slows down IE development. IE 7 wasn't that much difference to IE 6. It shows Microsoft had very little incentive to improve the Web. I dont know how many actually hate them for not complying with ACID "Standards". I certainly dont. But at the time the Web has so many low hanging fruit a lot of people ( or just me ) were pissed Microsoft didn't even bother improving while holding the web standard hostage with its IE dominance. Along with the crap called Windows Vista. Luckily we got the first iPhone, 2 (?) years later. And the rest is history.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wbl 7y ago
  MHT does not do what PDF does. Web text rendering remains abyssal in comparison to what 1980's computer technology can achieve.
  - felixfbecker 7y ago
    But it would do a lot of the things people use PDF for much better.
FreakyT 7y ago
Really enjoyed the overview of all the ahead-of-their-time features introduced by IE! I feel like many people forget that, back when it completed against Netscape, IE really was the best browser on the market. The problem was that once they had “won” the browser war, Microsoft just completely abandoned development, allowing the product to languish and become the terrible abomination many of us remember having to write ridiculous workarounds to support.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  I would argue that in 2005 the best browser was Opera. A lot of things we now take for granted in browsers were pioneered by them. I was sad they cancelled development of their engine instead of open-sourcing it.
  - SkyMarshal 7y ago
    Opera was amazing back then. Ran rings around IE in features and was super fast. It’s definitely too bad they didn’t open source it and build a large community around it.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Opera was probably using licensed third-party code internally which they couldn't legally release as open source.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    I believe this comment is talking about a time prior to that, closer to 2000.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
      I was using Opera as my chief browser in 2002..2010 period, so 2005 was Opera's peak, around versions 8-9 and a race to pass ACID2 test. I finally switched away to chrome because Opera became unbearable on Ubuntu, it slowed down and a lot of graphics issues appeared.
    - 7y ago
aikah 7y ago
I never use EDGE on my computer because I found it to be slower than Firefox. But I still use IE11, ironically, because I like to develop quick HTA tools for enterprise in HTML and Typescript powered by excel documents or access database using COM instead of having to download Electron and what not, which I don't need since I'm only developing for Windows. it's unfortunate that everybody lost nearly 10 years because Microsoft stopped taking Webtechs seriously in order to focus on Silverlight and what not, which they later abandoned anyway. I need to find an alternative to HTA though that still support COM since eventually Windows will stop supporting HTA apps.
- uallo 7y ago
  > it's unfortunate that everybody lost nearly 10 years because Microsoft stopped taking Webtechs seriously Yes it is. It is also unfortunate that some people refuse to upgrade their browsers and engineers have to jump through hoops in order to still support them... ;)
Ericson2314 7y ago
Let's not celebrate embrace extend extinguish, but let's also not celebrate MS handing the keys to google so they can do the same with Chrome. Why help your competitor? They should have gone with Firefox. Around 2012 when all 3 major browsers had similar market share [1] is what we want: everyone can make try extension but no one can ram them down our throats. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
- jfoster 7y ago
  In adopting chromium they're not just helping their competitor, but their competitor is now also helping them. At the end of the day, the default option for most users would naturally be to stick to Edge, but they instead have been installing Chrome. Why? Because Chrome was better. Now Edge is like Chrome. There's much less of a reason for users to install Chrome as a result. Microsoft are likely to regain some marketshare with this approach. If Bing is good enough, that may also mean billions in revenue.
  - stOneskull 7y ago
    That's it, and everything syncs across easily. Installing Chrome is now pretty much redundant.
  - withinboredom 7y ago
    > If Bing is good enough I've actually noticed it is better in some kinds of searches, and worse in others. Thanks to Edge, it's my default and to be honest, I don't even realize it's not Google most days.
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    1. Google will still push people to Chrome. Users could well still switch because of that. 2. Mozilla is not a competitor but they would get just as much free work. (Or MS sponsors Firefox for the Bing plug, and they get that side benefit.)
- jknew 7y ago
  For others who weren't aware, "embrace, extend, extinguish" was an explicit strategy discussed internally at Microsoft for gaining control of the internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... Though I think there are real innovations discussed in the article, the portrayal of Microsoft being an altruistic actor trying to get others to adopt their tech is downright dishonest with what we know about their internal discussions of their motivations and strategy at the time. I found the article really interesting, but I could do without the rose colored glasses.
reaperducer 7y ago
I don't like IE. I never have. But this part rings true: "Internet Explorer already had many of the things that we came to reinvent later and that we now celebrate as innovations." It happens all the time in tech, and IE probably reinvented some things from Hypercard or whatever came before it.
cstross 7y ago
I was really disappointed that the OP wasn't talking about the UGM-133 Trident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II (Alas, I think they'll be around for a few decades more, unless someone is wicked enough to use them.)
- LeftHandPath 7y ago
  This is what I was thinking as well, until I saw the “.dev” in the URL.
- spsrich2 7y ago
  Yes he's not talking about Trident missiles.
- vardump 7y ago
  I thought about Trident VGA cards... thinking "they're still around!?".
- rudolfwinestock 7y ago
  I thought of the Trident missile, as well. Anyone who's either a member of the Baby Boom or Generation X will bear witness to the Cold War for most of the rest of this century.
- ribs 7y ago
  Ditto. As I understand it, that program largely put me and my sister through college...
  - cstross 7y ago
    So every cloud has a silver lining! (Even the fiery mushroom cloud surrounding the fireball burning your face off a few years later ...)
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  Thought the same - always think of this when I hear Trident - the nuclear Missile Harrods would sell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyJh3qKjSMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyJh3qKjSMk
amelius 7y ago
Why did Microsoft choose Chromium, and not Firefox?
- yedpodtrzitko 7y ago
  Current portability potential of the engine. The codebase of Firefox has some legacy burden in it plus Rust as a dependency for building.
  - ComputerGuru 7y ago
    The rust part is actually an improvement as it is not in addition to but instead of. Building any rust component together with all its dependencies is one step and fully modernized. That’s one of the benefits moving away from legacy components with competing build systems duct taped together. Additionally, pure rust dependencies (which is the ultimate goal of the effort) are all statically linked and different versions of the same library can be used multiple times without symbol remaining voodoo, etc solving all sorts of typical DLL hell issues associated with adopting a huge foreign component into a project.
    - notriddle 7y ago
      Yes, yes, I like the new libraries, too. The Quantum team is following the Boy Scout rule -- when they refactor code, they leave it better than they found it. But Microsoft needs to release New Edge today. And today, Gecko is not made from a bunch of reusable, standalone Rust libraries. It's built from a couple of good libraries, plus a lot of ugly, tangled legacy. Some day, Gecko might be the best choice for software that wants to embed web technologies, but that's not today.
