4 ms·

> 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

by 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
- hannob 5y ago
  Netscape changed massively between 4 and 6 (which was the first version based on the Mozilla codebase). AFAIR in 4 CSS support was very preliminary, while in 6 it was best what you could get at the time.
rasz 5y ago
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/look-back-history-css/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/look-back-history-css/ "While CSS was still just a draft, Netscape had pressed on with presentational HTML elements like multicol, layer, and the dreaded blink tag. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, had taken to incorporating some of CSS piecemeal. But their support was spotty and, at times, incorrect. Which means that by the early aughts, after five years of CSS as an official recommendation, there were still no browsers with full CSS support. That came from kind of a strange place. When Tantek Çelik joined Internet Explorer for Macintosh in 1997, his team was pretty small. A year later, he was made the lead developer of the rendering engine at the same as his team was cut in half. Most of the focus for Microsoft (for obvious reasons) was on the Windows version of Internet Explorer, and the Macintosh team was mostly left to their own devices. So Starting with the development of version 5 in 2000, Çelik and his team decided to put their focus where no one else was, CSS support. It would take the team two years to finish version 5. During this time, Çelik spoke frequently with members of the W3C and web designers using their browser. As each piece slid into place, the IE-for-Mac team verified on all fronts that they were getting things just right. Finally, in March of 2002, they shipped Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. The first browser with full CSS Level 1 support."

by hannob 5y ago

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

hannob 5y ago
Netscape changed massively between 4 and 6 (which was the first version based on the Mozilla codebase). AFAIR in 4 CSS support was very preliminary, while in 6 it was best what you could get at the time.

rasz 5y ago

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/look-back-history-css/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/look-back-history-css/ "While CSS was still just a draft, Netscape had pressed on with presentational HTML elements like multicol, layer, and the dreaded blink tag. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, had taken to incorporating some of CSS piecemeal. But their support was spotty and, at times, incorrect. Which means that by the early aughts, after five years of CSS as an official recommendation, there were still no browsers with full CSS support. That came from kind of a strange place. When Tantek Çelik joined Internet Explorer for Macintosh in 1997, his team was pretty small. A year later, he was made the lead developer of the rendering engine at the same as his team was cut in half. Most of the focus for Microsoft (for obvious reasons) was on the Windows version of Internet Explorer, and the Macintosh team was mostly left to their own devices. So Starting with the development of version 5 in 2000, Çelik and his team decided to put their focus where no one else was, CSS support. It would take the team two years to finish version 5. During this time, Çelik spoke frequently with members of the W3C and web designers using their browser. As each piece slid into place, the IE-for-Mac team verified on all fronts that they were getting things just right. Finally, in March of 2002, they shipped Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. The first browser with full CSS Level 1 support."