9 ms·

25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

121 points by kuu 5y ago

franze 5y ago
I remember the news (think it was on Techcrunch) when MS disbanded the IE team. Even from far away it seemed like such a clear as day stupid decision. IE 6 was a buggy mess and everyone knew and hated it. And then they just ... walked away.
figbert 5y ago
Here it is on Thread Reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426587396343099397.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426587396343099397.html
- dt3ft 5y ago
  Thank you! This format should have been the first choice. I simply can't fathom why people post an article on twitter. Every sentence is a tweet, so that what, people can "like" each sentence? I wish people would stop using twitter for this type of data...
piker 5y ago
> Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it. Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few millions today, but that's some price.
- LanceJones 5y ago
  Ugh... that term, "broken families". I divorced when my sons were 10 and 7, and the divorce actually healed our family.
  - joophro 5y ago
    Cope. It didn’t for your kids.
    - dang 5y ago
      We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Given it was 25 years ago this would have been the mid 90s. They are probably multi millionaires but more so for simply getting MS stock rather than being personally rewarded for their efforts. After all this was already a big company with a lot of structure. Your compensation was likely based mostly on your role and level rather than the personal contribution you made to the company, and a lot of the gain you realized would have been from the general growth of Microsoft share price.
- rasz 5y ago
  Best guess glory aka "exposure" aka nothing. As Hadi wrote >Instead of hiring too fast, we kept a super-high bar for talent, betting that everybody would want to work for this new exclusive team at Microsoft that was so hard to get into. It worked. This is Bill from 1985 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... >After exchanging a few pleasantries, and telling me how much the Macintosh mattered to Microsoft, he looked me in the eye and said, "You're a really good programmer, right? I think you must be a really good programmer." >"I guess so," I responded, not understanding why he was attempting to flatter me. >"Well, I think you are. How long do you think it will take to do this project? A month or two? I think a really good programmer like you could get it done in less than two months." Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse.
  - rambambram 5y ago
    > Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse. Yeah indeed. Go look into cluster B personality disorders and look for the similarities between this behavior you mention and the behaviors of psychopaths or bad narcissists. It's an eye opener for good/naive people.
- verall 5y ago
  In some industries, people crunch, and everyone knows. It is very much considered to be a part of the job, and people that don't have their heads in sand are aware during hiring. Apple compensates very well but certainly knows how to push their engineers. The reward is to remain on a very rich boat during a fast-rising tide. Highly compensated software developers that have never had to crunch in their careers are lucky. And academics go through their own gauntlets...
  - hedberg10 5y ago
    This passage struck me as so sad. Was IE worth that? Would I break up my marriage for a product, for a company? For something 5 or 6 people remember and everyone just takes for granted later (best outcome if your product is highly successful) Never. And it's told like something to be proud of. The american work memes are insane.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Microsoft minted thousands of multi-millionaires in the 1990s due to stock options. The Seattle Times wrote once that there were 10,000+ of them living in the Seattle area. Many were quite ordinary employees. Amazon has minted as many or more.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lsllc 5y ago
Ah the introduction of flat toolbars and the subsequent race to copy it (in MFC): https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/controls/toolbar/flattoolbar/article.php/c2535/Flat-Toolbar-requires-IE3.htm https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/controls/toolbar/flattoolbar/ar... Good times!
- linguae 5y ago
  This brings back memories of playing around with Visual Basic 6 as an 11 year old, trying to figure out how exactly Microsoft came up with the flat toolbars used in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office 97 while the toolbar controls provided by Visual Basic were the standard Windows 95 rows of buttons (though VB 6 itself used flat toolbars). Today I have no issues making flat toolbars even from scratch, but my 11 year-old self had no idea how to come up with them. Still, sometimes I miss being a kid.
- aendruk 5y ago
  What does “flat” mean here? I tried looking up screenshots of this but they just look… normal.
  - Kwpolska 5y ago
    The non-flat toolbars had each button separate, with its own border. IE 3 did away with the borders. (Also seen in Office 97 vs 95, for example.) Compare the screenshots: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/Internet_Explorer_3_on_Windows_95.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/Internet_Expl... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Internet_Explorer_2.PNG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Internet_Expl... or in Office: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Office_97_on_Windows_NT_4.0.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Office_97_on_... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Office_95_on_Windows_NT_4.0.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Office_95_on_...
  - laumars 5y ago
    From a modern perspective they might. But that is because these days everyone designs flat toolbars. However in the early days of OS design each button on the toolbar looked like a distinct button. Microsoft then flattened the buttons while keeping a bevel on the toolbar itself (latter even that would disappear) — which is the effect being discussed here. Back in the 90s there used to be a great discussion over the flat design (aka Microsoft) vs skeuomorphic design (aka Apple) in terms of usability with most designers vocally preferring skeuomorphic citing usability as their reasons. Albeit some did still think Apple took their use skeuomorphic design too far. It’s funny how flat design eventually won out across all platforms and not just at Microsoft and Apple; later Google with Cardboard (et al) too. In the 90s this was quite a hot topic of debate.
warning26 5y ago
> Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it thought “we won.” (...) Years later, Internet Explorer would plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web developers. Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget how good earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a punchline, but there really was something to it; IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support. Abandoning it after they "won" was really a testament to the hubris of 90s-era Microsoft.
- twoodfin 5y ago
  My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities. You can imagine that a development culture like the one described in this Twitter thread would have a near-allergic reaction to working in an environment where the lawyers had to clear every major enhancement. Microsoft management wasn’t excited about pushing that rock up hill either, given their market dominance.
  - magicalist 5y ago
    > My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities. Not sure where you got this impression, but not the case. The IE team was largely retasked to work on OS features that actually did have DOJ oversight.
- hannob 5y ago
  > IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support. Faster may be, but certainly not more extensive CSS support. I vividly remember that I desperately wanted to use plenty of CSS features that worked in Mozilla/Netscape and were part of the standard, but there was no hope at ever using them, because IE was the market leader and after IE 6 Microsoft didn't bother to implement anything for many years to come.
linguae 5y ago
From Hadi Partovi's thread: "The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working! "Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it." Unfortunately these extreme work hours seems to be prevalent in our industry. Steve Jobs' "90 hours a week and loving it!" T-shirt from the early 1980's is a legend, and I remember reading about the history of the Apple Newton and how the very long work hours spent on that project broke up families and even led an engineer to suicide (https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream-engineer-s-nightmare.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream...). When I was a graduate student, I've seen people boast about their 90-hour work weeks. Thankfully I've been fortunate to work at places where it's okay to work a normal 40-hour week, but I've heard of places where working long hours is not only the norm, it's encouraged. I understand being passionate; sometimes I stay up very late working on side projects. But when work conflicts with health and with family, something has to give. I would love to hear stories of products that were successful and where the engineers and other people who contributed to that success were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.
- GrumpyNl 5y ago
  He forgot to mention that it wasnt a "great" product, they left us frontend developers with several headaches.
  - x0x0 5y ago
    ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time. My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall. By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of netscape to work around bugs.
earthscienceman 5y ago
I don't think people indoctrinated in tech culture can understand just how weird something like this reads. All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me. I can't imagine ruining my family for a paycheck so I could say I developed the 3rd version of MS' web browser.
- kerng 5y ago
  That's a fair point. Funny how without these efforts the web and technologies pretty much the entire world used over the last two decades would probably have been very, very different - I'm not judging better or worse. In fact Microsoft as a company might not even be relevant anymore without what these folks did. Sun, Netscape and Corel might rule the IT world today.
- whoisthemachine 5y ago
  Agreed. As I read the lines on the long hours and resultant divorces, all I could think of was "...and for what? A better browser?". Certainly IE advanced the state of the art at the time, but if Microsoft hadn't won the browser wars and Netscape had remained dominant and inched along with incremental improvements, we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    > we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later. or maybe a bit earlier if MS hadn't won but just been a credible competitor and then something like Opera came along - a 3 way race would probably have evolved things quicker.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      Like those overplanted baby forests that grow up quicker.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kristianp 5y ago
IE 4 was better than Netscape, partly because Netscape dropped the ball around version 4. Someone can correct me, but I think after ns3 they decided to re-implement a lot of the user interface code which caused a big delay and allowed IE to pull ahead.
- coldacid 5y ago
  There were a LOT of boneheaded decisions around "Communicator" 4, some of which had nothing to do with the user interface. Netscape management had lost its way after Navigator 3 was released.
- lkramer 5y ago
  In the 90s, I disliked Microsoft with the passion and irrationality you can only really drum up with teenagers. (I continued to somewhat dislike them, even through the mild good guys years, and feel somewhat vindicated by where Windows 10/11 has been going). I think I must have been one of the last hold outs for Netscape, but around 2000 even I could not justify using it anymore. (It was also a dark period for the Linux Desktop since until Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came around a good chunk of the internet was not usable there). In the end it was a terrible browser, and IE was clearly on a different planet in terms of just working better. I feel these days I'm expected to make the same choice with Chromium based browsers vs Firefox, though the difference this time around is that I feel Firefox is genuinely a better product (for my needs).
aparsons 5y ago
The IE effort was gargantuan - it was not NT in terms of sheer difficulty, but 1) we had built operating systems before NT, but never a web browser, and 2) Microsoft wanted to keep it under wraps as much as they could. The IE team had a carte blanche to succeed by any means necessary. If they wanted a system call to work differently, you had to get it done or risk getting a meeting with your boss’ angry boss.
- sharikous 5y ago
  Interesting. I would have thought that the state of the web 25 years ago was such that a browser would be a rather simple endeavor. Especially with a company with products like MS Word.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    Sure, the standards-based web was quite simple 25 years ago. But of course that's not the web that Netscape and Microsoft cared about. Netscape and Microsoft were engaged in a land rush to extend the web into their proprietary platforms. If they could grab enough marketshare, they'd get to define the web's direction. Initially it was Netscape in the driver's seat, but by 1999 Microsoft had taken control. It was an opportunity to invent everything from scratch. There was no standard styling, no standard DOM, no standard plug-in API, no standard programming language... Solutions and answers that seem predetermined in hindsight were anything but. For example, Netscape was pushing their own scripting language initially called LiveScript but then rebranded into JavaScript as part of a Sun partnership. Meanwhile Microsoft's browser supported multiple programming languages that could access a common object model: you could program web pages in VBScript, or Microsoft's own JavaScript look-a-like "JScript", or other languages not yet defined. Maybe a language-agnostic model would have been better for the web than JavaScript dominance? We might have had something like WebAssembly much sooner. We'll never know. But the answer to these design challenges certainly were not obvious in 1996 to engineers at either browser company.
ilovwindows 5y ago
Many people might not know, but early version of IE was built on top of Mosaic, the first web browser, created by same people who built Netscape Navigator. Also, IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator but it was shipped free with Windows OS.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  > IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator But it surely did help.
- hulitu 5y ago
  IE was not better than navigator. Everybody i know would use netscape instead of IE. IE won because it was shipped with the OS and some people will not bother to download something else.
TroisM 5y ago
since then, I rarely used IE...
rapdangsfamily 5y ago
What are you an elitist cunt?