      - ComputerGuru 7y ago
        I never commented the viability of Gecko for MSEdge; I merely rejected the notion that Rust was part of the reason why it wasn’t viable.
- Macha 7y ago
shdon 7y ago
Although I can see the advantages for Microsoft, I don't think it's a good thing that the browser engine landscape is going to get even more homogeneous. Firefox is now the only web browser of note that is not based on a WebKit/Blink/Chromium derivative. Sure, it's one fewer target to test against, but it saddens me to think that this is going to make it even more likely that web developers target Chrome and its ilk only and that the layout bugs in it are becoming the de-facto standard, just as happened with IE6 for ages. This is actually bad for Firefox even in the parts where it adheres to the standards when other browsers won't.
- akho 7y ago
  If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that — perhaps bundling Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction of the cost of continued Edge development. Trident was not much of a contender in 2010s. It’s formal death does not decrease diversity. Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less.
  - bayindirh 7y ago
    > If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that... With all the coupling with other Windows subsystems and some features just to enable a Windows-only PC ecosystem, I'm not sure that IE/Edge/Trident/EdgeHTML can be open sourced in a whim. > Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less. Internet explorer just became a OS vendor backed version of NeoPlanet browser. Just the same thing, in different shell.
    - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
      Former Internet Explorer SE here: it’s not the coupling with Windows that makes it impossible (MSHTML is actually really self-contained). The main reason Microsoft doesn’t open-source legacy code is because there a huge chunks of licensed third-party source code that cannot be publicly disclosed. While those portions could be stripped-out, it would be a mammoth task to go through the source code history and identify what belongs to who and stub it out if necessary (let alone replace it with first-party code). Whereas MS’ new projects (like .NET Core) were made open-source from the start and made in the open (Cathedral and the Bazaar) - so there’s no mean ol’ lawyers from LCA to stop people having fun.
leeoniya 7y ago
the webkit monoculture is saddening. just yesterday i ran into chrome's 2016 img/flex-basis bug which works properly in firefox but requires an extra wrapping div as a work-around in chrome. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560 what possible motivation is there to fix it when you're not competing with anyone? hopefully microsoft can help fix it now? also yesterday, i was writing some ui tests that use getBoundingClientRect() at different media query breakpoints. not only does chrome intermittently fail to deliver consistent results between runs (even with judicious timeouts), at different screen pixel densities its rounding errors are several pixels off and accumulate to bork all tests in a major way. on the other hand, firefox behaves deterministically across test runs and there's a single pixel (non-accumulating) error in one of several hundred tests. somehow, i made it through the dark ages of IE6 without permanent hair loss, but i dont have fond memories of those years in my career. now manifest v3 is starting to roll out in Chrome 80. once uBlock Origin stops working, i will use chrome even less (i try only to use it for its devtools currently)
- tuespetre 7y ago
  Chromium and WebKit are not synonymous
  - leeoniya 7y ago
    ok, it's Blink now. nuances aside, the fact that 75-80% of the landscape will be blink-based is unfortunate.
    - bagacrap 7y ago
      blink and webkit are diverging in not-insignificant ways. Is it really that important that various rendering engines have zero shared lineage?
- MR4D 7y ago
  Why does nobody say “the TCP/IP monoculture is maddening,” or “the HTML monoculture is maddening” ? Seriously, I need somebody to explain it to me because I don’t get it. Having one core base of code is not a bad thing to me. What am I missing here?
arexxbifs 7y ago
> One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Personally, I'd say it was mainly because we were tech geeks who, back then, actually believed in a web that should be accessible to as many different platforms as possible using as many different browsers as possible, not just Windows and IE users. In a sense, that notion prevailed: the web is ubiquitous, browser lock-in is considered a douche move and you can still access some really worthwhile sites even with rather simple means. In another sense, we all failed, lending our hands to help create the current privacy-invading, dark-patterned UX nightmare we're still trying to pass off as a reasonable way of making the world a better place. I never thought I'd lament the day Microsoft stopped making their own browser core. As a web developer, one less rendering engine to GAF about is nice. As a netizen, the Google dominance is going from unsettling to scary.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  Just because a common open source engine has been decided upon doesn’t mean there’s no competition or that no innovation can happen.
  - arexxbifs 7y ago
    No, it doesn't. But with Microsoft, Google and Amazon all relying on Chromium, there's going to be massive pull in that direction no matter what. Together, these three companies will now, basically, control the desktop OS market, the browser market and the cloud market. I'm not exactly giddy with excitement about that.
    - wayneftw 7y ago
      No, this is incorrect. It’s open source. It’s like saying that because Microsoft Amazon and Google all use Linux - that we’ll have no innovation.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
Theodores 7y ago
We missed out in using these features in part because we were too concerned with making pixel perfect copies of designs that had to look exactly the same in every browser because that is what our clients signed off on. This was in the days before responsive and all our time was spent fiddling with margins and padding to get things pixel perfect. There was no scope to take a step back and play with some of this Microsoft technology. Invariably the cast in stone designs were PDF drawings from Photoshop where the art was in second guessing what the designer was thinking of and where they stole their influences from. You could not implement a table in a cool way on MS IE and in a more boring way on the other browsers, knowledge was just not there or the space to experiment.
uncle_j 7y ago
This is a shame in some ways. Internet explorer was always very strict on how it works. Anything before 8 was a challenge due to some atrocious bugs. This had it problems but it really taught you not to write sloppy CSS and JS as it would usually just wouldn't work. Versions After 7 basically anything that wasn't in the spec supported wasn't implemented so you had to write code pretty much bang on the spec. Just this Friday I solved a rendering problem with IE where SVG TEXT elements weren't being rendered correctly, I was calling element.innerHTML to set the text which was incorrect. I should have been element.textContent. Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't have a innerHTML property (they are not HTML). IE11 was actually working correctly, where the latest Chrome behaviour was incorrect. So spending time making it work in IE has improved my code.
- kyle-rb 7y ago
  >Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't have a innerHTML property Is that definitely the case? Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all return a value for the innerHTML property of an element in an SVG document. This W3C spec [0] specifically mentions XML documents in addition to HTML documents. And as I understand it, it seems like embedded SVG elements also inherit from the Element interface which includes InnerHTML. IE11 might also be correct, following an older spec, but I don't think you can jump to the conclusion that Chrome is wrong just because the property is called innerHTML. [0] https://w3c.github.io/DOM-Parsing/#the-innerhtml-mixin https://w3c.github.io/DOM-Parsing/#the-innerhtml-mixin
