5 ms·

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

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).
yoz 7y ago
The idea that "if only web browsers didn't render bad HTML, the web would be so much better" is one of the oldest myths in web development, and I'm kind of amazed that it's still showing up. What you call the permissiveness of web browsers - in other words, their insistence on attempting to render invalid or badly-formed HTML - is what has made the web succeed at all. Firstly, it was fundamental from the start: NCSA Mosaic was implemented that way, as was Netscape, so there's no point blaming Microsoft. Secondly, and far more importantly, the robustness of web browsers is the reason why you can read 99.9% of web pages at all, including the one you're reading right now. (Yes, it's invalid: https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D22146629 https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina... ) I know it's tempting to believe that draconian error handling would have forced people to code web pages "properly". Unfortunately, when draconian error handling was added to the web (as XHTML), it failed to take off. Check the history: https://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/DraconianErrorHandling https://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/DraconianErrorHandling Mark Pilgrim wrote several excellent pieces about why non-draconian error handling is better, and as someone who wrote XML feed parsers and validators that were among the most robust and thorough in existence, he is deeply qualified to know. My favourite of those pieces is the "Thought Experiment"[1] but I also recommend [2], which includes: There are no exceptions to Postel’s Law. Anyone who tries to tell you differently is probably a client-side developer who wants the entire world to change so that their life might be 0.00001% easier. The world doesn’t work that way. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080609005748/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment http://web.archive.org/web/20080609005748/http://diveintomar... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20090306160434/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/08/postels-law http://web.archive.org/web/20090306160434/http://diveintomar...
- owl57 7y ago
  But your publishing tool had a bug, and it automatically inserted their illegal characters into your carefully and validly authored page, and now all hell has broken loose. I'm not entirely sure an XML-error-deface is the worst way to expose a program that automatically inserts anyone's garbage in your web page while not having a clear model of acceptable garbage.
- s_gourichon 7y ago
ironmagma 7y ago
This article is not just about the web, though. MsHTA was a great development platform and supported many features that IE did not because of the trusted nature of the applications it ran. This was nevertheless made possible by Trident.

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).

yoz 7y ago

The idea that "if only web browsers didn't render bad HTML, the web would be so much better" is one of the oldest myths in web development, and I'm kind of amazed that it's still showing up. What you call the permissiveness of web browsers - in other words, their insistence on attempting to render invalid or badly-formed HTML - is what has made the web succeed at all. Firstly, it was fundamental from the start: NCSA Mosaic was implemented that way, as was Netscape, so there's no point blaming Microsoft. Secondly, and far more importantly, the robustness of web browsers is the reason why you can read 99.9% of web pages at all, including the one you're reading right now. (Yes, it's invalid: https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D22146629 https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina... ) I know it's tempting to believe that draconian error handling would have forced people to code web pages "properly". Unfortunately, when draconian error handling was added to the web (as XHTML), it failed to take off. Check the history: https://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/DraconianErrorHandling https://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/DraconianErrorHandling Mark Pilgrim wrote several excellent pieces about why non-draconian error handling is better, and as someone who wrote XML feed parsers and validators that were among the most robust and thorough in existence, he is deeply qualified to know. My favourite of those pieces is the "Thought Experiment"[1] but I also recommend [2], which includes: There are no exceptions to Postel’s Law. Anyone who tries to tell you differently is probably a client-side developer who wants the entire world to change so that their life might be 0.00001% easier. The world doesn’t work that way. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080609005748/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment http://web.archive.org/web/20080609005748/http://diveintomar... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20090306160434/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/08/postels-law http://web.archive.org/web/20090306160434/http://diveintomar...

owl57 7y ago
But your publishing tool had a bug, and it automatically inserted their illegal characters into your carefully and validly authored page, and now all hell has broken loose. I'm not entirely sure an XML-error-deface is the worst way to expose a program that automatically inserts anyone's garbage in your web page while not having a clear model of acceptable garbage.
s_gourichon 7y ago

ironmagma 7y ago

This article is not just about the web, though. MsHTA was a great development platform and supported many features that IE did not because of the trusted nature of the applications it ran. This was nevertheless made possible by Trident.