5 ms·

> 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 j

> 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.
- laumars 5y ago
  That was several years later than what the GP was referring to. His point was accurate for IE3 and 4. While I would go on to loathe Internet Explorer, the early releases were actually pretty good. But this was Microsoft back when they had their “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy down as a finely honed art.
  - system2 5y ago
    I wonder how many websites were using CSS those days.
    - laumars 5y ago
      I was. But you had to do so many hacks because things like tables couldn’t be styled in CSS and tables were often the only way to style items on a page as div layers were still in their infancy.
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  That was easily not true for the early days of CSS. I still have memories of writing CSS for Netscape Navigator and finding it didn't follow the CSS standards in certain areas IE did. One example that I recall was the text-align property. Even early versions of IE correctly only applied that to text only and not certain other elements. Whereas for quite some time Netscape Navigator would align everything (including tables and the like). The Netscape behavior was exactly the same as what the old <center>...</center> tag did so I have a suspicion that Netscape took the lazy route and just applied the same code for text-align: center as for the <center> tag despite the very different behavior specified by the HTML and CSS standards! I acknowledge that Netscape did eventually fix this particular bug, although if my memory serves it took them in the order of years to fix. It was stuff like this which held back CSS adoption since CSS was a moving goal-post--browsers were fixing bugs and breaking layouts in the process! IE's incorrect box model big mistake for instance. I would also point out what may be a surprising fact to young people today: IE for Mac was the first browser to have full support for CSS Level 1 [1]. Opera (which had their own engine back in the day) was also pretty good from what I read. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption

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.

laumars 5y ago
That was several years later than what the GP was referring to. His point was accurate for IE3 and 4. While I would go on to loathe Internet Explorer, the early releases were actually pretty good. But this was Microsoft back when they had their “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy down as a finely honed art.
- system2 5y ago
  I wonder how many websites were using CSS those days.
  - laumars 5y ago
    I was. But you had to do so many hacks because things like tables couldn’t be styled in CSS and tables were often the only way to style items on a page as div layers were still in their infancy.
kiwijamo 5y ago
That was easily not true for the early days of CSS. I still have memories of writing CSS for Netscape Navigator and finding it didn't follow the CSS standards in certain areas IE did. One example that I recall was the text-align property. Even early versions of IE correctly only applied that to text only and not certain other elements. Whereas for quite some time Netscape Navigator would align everything (including tables and the like). The Netscape behavior was exactly the same as what the old <center>...</center> tag did so I have a suspicion that Netscape took the lazy route and just applied the same code for text-align: center as for the <center> tag despite the very different behavior specified by the HTML and CSS standards! I acknowledge that Netscape did eventually fix this particular bug, although if my memory serves it took them in the order of years to fix. It was stuff like this which held back CSS adoption since CSS was a moving goal-post--browsers were fixing bugs and breaking layouts in the process! IE's incorrect box model big mistake for instance. I would also point out what may be a surprising fact to young people today: IE for Mac was the first browser to have full support for CSS Level 1 [1]. Opera (which had their own engine back in the day) was also pretty good from what I read. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption