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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 Netsc

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.
  - FreakyT 7y ago
    Yup, you're correct -- by the time 2005 had rolled around the Netscape-successors had finally produced a good product, Firebird/Firefox! It felt leagues beyond IE6, which came out near 2000 and was basically untouched for 5 years at that point.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
      Well, Firefox passed the ACID2 test almost 2 years later than Opera (only in 2008), and was rather slow at the time.
zerotolerance 7y ago
Having more features does not make a browser superior. IE had a universe of memory leak and CSS rendering quirks. Their rendering was so overly permissive that "anyone" could put a mess together and it'd render. That permissive client almost single handedly slowed web development progress by a decade. Because nobody wanted to produce a browser that failed to render some web pages that could be rendered in other browsers. Nobody cared that the pages in question were gibberish. If anything all these IE only features did more to harm web dev than help it. They're why we're in the situation where all this enterprise software still requires old versions of IE to operate.
- yoz 7y ago
  Oh, and: as someone who was doing a huge amount of web development between 1995 and 2000, I can confirm that IE took the lead in version 3 because it better in almost every way than Netscape. I spent ages trying to persuade Netscape versions 3 and 4.* to render HTML correctly and not crash. I'm not saying that Netscape's engineers did a poor job, because web pages are hard to render correctly. (No, not just because of badly-formed HTML.) I'm saying that IE, for whatever reason, was faster, more stable and more correct.
  - zerotolerance 7y ago
    IE took the lead with v4 because it was shipped with Win95 sp2.5 and Win98 v1. There was a lawsuit about it and everything. More importantly, web users dont know or care which browser renders sites "more correctly." They did understand which sites could and could not make a page that worked in either. They probably did care about crashes. But they also cared about security vulnerabilities created by the other inappropriate applications of postel's law for which Microsoft remains famous.
- berkut 7y ago
  I'd say it depends on the features: smooth scrolling was pretty cool at the time (1998/1999), so to me, a nicer and faster UI made a huge difference given other user experience improvements as well. Also, Netscape was extremely buggy as well: I remember moving friends and family to IE as it was a much better experience in general. For example, one very annoying bug (given the slow downloads at 28.8) was Netscape would often not use its cache for certain code paths and would re-download files again, even if it had them in its cache. In particular window resizing would cause it to re-download files for no reason (this was obviously well before anything like responsive layouts, or imgsrc), and you'd often wait 30-40 seconds to see the page again. Similarly, I seem to remember IE's "offline mode" worked almost perfectly from the cache and you could revisit pages when not dialed up, but Netscape often would not show anything. (Obviously there were other ways of handling this, like Teleport Pro to download entire sites, but it was convenient IE's features generally just worked from a user perspective).

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.
- FreakyT 7y ago
  Yup, you're correct -- by the time 2005 had rolled around the Netscape-successors had finally produced a good product, Firebird/Firefox! It felt leagues beyond IE6, which came out near 2000 and was basically untouched for 5 years at that point.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    Well, Firefox passed the ACID2 test almost 2 years later than Opera (only in 2008), and was rather slow at the time.

zerotolerance 7y ago

Having more features does not make a browser superior. IE had a universe of memory leak and CSS rendering quirks. Their rendering was so overly permissive that "anyone" could put a mess together and it'd render. That permissive client almost single handedly slowed web development progress by a decade. Because nobody wanted to produce a browser that failed to render some web pages that could be rendered in other browsers. Nobody cared that the pages in question were gibberish. If anything all these IE only features did more to harm web dev than help it. They're why we're in the situation where all this enterprise software still requires old versions of IE to operate.

yoz 7y ago
Oh, and: as someone who was doing a huge amount of web development between 1995 and 2000, I can confirm that IE took the lead in version 3 because it better in almost every way than Netscape. I spent ages trying to persuade Netscape versions 3 and 4.* to render HTML correctly and not crash. I'm not saying that Netscape's engineers did a poor job, because web pages are hard to render correctly. (No, not just because of badly-formed HTML.) I'm saying that IE, for whatever reason, was faster, more stable and more correct.
- zerotolerance 7y ago
  IE took the lead with v4 because it was shipped with Win95 sp2.5 and Win98 v1. There was a lawsuit about it and everything. More importantly, web users dont know or care which browser renders sites "more correctly." They did understand which sites could and could not make a page that worked in either. They probably did care about crashes. But they also cared about security vulnerabilities created by the other inappropriate applications of postel's law for which Microsoft remains famous.
berkut 7y ago
I'd say it depends on the features: smooth scrolling was pretty cool at the time (1998/1999), so to me, a nicer and faster UI made a huge difference given other user experience improvements as well. Also, Netscape was extremely buggy as well: I remember moving friends and family to IE as it was a much better experience in general. For example, one very annoying bug (given the slow downloads at 28.8) was Netscape would often not use its cache for certain code paths and would re-download files again, even if it had them in its cache. In particular window resizing would cause it to re-download files for no reason (this was obviously well before anything like responsive layouts, or imgsrc), and you'd often wait 30-40 seconds to see the page again. Similarly, I seem to remember IE's "offline mode" worked almost perfectly from the cache and you could revisit pages when not dialed up, but Netscape often would not show anything. (Obviously there were other ways of handling this, like Teleport Pro to download entire sites, but it was convenient IE's features generally just worked from a user perspective).