  - uncle_j 7y ago
    That is interesting. I assumed that innerHTML must have been wrong because textContent works in all the browsers I have tried it on whereas innerHTML doesn't work. A cursory search textContent vs innerHTML seemed to suggest textContent was the correct way. It looks like it isn't a simple case of IE11 (I haven't had a chance to test on 9 & 10 yet) being correct and the others being incorrect. Thanks for the info.
- hadrien01 7y ago
  Totally agree with your conclusion. I remember generating a JavaScript array in a server-side loop, and the code wouldn't work (at first) because of a trailing comma on the last element before a bracket. Firefox would ignore it, but IE 8 wanted a perfect no-extraneous-commas code.
sayhello 7y ago
Disclosure: I work at Google on Chrome. Opinions are my own. Using chromium as a base, browsers will have to differentiate by offering a better product. “Better” is less likely to be better performance, compatibility, or accessibility. By using much of the same code as another browser implementer, any browser vendor [hint hint] that still makes their own engine could reduce the resources they put on the foundations and web platform and put more of it on the product itself. Perhaps we’ll have more groundbreaking innovations to move browsers forward. The last few big ones: multi-process architecture, tabs. In effect, by using the same foundations, the browser wars could in fact be reignited and the users could be the winners. On the web platform side, I.e., the stuff you see on MDN and w3c specs, using the same “base” doesn’t mean the browsers won’t have different implementations of future APIs if the vendors’ opinions diverge strongly. Case in point: Chromium used to use WebKit as its renderer and now uses blink, a fork of WebKit.
- sayhello 7y ago
  About web APIs, didn’t want to imply that blink was used instead of WebKit for that reason, it was just an example that rendering engines could still evolve independently.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  > By using much of the same code as another browser implementer, any browser vendor [hint hint] that still makes their own engine could reduce the resources they put on the foundations and web platform and put more of it on the product itself. In other words, throw out all the advantages that come from using Rust in the browser in favor of a codebase that has a policy forbidding any use of that language. No thanks. Furthermore, I have to note the irony that you say nobody else should implement their own engine when your team is the one that forked Blink from WebKit in the first place.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Open browsers have been around for decades, Chromium didn't offer anything new there and as you say it even started off an open browser itself. If everyone did what you suggest there is a net loss for the user as where there used to be competition in browser backends there is now whatever Google considers in it's interest to merge into Chromium for others to also adopt (until the point someone manages a fork and we're back at the part where you say companies should drop their engines for what is popular instead).
OliverJones 7y ago
Yes, the Redmond Middle School science project called Internet Explorer prototyped some excellent concepts. For sure. You can get a LOT of cool concepts for a hundred megabucks a year from people of the intellectual and creative firepower hired by Microsoft. But, why did it fail? Of course, as the article says, one reason was the Ballmer-era tsunami of bureaucratic confusion that inundated Microsoft and stymied the release of the Windows versions that carried IE. Another was security. Cybercreeps love IE. Drive-by malware? IE. "Internet Exploder." A third was the cost of compatibility. It necessary for web developers and later, web app developers, to develop and test once on all the browsers and then again on each version of IE. It didn't help that it came bundled with Windows: large-org IT managers often forced their users to use an atrocity like IE6 years after it upgraded. This bogus standardization shackled a ball and chain to third-party developers. A fourth was, paradoxically, the whole ActiveX Control subsystem. Apartment threading, anyone? Monikers, anyone? It was just barely good enough that DICOM and other high-end imaging systems could use it. That took away incentives to get <canvas>-like stuff working well. Other companies have done similar things. DECNet, GM's MAP/TOP. Apollo Token Ring. SysV vs. BSD. But none of those things hobbled an industry quite like IE. Trebuchets are cool tech too. But imagine if every UPS truck had to carry one to place packages on peoples' doorsteps.
monoideism 7y ago
Warning: article is excellent, but contains rapidly flashing colors that could trigger a photosensitive epileptic reaction.
adev_ 7y ago
I find the article to be pretty lineant, or amusingly silent, on "why" IE technologies never got adopted or standardized. I am old enough to remember the time where VML and the others were invented. And at this time "Open Source" was still called by Microsoft a "cancer", and Linux users frightened for patent violation every 2 month by MS. It would have been insane to re-implement or standardized anything coming from Microsoft at this time, leading you for sure in front of a judge for patent infringement... Anything coming from Microsoft was radioactive due to stupid political decisions and aggressive patent & IP attitude. This is sad, and cause us to loose 10 years in the web evolution, reinventing the wheel many many times. Without even consider the millions of hours of engineering wasted to fight with broken HTML compatibilities, locked-in technologies (flash, Sliverlight, ActiveX, Vbscript) and continuously deprecated proprietary APIs.
Keverw 7y ago
I hope they bring the Chromium based version of Edge to the Xbox too. I was playing some Babylon.js demos and it kept freezing up once I had to force restart the whole thing. But webGL + the controller API means you could ship to the console directly. Not sure if Playstation browser could do this either, but be nice since console's are more locked down but seems they are opening up since Fortnite I believe is the first cross platform game where your Playstation and Xbox friends can play together. Then I think if you created something like a virtual world where dynamic content is allowed, I think the console makers might not be too thrilled about that, so really like the idea of being able to publish console games as just a web app directly. I also think Microsoft is more open too when it comes to consoles, for example you can go to Walmart and buy a Xbox and then turn it into a DevKit while I believe the others make you buy a expensive DevKit hardware that isn't the same as the console already shipped, but maybe this is because of Microsoft's PC background. So from my understand it's easier to publish to the Xbox if making a native game compared to the other consoles, can get started faster but still need approval to ship - while I think with the PlayStation you have to spend a lot of money just to license the tools before you even write that first line of code.
acdha 7y ago