121 points by kuu 5y ago

I remember the news (think it was on Techcrunch) when MS disbanded the IE team. Even from far away it seemed like such a clear as day stupid decision. IE 6 was a buggy mess and everyone knew and hated it. And then they just ... walked away.

figbert 5y ago

Here it is on Thread Reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426587396343099397.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426587396343099397.html

dt3ft 5y ago
Thank you! This format should have been the first choice. I simply can't fathom why people post an article on twitter. Every sentence is a tweet, so that what, people can "like" each sentence? I wish people would stop using twitter for this type of data...

piker 5y ago

> Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it. Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few millions today, but that's some price.

LanceJones 5y ago
Ugh... that term, "broken families". I divorced when my sons were 10 and 7, and the divorce actually healed our family.
- joophro 5y ago
  Cope. It didn’t for your kids.
  - dang 5y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Given it was 25 years ago this would have been the mid 90s. They are probably multi millionaires but more so for simply getting MS stock rather than being personally rewarded for their efforts. After all this was already a big company with a lot of structure. Your compensation was likely based mostly on your role and level rather than the personal contribution you made to the company, and a lot of the gain you realized would have been from the general growth of Microsoft share price.
rasz 5y ago
Best guess glory aka "exposure" aka nothing. As Hadi wrote >Instead of hiring too fast, we kept a super-high bar for talent, betting that everybody would want to work for this new exclusive team at Microsoft that was so hard to get into. It worked. This is Bill from 1985 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... >After exchanging a few pleasantries, and telling me how much the Macintosh mattered to Microsoft, he looked me in the eye and said, "You're a really good programmer, right? I think you must be a really good programmer." >"I guess so," I responded, not understanding why he was attempting to flatter me. >"Well, I think you are. How long do you think it will take to do this project? A month or two? I think a really good programmer like you could get it done in less than two months." Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse.
- rambambram 5y ago
  > Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse. Yeah indeed. Go look into cluster B personality disorders and look for the similarities between this behavior you mention and the behaviors of psychopaths or bad narcissists. It's an eye opener for good/naive people.
verall 5y ago
In some industries, people crunch, and everyone knows. It is very much considered to be a part of the job, and people that don't have their heads in sand are aware during hiring. Apple compensates very well but certainly knows how to push their engineers. The reward is to remain on a very rich boat during a fast-rising tide. Highly compensated software developers that have never had to crunch in their careers are lucky. And academics go through their own gauntlets...
- hedberg10 5y ago
  This passage struck me as so sad. Was IE worth that? Would I break up my marriage for a product, for a company? For something 5 or 6 people remember and everyone just takes for granted later (best outcome if your product is highly successful) Never. And it's told like something to be proud of. The american work memes are insane.
WalterBright 5y ago
Microsoft minted thousands of multi-millionaires in the 1990s due to stock options. The Seattle Times wrote once that there were 10,000+ of them living in the Seattle area. Many were quite ordinary employees. Amazon has minted as many or more.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lsllc 5y ago

