7 ms·

> Incidentally, you’d be surprised just how many relatively major browser features have snuck their way into releases like this. I don't think I would! Explain

> Incidentally, you’d be surprised just how many relatively major browser features have snuck their way into releases like this. I don't think I would! Explains a lot about the nightmares of web development.

neilv 6y ago
Early on, it was a race between the browsers to differentiate themselves with proprietary extensions, and to be "this site best viewed with ___" (a very common saying on Web pages, and sometimes with image badges provided by the browser vendor). W3C reined that in, and the W3C staff people are the real deal. Though eventually big browser vendors were able to push through whatever they wanted, maybe sometimes sabotage things they don't like (e.g, HTML5 Offline mechanisms competing with browser vendor's app store), etc.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  "this site best viewed with ___" Amazingly, this still happens today. I run into it occasionally. Most recently over the weekend on a county voter registration web site which stated that Internet Explorer was "required."
  - gen220 6y ago
    When you call $company support about anything related to their web applicaations, one of the first questions they're instructed to ask is "what browser are you using? X? Have you tried using Chrome instead?" 9/10 (maybe 99/100) times, the issue has nothing to do with the browser, but these questions have a strong normalizing effect. Even if the browser has nothing to do with it, people who don't know better will stick to Chrome, "just to be safe".
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I see it often too, and most of the time, that sentence ends with Chrome. Chrome is truly the IE of our era.
ponker 6y ago
And explains XmlHttpRequest, also from Microsoft.
- asddubs 6y ago
  still the only way to do requests with progress bars
- unilynx 6y ago
  They had to sneak that one into IE through the MSXML library. http://web.archive.org/web/20070210004825/http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20070210004825/http://www.alexhop...
- kevincox 6y ago
  You mean XMLHttpRequest. The two acronyms are capitalized differently for added quality.
  - ponker 6y ago
    I loled
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  I started using XmlHttpRequest immediately when I saw it documented somewhere at MS, probably MSDN. It was before google used it for auto-complete, and before I'd seen it being used anywhere, in fact. I'm sure other small pockets of developers were using it, but sites like StackOverflow, HackerNews, Twitter, etc didn't really exist to share such things. Slashdot was around, but I never saw it discussed there. My team was blown away when I delivered pages that dynamically changed with fresh data without the user having to interact with it, and without page refreshes or auto-refreshed iframes. Of course it only worked in IE but that was OK. The server-side data format I chose was XML since that was in vogue.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    You could even do that before XmlHttpRequest, and on non-MS browsers. But it was unusual for anyone to bother. People mostly didn't think of it until XHR became popular.

neilv 6y ago

Early on, it was a race between the browsers to differentiate themselves with proprietary extensions, and to be "this site best viewed with ___" (a very common saying on Web pages, and sometimes with image badges provided by the browser vendor). W3C reined that in, and the W3C staff people are the real deal. Though eventually big browser vendors were able to push through whatever they wanted, maybe sometimes sabotage things they don't like (e.g, HTML5 Offline mechanisms competing with browser vendor's app store), etc.

reaperducer 6y ago
"this site best viewed with ___" Amazingly, this still happens today. I run into it occasionally. Most recently over the weekend on a county voter registration web site which stated that Internet Explorer was "required."
- gen220 6y ago
  When you call $company support about anything related to their web applicaations, one of the first questions they're instructed to ask is "what browser are you using? X? Have you tried using Chrome instead?" 9/10 (maybe 99/100) times, the issue has nothing to do with the browser, but these questions have a strong normalizing effect. Even if the browser has nothing to do with it, people who don't know better will stick to Chrome, "just to be safe".
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I see it often too, and most of the time, that sentence ends with Chrome. Chrome is truly the IE of our era.

ponker 6y ago

And explains XmlHttpRequest, also from Microsoft.

asddubs 6y ago
still the only way to do requests with progress bars
unilynx 6y ago
They had to sneak that one into IE through the MSXML library. http://web.archive.org/web/20070210004825/http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20070210004825/http://www.alexhop...
kevincox 6y ago
You mean XMLHttpRequest. The two acronyms are capitalized differently for added quality.
- ponker 6y ago
  I loled
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
I started using XmlHttpRequest immediately when I saw it documented somewhere at MS, probably MSDN. It was before google used it for auto-complete, and before I'd seen it being used anywhere, in fact. I'm sure other small pockets of developers were using it, but sites like StackOverflow, HackerNews, Twitter, etc didn't really exist to share such things. Slashdot was around, but I never saw it discussed there. My team was blown away when I delivered pages that dynamically changed with fresh data without the user having to interact with it, and without page refreshes or auto-refreshed iframes. Of course it only worked in IE but that was OK. The server-side data format I chose was XML since that was in vogue.
- jlokier 6y ago
  You could even do that before XmlHttpRequest, and on non-MS browsers. But it was unusual for anyone to bother. People mostly didn't think of it until XHR became popular.