This is generally good but the conclusion is mostly wrong > One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Instead we were so busy learning about semantic markup and CSS that we totally missed the rest. And finally, I think too few people back then were fluent enough in JavaScript, let alone in architecting complex applications with JavaScript to appreciate things like HTML Components, Data Bindings or Default Behaviors. Not to speak of those weird XML sprinkles and VML. > > The other reason could have been a lack of platforms to spread knowledge to the masses. The internet was still in its infancy, so there was no MDN, no Smashing Magazine, no Codepen, no Hackernoon, no Dev.to and almost no personal blogs with articles on these things. Except Webmonkey. People were building complex JavaScript apps back then (the term DHTML was coined in 1997), and there were plenty of experienced software developers and people interested in really learning how to code well. Similarly, there were many sites where you could learn techniques — not just A List Apart but many personal blogs and sites like Philip Greenspun's https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ (1997). If you look at the first A List Apart entry in the Wayback Machine, they list many well-known resources: http://web.archive.org/web/19991005040451fw_/http://www.alistapart.com/news.html#res http://web.archive.org/web/19991005040451fw_/http://www.alis... (There is, however, a quite legitimate argument that back then English fluency was a very significant barrier) The main problem was that 1990s Microsoft was all about “cutting off their air supply”. They threw huge amounts of money into building out tons of features, exclusive bundling agreements and promotions with various other companies, etc. but they were not nearly as lavish in spending on QA or developing web standards even before the collapse of Netscape lead them to pull most of the IE team away. If you tried to use most of the features listed, they often had performance issues, odd quirks and limitations, or even crashing bugs which made them hard to use in a production project and many of those bugs took years to be fixed or never were. In many cases — XHR being perhaps the best example — going through the process of cleaning the spec up to the point where another browser would implement it might have lead to the modern era dawning a decade earlier with better than weekend-hackathon-grade quality implementation in IE. I look at that era of Microsoft as a tragedy of management where they had some very smart people but no strategy other than “prevent competition”.
mianos 7y ago
Having the width include the border because that is how a physical box works has to be one of the all time stupid design decisions of all time. What sort of management structure would lead to something like that? It suggests there was some guy/girl who were supreme dictators who made lots of these decisions. While committees often make crazy decisions this is the other end of the spectrum. Similarly, orders from the office team for extensions. The stories behind these things would even better reading.
- untog 7y ago
  > Having the width include the border because that is how a physical box works has to be one of the all time stupid design decisions of all time. ...no? If I want two side by side divs, I could give them width: 50%. But with regular box-sizing, if I apply a border to those boxes they'll stack vertically. That's pretty dumb.
userbinator 7y ago
I wish they'd open-source it and put it on GitHub... one thing I've noticed with IE is that for non-script/app HTML it tends to use far less memory and is faster at rendering than Firefox or the Webkit browsers. I suppose that's because it originally was written to work in Win95 with very limited memory, and so there's been a lot of optimisations around that.
stmw 7y ago
This talk by Adam Bosworth from 2007 is on the same topic and quite interesting take on the early history of IE. https://www.eweek.com/networking/googles-bosworth-why-ajax-failed-then-succeeded https://www.eweek.com/networking/googles-bosworth-why-ajax-f...
013a 7y ago
While having a very long, complete answer is interesting, there's a very simple tl;dr that answers the question just as well. You only have N bandwidth available to the house. Cable companies have a tradition in providing content; content can be very complex, and very rarely was content ever coming back from the house. So, instead of doing N/2 upload N/2 download, they did, lets say, N/4 upload 3N/4 download. Why haven't they fixed it? Legacy systems. We've all been there.
svnpenn 7y ago
> https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/5736/312f4d46-e479-4087-b562-2aece0125736/3-114R.wmv https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/5736/312f4d46-e479-4087-b562-2aece012... Who still uses WMV?
jameslk 7y ago
I was wondering what the building is shown in the first photo of this article. It's this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzludzha_monument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzludzha_monument
AgentME 7y ago
I'm a bit irked at the specific way the article keeps on bringing up unstandardized and clunky-as-hell looking features (I never knew about IE's behavior attribute; that looks scary) that were only ever implemented in IE as if IE was being unfairly judged. It's neat to see IE did those things, but the article glosses over that web features are good when they're cross-platform, standardized, and mesh well with other/future features. It's easy to just add features if you're IE and not worried about those things. It's telling that the article links to a demo for one of the old features and mentions you need a VM with some specific old IE for the demo to work. One way standardized features are better is that they tend to stay working in future browsers.
tarsinge 7y ago
> One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Well if you only look at the web and exclude the bulk of enterprise software in the 00’s.
kirstenbirgit 7y ago
Skimming through this article, while all these IE features are cool, they seem to have been created with no common strategy or goal other than to make something that another MS team thought useful, like MSXML for the Outlook Web Access team. The implementation of them seem to be totally inconsistant (sometimes weird nonstandard CSS syntax, weird meta tags, ".htc" files, etc. etc.), and very IE-specific, so it's almost impossible for other browsers to implement. This is the real reason why they cranked out all these weird features: to vendor-lock people into IE.
ndesaulniers 7y ago
An incredibly well cited and researched article! So many of these I have never heard of. (If only M$ had documented these as well as MDN, maybe folks would have used them more and demanded their implementation in the competing browsers. Ah, getting to the end of the article, this is mentioned). >The other reason could have been a lack of platforms to spread knowledge to the masses. The internet was still in its infancy, so there was no MDN ... Really incredible demos, too. You can see the URL in some of the demos; looks like the author stood up a VM and wrote many of the demoes. (Recent Star Wars trailers in Windows XP?) Ah, later there's an Internet Archive link to a M$ published VM image! > You think Internet Explorer could not animate stuff? Not entirely true. Because, back in the days there was already SMIL, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. SMIL is a markup language to describe multimedia presentations, defining markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding. While Microsoft was heavily involved in the creation of this new W3C standard, they ultimately decided against implementing it in Internet Explorer. This brings back bad memories; I recall being taught SMIL briefly in a web-dev class in college. I think Mozilla implemented it. IIRC, you could declaratively animate SVG via XML-like tags, rather than JS or CSS. I didn't know it could access DOM/HTML, or play audio/video! The implementation of the currentScript() example uses `i` without declaring made me quickly panic. (Thank god JS doesn't allow that to work; had to double check in a console quickly though; "surely `undefined`++ won't convert anything to a number).
- arh68 7y ago
  > surely `undefined`++ won't convert anything to a number You're right, it converts it to Not-A-Number. undefined++ becomes NaN.
est 7y ago
> One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Instead we were so busy learning about semantic markup and CSS that we totally missed the rest Should we address the elephant in the room? For us without a CS degree, Flash was easily the first choice, IE have lagging problems whenver there's more than three layers of <DIV>s around. Yes it has lots of cool capabilities but it's rendered largely impractical. Even Adobe Flex was about take over the "business app" world. On the Microsoft side, .NET happened and Silverlight happened. But ultimately, the iPhone happened. 1-charge per day battery phones happened. BTW the article didn't mention <IMG DYNSRC> and background MIDI music support.
dejawu 7y ago
Every now and then I daydream about what it would take to totally re-invent the frontend stack with today's knowledge that the web is a place for applications, not just documents. There are over 40 years' of legacy and backwards-compatible baggage in HTML+CSS+JS and it's basically impossible for a small entity with little funding to build their own browser engine now. What would a new spec for a platform for delivering applications look like?