Ah the introduction of flat toolbars and the subsequent race to copy it (in MFC): https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/controls/toolbar/flattoolbar/article.php/c2535/Flat-Toolbar-requires-IE3.htm https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/controls/toolbar/flattoolbar/ar... Good times!

linguae 5y ago
This brings back memories of playing around with Visual Basic 6 as an 11 year old, trying to figure out how exactly Microsoft came up with the flat toolbars used in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office 97 while the toolbar controls provided by Visual Basic were the standard Windows 95 rows of buttons (though VB 6 itself used flat toolbars). Today I have no issues making flat toolbars even from scratch, but my 11 year-old self had no idea how to come up with them. Still, sometimes I miss being a kid.
aendruk 5y ago
What does “flat” mean here? I tried looking up screenshots of this but they just look… normal.
- Kwpolska 5y ago
  The non-flat toolbars had each button separate, with its own border. IE 3 did away with the borders. (Also seen in Office 97 vs 95, for example.) Compare the screenshots: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/Internet_Explorer_3_on_Windows_95.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/Internet_Expl... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Internet_Explorer_2.PNG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Internet_Expl... or in Office: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Office_97_on_Windows_NT_4.0.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Office_97_on_... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Office_95_on_Windows_NT_4.0.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Office_95_on_...
- laumars 5y ago
  From a modern perspective they might. But that is because these days everyone designs flat toolbars. However in the early days of OS design each button on the toolbar looked like a distinct button. Microsoft then flattened the buttons while keeping a bevel on the toolbar itself (latter even that would disappear) — which is the effect being discussed here. Back in the 90s there used to be a great discussion over the flat design (aka Microsoft) vs skeuomorphic design (aka Apple) in terms of usability with most designers vocally preferring skeuomorphic citing usability as their reasons. Albeit some did still think Apple took their use skeuomorphic design too far. It’s funny how flat design eventually won out across all platforms and not just at Microsoft and Apple; later Google with Cardboard (et al) too. In the 90s this was quite a hot topic of debate.

warning26 5y ago

> Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it thought “we won.” (...) Years later, Internet Explorer would plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web developers. Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget how good earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a punchline, but there really was something to it; IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support. Abandoning it after they "won" was really a testament to the hubris of 90s-era Microsoft.

twoodfin 5y ago
My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities. You can imagine that a development culture like the one described in this Twitter thread would have a near-allergic reaction to working in an environment where the lawyers had to clear every major enhancement. Microsoft management wasn’t excited about pushing that rock up hill either, given their market dominance.
- magicalist 5y ago
  > My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities. Not sure where you got this impression, but not the case. The IE team was largely retasked to work on OS features that actually did have DOJ oversight.
hannob 5y ago
> IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support. Faster may be, but certainly not more extensive CSS support. I vividly remember that I desperately wanted to use plenty of CSS features that worked in Mozilla/Netscape and were part of the standard, but there was no hope at ever using them, because IE was the market leader and after IE 6 Microsoft didn't bother to implement anything for many years to come.

linguae 5y ago

From Hadi Partovi's thread: "The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working! "Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it." Unfortunately these extreme work hours seems to be prevalent in our industry. Steve Jobs' "90 hours a week and loving it!" T-shirt from the early 1980's is a legend, and I remember reading about the history of the Apple Newton and how the very long work hours spent on that project broke up families and even led an engineer to suicide (https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream-engineer-s-nightmare.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream...). When I was a graduate student, I've seen people boast about their 90-hour work weeks. Thankfully I've been fortunate to work at places where it's okay to work a normal 40-hour week, but I've heard of places where working long hours is not only the norm, it's encouraged. I understand being passionate; sometimes I stay up very late working on side projects. But when work conflicts with health and with family, something has to give. I would love to hear stories of products that were successful and where the engineers and other people who contributed to that success were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.

