3 ms·

Yes, the Redmond Middle School Science project called Internet Explorer, now in the dumpster of history where it always belonged, was evil. Its over-engineered

Yes, the Redmond Middle School Science project called Internet Explorer, now in the dumpster of history where it always belonged, was evil. Its over-engineered idiocy (monikers? apartment threading? quirks mode? wtf?) slowed down the development of good internet applications by decades, and caused tens of thousands of lost developer and tester hours that we can never get back. Gates was too greedy to understand why it was a problem. Ballmer was too stupid. Now, Nadella finally figured out that developers might stop hating his company if he finally flushed that toilet. And flush it he did. Edgium is good. As good as all the takes-16-hours-to-compile stuff running on modern desktops.

TimTheTinker 6y ago
> quirks mode? Quirks mode was a necessary measure to ensure backwards compatibility for a majority of websites at the time (circa 2000 - this was IE5). If they had switched every website to standards mode, most of the internet at the time would have appeared broken, and people would have blamed Microsoft, not the websites. (To be fair, IE5 through IE7 had a very broken standards mode, but it was much less broken than quirks mode.)
- Joeri 6y ago
  I remember some web developers would deliberately build for quirks mode because it was a stable target, unlike the always shifting standards mode.
  - TimTheTinker 6y ago
    For better or for worse, IE6 lived on, and on, and on for far too long with no changes. A bigger concern than the changing standards mode in other browsers was the fact that IE6 just wouldn’t die. I had people challenging me “why are you developing for Firefox first and then adapting your app to work on IE? Shouldn’t you be doing it the other way around?” Over 10 years later those apps I built are still working great on the latest browsers, with no layout fixes since then. Meanwhile, many of those “rich”, forward-thinking apps developed for IE and Silverlight are long dead.
    - OliverJones 6y ago
      Right. In hospitals there was a very popular medical imaging web information system, GE, Maybe? It rendered with an ActiveX control embedded in IE6. It didn't work in IE7. So a lot of customers I worked with couldn't move past IE6. "No way, everybody need to be able to see those XRays images." We even tried, without success, to organize the quick development of some sort of replacement for that, umm, "legacy" ActiveX control.
sumtechguy 6y ago
At that time there were basically 3 browsers to choose from. IE, Netscape, and in some particular cases Mosaic (which no one really did anymore). Out of those 3 one did not crash as much, was faster, and was already installed. Before Firefox, Netscape would crash if you looked at it wrong. Netscape started off decent but quickly devolved into something just as bad of a mess as IE. That was our choices as a consumer. So we worked with what we had. It was not until Firefox came along and showed everyone 'hey there is a better way' that anything happened. Even that took a few years.
AshamedCaptain 6y ago
IE was not bad at all, at least technically and at least when it was still being actively developed (i.e. <<ie6), compared to its competitors. The bad things (and what the web page is mostly complaining about) are the political shenigans from MS; e.g. bundling it with Windows, and then slowing down development significantly when they got to the monopoly position. And for those that believe MS is now politically better than it was a couple decades ago, just try a recent Windows 10 build. Not only it _still_ bundles Edge as if the EU court ruling was a joke, it will periodically nag you about making it your default browser, even in completely irrelevant places such as Settings. This is all like 20 years ago except that no one seems to care about desktop browsers anymore.

TimTheTinker 6y ago

> quirks mode? Quirks mode was a necessary measure to ensure backwards compatibility for a majority of websites at the time (circa 2000 - this was IE5). If they had switched every website to standards mode, most of the internet at the time would have appeared broken, and people would have blamed Microsoft, not the websites. (To be fair, IE5 through IE7 had a very broken standards mode, but it was much less broken than quirks mode.)

Joeri 6y ago
I remember some web developers would deliberately build for quirks mode because it was a stable target, unlike the always shifting standards mode.
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  For better or for worse, IE6 lived on, and on, and on for far too long with no changes. A bigger concern than the changing standards mode in other browsers was the fact that IE6 just wouldn’t die. I had people challenging me “why are you developing for Firefox first and then adapting your app to work on IE? Shouldn’t you be doing it the other way around?” Over 10 years later those apps I built are still working great on the latest browsers, with no layout fixes since then. Meanwhile, many of those “rich”, forward-thinking apps developed for IE and Silverlight are long dead.
  - OliverJones 6y ago
    Right. In hospitals there was a very popular medical imaging web information system, GE, Maybe? It rendered with an ActiveX control embedded in IE6. It didn't work in IE7. So a lot of customers I worked with couldn't move past IE6. "No way, everybody need to be able to see those XRays images." We even tried, without success, to organize the quick development of some sort of replacement for that, umm, "legacy" ActiveX control.

sumtechguy 6y ago

At that time there were basically 3 browsers to choose from. IE, Netscape, and in some particular cases Mosaic (which no one really did anymore). Out of those 3 one did not crash as much, was faster, and was already installed. Before Firefox, Netscape would crash if you looked at it wrong. Netscape started off decent but quickly devolved into something just as bad of a mess as IE. That was our choices as a consumer. So we worked with what we had. It was not until Firefox came along and showed everyone 'hey there is a better way' that anything happened. Even that took a few years.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago

IE was not bad at all, at least technically and at least when it was still being actively developed (i.e. <<ie6), compared to its competitors. The bad things (and what the web page is mostly complaining about) are the political shenigans from MS; e.g. bundling it with Windows, and then slowing down development significantly when they got to the monopoly position. And for those that believe MS is now politically better than it was a couple decades ago, just try a recent Windows 10 build. Not only it _still_ bundles Edge as if the EU court ruling was a joke, it will periodically nag you about making it your default browser, even in completely irrelevant places such as Settings. This is all like 20 years ago except that no one seems to care about desktop browsers anymore.