415 points by ttepasse 7y ago

dwb 7y ago

I remember using page transitions as a teenager to emulate PowerPoint in a programmable info-screen thing for the school library. Baby's first PHP. Lots of copy-and-paste cos I didn't really understand the fuss about writing functions. Good times, RIP.

Keverw 7y ago
Oh yeah, Powerpoint Jeopardy! I remembered we did that in high school science class once. Totally forgot about powerpoint being able to link buttons to different slides but in that case I do think it was a lot of copy and pasting.

sandworm101 7y ago

That introduction is why tech journalists shouldn't dabble in amateur history. I sounds like something from a 1960s highschool textbook: oversimplified and dripping in passive-aggressive politics.

ComputerGuru 7y ago
Your comment is needlessly insulting and very patronizing without actually providing any substance or even a single point of contention.

teilo 7y ago

Every one of these "innovations" was invented by Microsoft alone, without any dialog or input with or input from the standards committees. Their intent was clear: to subvert web standards in any way they possibly could in order to force people to Windows. And in large part they succeeded. Treating them as advances that were, sadly, not adopted by the rest of the web takes a lot of chutzpah.

gruez 7y ago
Sounds like what chrome is doing now.
Rexxar 7y ago
That's was the standard way of doing things at the beginning of the web : Let browsers experiment things then standardize what's working. Every body was doing this. The problem with Microsoft was aggressive pricing and forced default installation, it was not the technical side of the browser.
- teilo 7y ago
  This is not true. It was only Microsoft's innovations that were tied to a specific operating system. Other browsers were cross platform. Even Microsoft's short-lived IE for Mac was not really IE. ActiveX nearly destroyed the web, and as recently as a few years ago there were still enterprises digging themselves out of the proprietary mess they developed themselves into.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    It's unreasonable to blame ActiveX for this. NPAPI was not implicitly portable in some fashion, it was still just native code being embedded in the browser, with no particular guarantee of quality and no guarantee that a Win32 NPAPI plugin had Mac and Linux ports. The ActiveX API was also well-specified and debuggable in a way NPAPI was not, and it was possible to embed it in other runtime environments like Office documents and Visual Basic applications relatively easily, because COM was truly wonderful technology (even if using it was, at times, very painful). It's not a coincidence that Firefox made heavy use of COM for a long time (though they've rightly been removing it). Having used COM and ActiveX extensively, despite their flaws they were vastly superior technologies compared to NPAPI and they were a pleasure to work with. The security model was bad but again none of the competitor technologies were any better. I shipped large-scale native apps that successfully embedded ActiveX controls (like the flash player) and this was reasonable specifically because of how good the APIs were. Even after NPAPI and ActiveX made an exit, the web still was infected by swf files and unity games and what have you. Those things are all either dead now or on life support because it turns out browser vendors don't want to maintain them and they're not portable.

ksec 7y ago

>MHTML was proposed as an open standard to the IETF but somehow it never took off. I had always wished MHT replaced PDF. But due to the rivalry at the time Firefox refuse to support MHT ( even to this day ). Webkit has WebArchive which as far as I know isn't support outside of Apple's ecosystem. I dont actually buy the argument it was Vista that slows down IE development. IE 7 wasn't that much difference to IE 6. It shows Microsoft had very little incentive to improve the Web. I dont know how many actually hate them for not complying with ACID "Standards". I certainly dont. But at the time the Web has so many low hanging fruit a lot of people ( or just me ) were pissed Microsoft didn't even bother improving while holding the web standard hostage with its IE dominance. Along with the crap called Windows Vista. Luckily we got the first iPhone, 2 (?) years later. And the rest is history.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wbl 7y ago
MHT does not do what PDF does. Web text rendering remains abyssal in comparison to what 1980's computer technology can achieve.
- felixfbecker 7y ago
  But it would do a lot of the things people use PDF for much better.

FreakyT 7y ago

Really enjoyed the overview of all the ahead-of-their-time features introduced by IE! I feel like many people forget that, back when it completed against Netscape, IE really was the best browser on the market. The problem was that once they had “won” the browser war, Microsoft just completely abandoned development, allowing the product to languish and become the terrible abomination many of us remember having to write ridiculous workarounds to support.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
I would argue that in 2005 the best browser was Opera. A lot of things we now take for granted in browsers were pioneered by them. I was sad they cancelled development of their engine instead of open-sourcing it.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  Opera was amazing back then. Ran rings around IE in features and was super fast. It’s definitely too bad they didn’t open source it and build a large community around it.
- nradov 7y ago
  Opera was probably using licensed third-party code internally which they couldn't legally release as open source.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  I believe this comment is talking about a time prior to that, closer to 2000.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    I was using Opera as my chief browser in 2002..2010 period, so 2005 was Opera's peak, around versions 8-9 and a race to pass ACID2 test. I finally switched away to chrome because Opera became unbearable on Ubuntu, it slowed down and a lot of graphics issues appeared.
  - 7y ago

aikah 7y ago

I never use EDGE on my computer because I found it to be slower than Firefox. But I still use IE11, ironically, because I like to develop quick HTA tools for enterprise in HTML and Typescript powered by excel documents or access database using COM instead of having to download Electron and what not, which I don't need since I'm only developing for Windows. it's unfortunate that everybody lost nearly 10 years because Microsoft stopped taking Webtechs seriously in order to focus on Silverlight and what not, which they later abandoned anyway. I need to find an alternative to HTA though that still support COM since eventually Windows will stop supporting HTA apps.

uallo 7y ago
> it's unfortunate that everybody lost nearly 10 years because Microsoft stopped taking Webtechs seriously Yes it is. It is also unfortunate that some people refuse to upgrade their browsers and engineers have to jump through hoops in order to still support them... ;)

Ericson2314 7y ago

Let's not celebrate embrace extend extinguish, but let's also not celebrate MS handing the keys to google so they can do the same with Chrome. Why help your competitor? They should have gone with Firefox. Around 2012 when all 3 major browsers had similar market share [1] is what we want: everyone can make try extension but no one can ram them down our throats. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

jfoster 7y ago
In adopting chromium they're not just helping their competitor, but their competitor is now also helping them. At the end of the day, the default option for most users would naturally be to stick to Edge, but they instead have been installing Chrome. Why? Because Chrome was better. Now Edge is like Chrome. There's much less of a reason for users to install Chrome as a result. Microsoft are likely to regain some marketshare with this approach. If Bing is good enough, that may also mean billions in revenue.
- stOneskull 7y ago
  That's it, and everything syncs across easily. Installing Chrome is now pretty much redundant.
- withinboredom 7y ago
  > If Bing is good enough I've actually noticed it is better in some kinds of searches, and worse in others. Thanks to Edge, it's my default and to be honest, I don't even realize it's not Google most days.
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  1. Google will still push people to Chrome. Users could well still switch because of that. 2. Mozilla is not a competitor but they would get just as much free work. (Or MS sponsors Firefox for the Bing plug, and they get that side benefit.)
jknew 7y ago
For others who weren't aware, "embrace, extend, extinguish" was an explicit strategy discussed internally at Microsoft for gaining control of the internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... Though I think there are real innovations discussed in the article, the portrayal of Microsoft being an altruistic actor trying to get others to adopt their tech is downright dishonest with what we know about their internal discussions of their motivations and strategy at the time. I found the article really interesting, but I could do without the rose colored glasses.

reaperducer 7y ago

I don't like IE. I never have. But this part rings true: "Internet Explorer already had many of the things that we came to reinvent later and that we now celebrate as innovations." It happens all the time in tech, and IE probably reinvented some things from Hypercard or whatever came before it.

cstross 7y ago

I was really disappointed that the OP wasn't talking about the UGM-133 Trident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II (Alas, I think they'll be around for a few decades more, unless someone is wicked enough to use them.)

