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That didn't make IE damaging. XMLHttpRequest pulled the web forward. What made IE damaging was that after it came pre-installed on Windows, it stopped progressi

That didn't make IE damaging. XMLHttpRequest pulled the web forward. What made IE damaging was that after it came pre-installed on Windows, it stopped progressing after IE6. It had a garbage collector that made very rich webapps nearly impossible. https://vinaytech.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/garbage-collection-in-ie6/ https://vinaytech.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/garbage-collectio... It had CSS bugs that weren't fixed for years. https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time/ https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time... It didn't implement features that web developers asked for and didn't even join the working group formed to standardize those features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG It had security issues that made it dangerous for people to use the web. Safari suffers from the last three of those problems, and Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd.

danaris 4y ago
Right, so you remember and bring up one of the very very few features IE introduced during that period that actually turned out to be helpful and beneficial, and you gloss over the many that were emphatically not. I notice you don't mention ActiveX as being something that "pulled the web forward".
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  ActiveX has had no impact whatsoever. How has it harmed the web platform? XHR, just like MSE, which the person who started this thread is asking for, expands the usability of the web in a vendor-neutral way. MSE, better than XHR, went through a standards process to ensure web publishers wanted it and browser vendors agreed on the API. There is no reason for Apple to drag its feet on implementing MSE on iPhones, aside from protecting Apple's profits. It is ridiculous to see people defending Apple about this.
WorldMaker 4y ago
It wouldn't have mattered if IE stopped progressing after IE6 given migration to other browsers, if there weren't so many "legacy" websites and apps stuck needing IE. Even in the worst days of IE stagnation Firefox and Chrome were only an install away. (And Chrome was busy using bad adware tactics to get as many installs as possible back in those days, but that's a different complaint in a different conversation.) What made IE truly damaging/dangerous was that before it stopped progressing it had lots of great "pull the web forward" features like XHR and CSS box-sizing that yesterday's developers wrote "bleeding edge" apps on that became those very same "legacy" sites and apps when the stagnation hit. While the web eventually standardized things like XHR and CSS box-sizing, they were done in ways that made migration of those "single browser apps" just slightly uncomfortable enough so companies especially procrastinated staying on the stagnant browser as long as possible to avoid paying down tech debt in their "legacy" apps. Today's "bleeding edge" apps are tomorrow's "legacy apps", and people aren't building "bleeding edge" apps for Safari [0], but they are building Chrome-only "bleeding edge" apps using all the little things that are like XHR in their own ways (WebUSB, Speech Recognition, what have you). The danger is that there are far too many of them. Again, I can't predict the future and I can't assume that Google execs are dumb enough to do the exact same thing that Microsoft did: check their (current!) marketshare, declare themselves the winner, and decide to finish Chrome as a project, moving the development team to more important tasks to the corporate bottom line. I want to believe that the pursuant stagnation would be less overall a dark period for the web because plenty of Chromium forks exist, but the install base is huge and convincing them all to switch to a fork would still be a massive marketing effort that wouldn't happen overnight. But stagnation is the consequence of the danger of people building single-browser apps, it's not the danger itself. The canaries (Safari, Firefox) are dying and blaming the canaries for being weak is avoiding asking hard questions about if the web is currently safe or not. > Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd. That is a different, unrelated problem than comparisons to IE. Even when pre-installed on Windows IE never stopped people from installing other browsers or setting them the default. It got real unfriendly about it in some versions of Windows, but it never (could have) blocked them entirely. That's still a problem to deal with, and maybe even a major problem, though these days iOS and Android are pretty neck-and-neck in the market and iOS does not have the domination it once had even in the US. But it's not at all the same problem as IE was. [0] Anymore; I will admit there was a brief period early in the rise of iOS with -webkit- prefixed everything where it was a small concern.

danaris 4y ago

Right, so you remember and bring up one of the very very few features IE introduced during that period that actually turned out to be helpful and beneficial, and you gloss over the many that were emphatically not. I notice you don't mention ActiveX as being something that "pulled the web forward".

lern_too_spel 4y ago
ActiveX has had no impact whatsoever. How has it harmed the web platform? XHR, just like MSE, which the person who started this thread is asking for, expands the usability of the web in a vendor-neutral way. MSE, better than XHR, went through a standards process to ensure web publishers wanted it and browser vendors agreed on the API. There is no reason for Apple to drag its feet on implementing MSE on iPhones, aside from protecting Apple's profits. It is ridiculous to see people defending Apple about this.

WorldMaker 4y ago

It wouldn't have mattered if IE stopped progressing after IE6 given migration to other browsers, if there weren't so many "legacy" websites and apps stuck needing IE. Even in the worst days of IE stagnation Firefox and Chrome were only an install away. (And Chrome was busy using bad adware tactics to get as many installs as possible back in those days, but that's a different complaint in a different conversation.) What made IE truly damaging/dangerous was that before it stopped progressing it had lots of great "pull the web forward" features like XHR and CSS box-sizing that yesterday's developers wrote "bleeding edge" apps on that became those very same "legacy" sites and apps when the stagnation hit. While the web eventually standardized things like XHR and CSS box-sizing, they were done in ways that made migration of those "single browser apps" just slightly uncomfortable enough so companies especially procrastinated staying on the stagnant browser as long as possible to avoid paying down tech debt in their "legacy" apps. Today's "bleeding edge" apps are tomorrow's "legacy apps", and people aren't building "bleeding edge" apps for Safari [0], but they are building Chrome-only "bleeding edge" apps using all the little things that are like XHR in their own ways (WebUSB, Speech Recognition, what have you). The danger is that there are far too many of them. Again, I can't predict the future and I can't assume that Google execs are dumb enough to do the exact same thing that Microsoft did: check their (current!) marketshare, declare themselves the winner, and decide to finish Chrome as a project, moving the development team to more important tasks to the corporate bottom line. I want to believe that the pursuant stagnation would be less overall a dark period for the web because plenty of Chromium forks exist, but the install base is huge and convincing them all to switch to a fork would still be a massive marketing effort that wouldn't happen overnight. But stagnation is the consequence of the danger of people building single-browser apps, it's not the danger itself. The canaries (Safari, Firefox) are dying and blaming the canaries for being weak is avoiding asking hard questions about if the web is currently safe or not. > Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd. That is a different, unrelated problem than comparisons to IE. Even when pre-installed on Windows IE never stopped people from installing other browsers or setting them the default. It got real unfriendly about it in some versions of Windows, but it never (could have) blocked them entirely. That's still a problem to deal with, and maybe even a major problem, though these days iOS and Android are pretty neck-and-neck in the market and iOS does not have the domination it once had even in the US. But it's not at all the same problem as IE was. [0] Anymore; I will admit there was a brief period early in the rise of iOS with -webkit- prefixed everything where it was a small concern.