GrumpyNl 5y ago
He forgot to mention that it wasnt a "great" product, they left us frontend developers with several headaches.
- x0x0 5y ago
  ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time. My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall. By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of netscape to work around bugs.

earthscienceman 5y ago

I don't think people indoctrinated in tech culture can understand just how weird something like this reads. All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me. I can't imagine ruining my family for a paycheck so I could say I developed the 3rd version of MS' web browser.

kerng 5y ago
That's a fair point. Funny how without these efforts the web and technologies pretty much the entire world used over the last two decades would probably have been very, very different - I'm not judging better or worse. In fact Microsoft as a company might not even be relevant anymore without what these folks did. Sun, Netscape and Corel might rule the IT world today.
whoisthemachine 5y ago
Agreed. As I read the lines on the long hours and resultant divorces, all I could think of was "...and for what? A better browser?". Certainly IE advanced the state of the art at the time, but if Microsoft hadn't won the browser wars and Netscape had remained dominant and inched along with incremental improvements, we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  > we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later. or maybe a bit earlier if MS hadn't won but just been a credible competitor and then something like Opera came along - a 3 way race would probably have evolved things quicker.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Like those overplanted baby forests that grow up quicker.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kristianp 5y ago

IE 4 was better than Netscape, partly because Netscape dropped the ball around version 4. Someone can correct me, but I think after ns3 they decided to re-implement a lot of the user interface code which caused a big delay and allowed IE to pull ahead.

coldacid 5y ago
There were a LOT of boneheaded decisions around "Communicator" 4, some of which had nothing to do with the user interface. Netscape management had lost its way after Navigator 3 was released.
lkramer 5y ago
In the 90s, I disliked Microsoft with the passion and irrationality you can only really drum up with teenagers. (I continued to somewhat dislike them, even through the mild good guys years, and feel somewhat vindicated by where Windows 10/11 has been going). I think I must have been one of the last hold outs for Netscape, but around 2000 even I could not justify using it anymore. (It was also a dark period for the Linux Desktop since until Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came around a good chunk of the internet was not usable there). In the end it was a terrible browser, and IE was clearly on a different planet in terms of just working better. I feel these days I'm expected to make the same choice with Chromium based browsers vs Firefox, though the difference this time around is that I feel Firefox is genuinely a better product (for my needs).

aparsons 5y ago

The IE effort was gargantuan - it was not NT in terms of sheer difficulty, but 1) we had built operating systems before NT, but never a web browser, and 2) Microsoft wanted to keep it under wraps as much as they could. The IE team had a carte blanche to succeed by any means necessary. If they wanted a system call to work differently, you had to get it done or risk getting a meeting with your boss’ angry boss.

sharikous 5y ago
Interesting. I would have thought that the state of the web 25 years ago was such that a browser would be a rather simple endeavor. Especially with a company with products like MS Word.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Sure, the standards-based web was quite simple 25 years ago. But of course that's not the web that Netscape and Microsoft cared about. Netscape and Microsoft were engaged in a land rush to extend the web into their proprietary platforms. If they could grab enough marketshare, they'd get to define the web's direction. Initially it was Netscape in the driver's seat, but by 1999 Microsoft had taken control. It was an opportunity to invent everything from scratch. There was no standard styling, no standard DOM, no standard plug-in API, no standard programming language... Solutions and answers that seem predetermined in hindsight were anything but. For example, Netscape was pushing their own scripting language initially called LiveScript but then rebranded into JavaScript as part of a Sun partnership. Meanwhile Microsoft's browser supported multiple programming languages that could access a common object model: you could program web pages in VBScript, or Microsoft's own JavaScript look-a-like "JScript", or other languages not yet defined. Maybe a language-agnostic model would have been better for the web than JavaScript dominance? We might have had something like WebAssembly much sooner. We'll never know. But the answer to these design challenges certainly were not obvious in 1996 to engineers at either browser company.

ilovwindows 5y ago

Many people might not know, but early version of IE was built on top of Mosaic, the first web browser, created by same people who built Netscape Navigator. Also, IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator but it was shipped free with Windows OS.

Semaphor 5y ago
> IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator But it surely did help.
hulitu 5y ago
IE was not better than navigator. Everybody i know would use netscape instead of IE. IE won because it was shipped with the OS and some people will not bother to download something else.

TroisM 5y ago

since then, I rarely used IE...

rapdangsfamily 5y ago

What are you an elitist cunt?