LeftHandPath 7y ago
This is what I was thinking as well, until I saw the “.dev” in the URL.
spsrich2 7y ago
Yes he's not talking about Trident missiles.
vardump 7y ago
I thought about Trident VGA cards... thinking "they're still around!?".
rudolfwinestock 7y ago
I thought of the Trident missile, as well. Anyone who's either a member of the Baby Boom or Generation X will bear witness to the Cold War for most of the rest of this century.
ribs 7y ago
Ditto. As I understand it, that program largely put me and my sister through college...
- cstross 7y ago
  So every cloud has a silver lining! (Even the fiery mushroom cloud surrounding the fireball burning your face off a few years later ...)
chadcmulligan 7y ago
Thought the same - always think of this when I hear Trident - the nuclear Missile Harrods would sell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyJh3qKjSMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyJh3qKjSMk

amelius 7y ago

Why did Microsoft choose Chromium, and not Firefox?

yedpodtrzitko 7y ago
Current portability potential of the engine. The codebase of Firefox has some legacy burden in it plus Rust as a dependency for building.
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  The rust part is actually an improvement as it is not in addition to but instead of. Building any rust component together with all its dependencies is one step and fully modernized. That’s one of the benefits moving away from legacy components with competing build systems duct taped together. Additionally, pure rust dependencies (which is the ultimate goal of the effort) are all statically linked and different versions of the same library can be used multiple times without symbol remaining voodoo, etc solving all sorts of typical DLL hell issues associated with adopting a huge foreign component into a project.
  - notriddle 7y ago
    Yes, yes, I like the new libraries, too. The Quantum team is following the Boy Scout rule -- when they refactor code, they leave it better than they found it. But Microsoft needs to release New Edge today. And today, Gecko is not made from a bunch of reusable, standalone Rust libraries. It's built from a couple of good libraries, plus a lot of ugly, tangled legacy. Some day, Gecko might be the best choice for software that wants to embed web technologies, but that's not today.
    - ComputerGuru 7y ago
      I never commented the viability of Gecko for MSEdge; I merely rejected the notion that Rust was part of the reason why it wasn’t viable.
Macha 7y ago

shdon 7y ago

Although I can see the advantages for Microsoft, I don't think it's a good thing that the browser engine landscape is going to get even more homogeneous. Firefox is now the only web browser of note that is not based on a WebKit/Blink/Chromium derivative. Sure, it's one fewer target to test against, but it saddens me to think that this is going to make it even more likely that web developers target Chrome and its ilk only and that the layout bugs in it are becoming the de-facto standard, just as happened with IE6 for ages. This is actually bad for Firefox even in the parts where it adheres to the standards when other browsers won't.

akho 7y ago
If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that — perhaps bundling Firefox (to stab at Google) for a fraction of the cost of continued Edge development. Trident was not much of a contender in 2010s. It’s formal death does not decrease diversity. Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less.
- bayindirh 7y ago
  > If Microsoft wanted to take their toys and leave the browser market, they would have done just that... With all the coupling with other Windows subsystems and some features just to enable a Windows-only PC ecosystem, I'm not sure that IE/Edge/Trident/EdgeHTML can be open sourced in a whim. > Now that Microsoft _embraced_ Chrome, I expect the browser market to become more diverse, not less. Internet explorer just became a OS vendor backed version of NeoPlanet browser. Just the same thing, in different shell.
  - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
    Former Internet Explorer SE here: it’s not the coupling with Windows that makes it impossible (MSHTML is actually really self-contained). The main reason Microsoft doesn’t open-source legacy code is because there a huge chunks of licensed third-party source code that cannot be publicly disclosed. While those portions could be stripped-out, it would be a mammoth task to go through the source code history and identify what belongs to who and stub it out if necessary (let alone replace it with first-party code). Whereas MS’ new projects (like .NET Core) were made open-source from the start and made in the open (Cathedral and the Bazaar) - so there’s no mean ol’ lawyers from LCA to stop people having fun.

leeoniya 7y ago

the webkit monoculture is saddening. just yesterday i ran into chrome's 2016 img/flex-basis bug which works properly in firefox but requires an extra wrapping div as a work-around in chrome. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560 what possible motivation is there to fix it when you're not competing with anyone? hopefully microsoft can help fix it now? also yesterday, i was writing some ui tests that use getBoundingClientRect() at different media query breakpoints. not only does chrome intermittently fail to deliver consistent results between runs (even with judicious timeouts), at different screen pixel densities its rounding errors are several pixels off and accumulate to bork all tests in a major way. on the other hand, firefox behaves deterministically across test runs and there's a single pixel (non-accumulating) error in one of several hundred tests. somehow, i made it through the dark ages of IE6 without permanent hair loss, but i dont have fond memories of those years in my career. now manifest v3 is starting to roll out in Chrome 80. once uBlock Origin stops working, i will use chrome even less (i try only to use it for its devtools currently)

tuespetre 7y ago
Chromium and WebKit are not synonymous
- leeoniya 7y ago
  ok, it's Blink now. nuances aside, the fact that 75-80% of the landscape will be blink-based is unfortunate.
  - bagacrap 7y ago
    blink and webkit are diverging in not-insignificant ways. Is it really that important that various rendering engines have zero shared lineage?
MR4D 7y ago
Why does nobody say “the TCP/IP monoculture is maddening,” or “the HTML monoculture is maddening” ? Seriously, I need somebody to explain it to me because I don’t get it. Having one core base of code is not a bad thing to me. What am I missing here?

arexxbifs 7y ago

> One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Personally, I'd say it was mainly because we were tech geeks who, back then, actually believed in a web that should be accessible to as many different platforms as possible using as many different browsers as possible, not just Windows and IE users. In a sense, that notion prevailed: the web is ubiquitous, browser lock-in is considered a douche move and you can still access some really worthwhile sites even with rather simple means. In another sense, we all failed, lending our hands to help create the current privacy-invading, dark-patterned UX nightmare we're still trying to pass off as a reasonable way of making the world a better place. I never thought I'd lament the day Microsoft stopped making their own browser core. As a web developer, one less rendering engine to GAF about is nice. As a netizen, the Google dominance is going from unsettling to scary.

wayneftw 7y ago
Just because a common open source engine has been decided upon doesn’t mean there’s no competition or that no innovation can happen.
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  No, it doesn't. But with Microsoft, Google and Amazon all relying on Chromium, there's going to be massive pull in that direction no matter what. Together, these three companies will now, basically, control the desktop OS market, the browser market and the cloud market. I'm not exactly giddy with excitement about that.
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    No, this is incorrect. It’s open source. It’s like saying that because Microsoft Amazon and Google all use Linux - that we’ll have no innovation.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

Theodores 7y ago

We missed out in using these features in part because we were too concerned with making pixel perfect copies of designs that had to look exactly the same in every browser because that is what our clients signed off on. This was in the days before responsive and all our time was spent fiddling with margins and padding to get things pixel perfect. There was no scope to take a step back and play with some of this Microsoft technology. Invariably the cast in stone designs were PDF drawings from Photoshop where the art was in second guessing what the designer was thinking of and where they stole their influences from. You could not implement a table in a cool way on MS IE and in a more boring way on the other browsers, knowledge was just not there or the space to experiment.

uncle_j 7y ago

This is a shame in some ways. Internet explorer was always very strict on how it works. Anything before 8 was a challenge due to some atrocious bugs. This had it problems but it really taught you not to write sloppy CSS and JS as it would usually just wouldn't work. Versions After 7 basically anything that wasn't in the spec supported wasn't implemented so you had to write code pretty much bang on the spec. Just this Friday I solved a rendering problem with IE where SVG TEXT elements weren't being rendered correctly, I was calling element.innerHTML to set the text which was incorrect. I should have been element.textContent. Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't have a innerHTML property (they are not HTML). IE11 was actually working correctly, where the latest Chrome behaviour was incorrect. So spending time making it work in IE has improved my code.

kyle-rb 7y ago
>Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't have a innerHTML property Is that definitely the case? Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all return a value for the innerHTML property of an element in an SVG document. This W3C spec [0] specifically mentions XML documents in addition to HTML documents. And as I understand it, it seems like embedded SVG elements also inherit from the Element interface which includes InnerHTML. IE11 might also be correct, following an older spec, but I don't think you can jump to the conclusion that Chrome is wrong just because the property is called innerHTML. [0] https://w3c.github.io/DOM-Parsing/#the-innerhtml-mixin https://w3c.github.io/DOM-Parsing/#the-innerhtml-mixin
- uncle_j 7y ago
  That is interesting. I assumed that innerHTML must have been wrong because textContent works in all the browsers I have tried it on whereas innerHTML doesn't work. A cursory search textContent vs innerHTML seemed to suggest textContent was the correct way. It looks like it isn't a simple case of IE11 (I haven't had a chance to test on 9 & 10 yet) being correct and the others being incorrect. Thanks for the info.
hadrien01 7y ago
Totally agree with your conclusion. I remember generating a JavaScript array in a server-side loop, and the code wouldn't work (at first) because of a trailing comma on the last element before a bracket. Firefox would ignore it, but IE 8 wanted a perfect no-extraneous-commas code.

sayhello 7y ago

Disclosure: I work at Google on Chrome. Opinions are my own. Using chromium as a base, browsers will have to differentiate by offering a better product. “Better” is less likely to be better performance, compatibility, or accessibility. By using much of the same code as another browser implementer, any browser vendor [hint hint] that still makes their own engine could reduce the resources they put on the foundations and web platform and put more of it on the product itself. Perhaps we’ll have more groundbreaking innovations to move browsers forward. The last few big ones: multi-process architecture, tabs. In effect, by using the same foundations, the browser wars could in fact be reignited and the users could be the winners. On the web platform side, I.e., the stuff you see on MDN and w3c specs, using the same “base” doesn’t mean the browsers won’t have different implementations of future APIs if the vendors’ opinions diverge strongly. Case in point: Chromium used to use WebKit as its renderer and now uses blink, a fork of WebKit.

sayhello 7y ago
About web APIs, didn’t want to imply that blink was used instead of WebKit for that reason, it was just an example that rendering engines could still evolve independently.
pcwalton 7y ago
> By using much of the same code as another browser implementer, any browser vendor [hint hint] that still makes their own engine could reduce the resources they put on the foundations and web platform and put more of it on the product itself. In other words, throw out all the advantages that come from using Rust in the browser in favor of a codebase that has a policy forbidding any use of that language. No thanks. Furthermore, I have to note the irony that you say nobody else should implement their own engine when your team is the one that forked Blink from WebKit in the first place.
zamadatix 7y ago
Open browsers have been around for decades, Chromium didn't offer anything new there and as you say it even started off an open browser itself. If everyone did what you suggest there is a net loss for the user as where there used to be competition in browser backends there is now whatever Google considers in it's interest to merge into Chromium for others to also adopt (until the point someone manages a fork and we're back at the part where you say companies should drop their engines for what is popular instead).

OliverJones 7y ago

Yes, the Redmond Middle School science project called Internet Explorer prototyped some excellent concepts. For sure. You can get a LOT of cool concepts for a hundred megabucks a year from people of the intellectual and creative firepower hired by Microsoft. But, why did it fail? Of course, as the article says, one reason was the Ballmer-era tsunami of bureaucratic confusion that inundated Microsoft and stymied the release of the Windows versions that carried IE. Another was security. Cybercreeps love IE. Drive-by malware? IE. "Internet Exploder." A third was the cost of compatibility. It necessary for web developers and later, web app developers, to develop and test once on all the browsers and then again on each version of IE. It didn't help that it came bundled with Windows: large-org IT managers often forced their users to use an atrocity like IE6 years after it upgraded. This bogus standardization shackled a ball and chain to third-party developers. A fourth was, paradoxically, the whole ActiveX Control subsystem. Apartment threading, anyone? Monikers, anyone? It was just barely good enough that DICOM and other high-end imaging systems could use it. That took away incentives to get <canvas>-like stuff working well. Other companies have done similar things. DECNet, GM's MAP/TOP. Apollo Token Ring. SysV vs. BSD. But none of those things hobbled an industry quite like IE. Trebuchets are cool tech too. But imagine if every UPS truck had to carry one to place packages on peoples' doorsteps.

monoideism 7y ago

Warning: article is excellent, but contains rapidly flashing colors that could trigger a photosensitive epileptic reaction.

adev_ 7y ago

I find the article to be pretty lineant, or amusingly silent, on "why" IE technologies never got adopted or standardized. I am old enough to remember the time where VML and the others were invented. And at this time "Open Source" was still called by Microsoft a "cancer", and Linux users frightened for patent violation every 2 month by MS. It would have been insane to re-implement or standardized anything coming from Microsoft at this time, leading you for sure in front of a judge for patent infringement... Anything coming from Microsoft was radioactive due to stupid political decisions and aggressive patent & IP attitude. This is sad, and cause us to loose 10 years in the web evolution, reinventing the wheel many many times. Without even consider the millions of hours of engineering wasted to fight with broken HTML compatibilities, locked-in technologies (flash, Sliverlight, ActiveX, Vbscript) and continuously deprecated proprietary APIs.

Keverw 7y ago

I hope they bring the Chromium based version of Edge to the Xbox too. I was playing some Babylon.js demos and it kept freezing up once I had to force restart the whole thing. But webGL + the controller API means you could ship to the console directly. Not sure if Playstation browser could do this either, but be nice since console's are more locked down but seems they are opening up since Fortnite I believe is the first cross platform game where your Playstation and Xbox friends can play together. Then I think if you created something like a virtual world where dynamic content is allowed, I think the console makers might not be too thrilled about that, so really like the idea of being able to publish console games as just a web app directly. I also think Microsoft is more open too when it comes to consoles, for example you can go to Walmart and buy a Xbox and then turn it into a DevKit while I believe the others make you buy a expensive DevKit hardware that isn't the same as the console already shipped, but maybe this is because of Microsoft's PC background. So from my understand it's easier to publish to the Xbox if making a native game compared to the other consoles, can get started faster but still need approval to ship - while I think with the PlayStation you have to spend a lot of money just to license the tools before you even write that first line of code.

acdha 7y ago

This is generally good but the conclusion is mostly wrong > One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Instead we were so busy learning about semantic markup and CSS that we totally missed the rest. And finally, I think too few people back then were fluent enough in JavaScript, let alone in architecting complex applications with JavaScript to appreciate things like HTML Components, Data Bindings or Default Behaviors. Not to speak of those weird XML sprinkles and VML. > > The other reason could have been a lack of platforms to spread knowledge to the masses. The internet was still in its infancy, so there was no MDN, no Smashing Magazine, no Codepen, no Hackernoon, no Dev.to and almost no personal blogs with articles on these things. Except Webmonkey. People were building complex JavaScript apps back then (the term DHTML was coined in 1997), and there were plenty of experienced software developers and people interested in really learning how to code well. Similarly, there were many sites where you could learn techniques — not just A List Apart but many personal blogs and sites like Philip Greenspun's https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ (1997). If you look at the first A List Apart entry in the Wayback Machine, they list many well-known resources: http://web.archive.org/web/19991005040451fw_/http://www.alistapart.com/news.html#res http://web.archive.org/web/19991005040451fw_/http://www.alis... (There is, however, a quite legitimate argument that back then English fluency was a very significant barrier) The main problem was that 1990s Microsoft was all about “cutting off their air supply”. They threw huge amounts of money into building out tons of features, exclusive bundling agreements and promotions with various other companies, etc. but they were not nearly as lavish in spending on QA or developing web standards even before the collapse of Netscape lead them to pull most of the IE team away. If you tried to use most of the features listed, they often had performance issues, odd quirks and limitations, or even crashing bugs which made them hard to use in a production project and many of those bugs took years to be fixed or never were. In many cases — XHR being perhaps the best example — going through the process of cleaning the spec up to the point where another browser would implement it might have lead to the modern era dawning a decade earlier with better than weekend-hackathon-grade quality implementation in IE. I look at that era of Microsoft as a tragedy of management where they had some very smart people but no strategy other than “prevent competition”.

mianos 7y ago

Having the width include the border because that is how a physical box works has to be one of the all time stupid design decisions of all time. What sort of management structure would lead to something like that? It suggests there was some guy/girl who were supreme dictators who made lots of these decisions. While committees often make crazy decisions this is the other end of the spectrum. Similarly, orders from the office team for extensions. The stories behind these things would even better reading.

untog 7y ago
> Having the width include the border because that is how a physical box works has to be one of the all time stupid design decisions of all time. ...no? If I want two side by side divs, I could give them width: 50%. But with regular box-sizing, if I apply a border to those boxes they'll stack vertically. That's pretty dumb.

userbinator 7y ago

I wish they'd open-source it and put it on GitHub... one thing I've noticed with IE is that for non-script/app HTML it tends to use far less memory and is faster at rendering than Firefox or the Webkit browsers. I suppose that's because it originally was written to work in Win95 with very limited memory, and so there's been a lot of optimisations around that.

stmw 7y ago

This talk by Adam Bosworth from 2007 is on the same topic and quite interesting take on the early history of IE. https://www.eweek.com/networking/googles-bosworth-why-ajax-failed-then-succeeded https://www.eweek.com/networking/googles-bosworth-why-ajax-f...

013a 7y ago

While having a very long, complete answer is interesting, there's a very simple tl;dr that answers the question just as well. You only have N bandwidth available to the house. Cable companies have a tradition in providing content; content can be very complex, and very rarely was content ever coming back from the house. So, instead of doing N/2 upload N/2 download, they did, lets say, N/4 upload 3N/4 download. Why haven't they fixed it? Legacy systems. We've all been there.

svnpenn 7y ago

> https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/5736/312f4d46-e479-4087-b562-2aece0125736/3-114R.wmv https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/5736/312f4d46-e479-4087-b562-2aece012... Who still uses WMV?

jameslk 7y ago

I was wondering what the building is shown in the first photo of this article. It's this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzludzha_monument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzludzha_monument

AgentME 7y ago

I'm a bit irked at the specific way the article keeps on bringing up unstandardized and clunky-as-hell looking features (I never knew about IE's behavior attribute; that looks scary) that were only ever implemented in IE as if IE was being unfairly judged. It's neat to see IE did those things, but the article glosses over that web features are good when they're cross-platform, standardized, and mesh well with other/future features. It's easy to just add features if you're IE and not worried about those things. It's telling that the article links to a demo for one of the old features and mentions you need a VM with some specific old IE for the demo to work. One way standardized features are better is that they tend to stay working in future browsers.

tarsinge 7y ago

> One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Well if you only look at the web and exclude the bulk of enterprise software in the 00’s.

kirstenbirgit 7y ago

Skimming through this article, while all these IE features are cool, they seem to have been created with no common strategy or goal other than to make something that another MS team thought useful, like MSXML for the Outlook Web Access team. The implementation of them seem to be totally inconsistant (sometimes weird nonstandard CSS syntax, weird meta tags, ".htc" files, etc. etc.), and very IE-specific, so it's almost impossible for other browsers to implement. This is the real reason why they cranked out all these weird features: to vendor-lock people into IE.

ndesaulniers 7y ago

An incredibly well cited and researched article! So many of these I have never heard of. (If only M$ had documented these as well as MDN, maybe folks would have used them more and demanded their implementation in the competing browsers. Ah, getting to the end of the article, this is mentioned). >The other reason could have been a lack of platforms to spread knowledge to the masses. The internet was still in its infancy, so there was no MDN ... Really incredible demos, too. You can see the URL in some of the demos; looks like the author stood up a VM and wrote many of the demoes. (Recent Star Wars trailers in Windows XP?) Ah, later there's an Internet Archive link to a M$ published VM image! > You think Internet Explorer could not animate stuff? Not entirely true. Because, back in the days there was already SMIL, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. SMIL is a markup language to describe multimedia presentations, defining markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding. While Microsoft was heavily involved in the creation of this new W3C standard, they ultimately decided against implementing it in Internet Explorer. This brings back bad memories; I recall being taught SMIL briefly in a web-dev class in college. I think Mozilla implemented it. IIRC, you could declaratively animate SVG via XML-like tags, rather than JS or CSS. I didn't know it could access DOM/HTML, or play audio/video! The implementation of the currentScript() example uses `i` without declaring made me quickly panic. (Thank god JS doesn't allow that to work; had to double check in a console quickly though; "surely `undefined`++ won't convert anything to a number).

arh68 7y ago
> surely `undefined`++ won't convert anything to a number You're right, it converts it to Not-A-Number. undefined++ becomes NaN.

est 7y ago

> One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Instead we were so busy learning about semantic markup and CSS that we totally missed the rest Should we address the elephant in the room? For us without a CS degree, Flash was easily the first choice, IE have lagging problems whenver there's more than three layers of <DIV>s around. Yes it has lots of cool capabilities but it's rendered largely impractical. Even Adobe Flex was about take over the "business app" world. On the Microsoft side, .NET happened and Silverlight happened. But ultimately, the iPhone happened. 1-charge per day battery phones happened. BTW the article didn't mention <IMG DYNSRC> and background MIDI music support.

dejawu 7y ago

Every now and then I daydream about what it would take to totally re-invent the frontend stack with today's knowledge that the web is a place for applications, not just documents. There are over 40 years' of legacy and backwards-compatible baggage in HTML+CSS+JS and it's basically impossible for a small entity with little funding to build their own browser engine now. What would a new spec for a platform for delivering applications look like?