4 ms·

>Web3 is a nebulous term in the tech world used to describe a hypothetical future version of the internet that’s more decentralized than it is today and not dom

by 1970-01-01 4y ago

>Web3 is a nebulous term in the tech world used to describe a hypothetical future version of the internet that’s more decentralized than it is today and not dominated by a handful of powerful players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This is not some hypothetical version of the Internet. This was how it worked until the early 2000s. Google and Amazon weren't evil back then. Microsoft was actively developing IE and had good intentions after it won the browser war. Almost everything was decentralized.

danielvaughn 4y ago
Curious to hear about these good intentions from MS/IE after the browser wars. Honestly, not being sarcastic. From what I've heard they stopped innovating because they no longer had competition, until Firefox in the early 2000's.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  A lot of heavy lifting for e-commerce and online business was done by MS in this era. Here are some examples from MSDN: Auth design, process isolation, and why you should be using SSL and certs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/web-security-part-2-introducing-the-web-application-manager-client-authentication-options-and-process-isolation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... XML and XPath: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/the-xml-files-addressing-infosets-with-xpath https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... Introduction of .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/september/microsoft-net-framework-delivers-the-platform-for-an-integrated-service-oriented-web https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000...
  - hakre 4y ago
    IE didn't support XPath, a bit loose if style at all how the hrefs are dropping here.
  - JustLurking2022 4y ago
    As a .NET developer since the early days, it's purpose has always been to sell more Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. For the first 15 years, there was no official support for other platforms. More recently, the runtime is cross platform but many libraries only have support for MSFT products out of the box (e.g. WPF, or entity framework relying on external maintainers to write providers for most popular OSS DBs).
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    .NET exists because ms didn’t want to pay licenses Also, they had visual J++. That was a nice ide, with an embrace and extend strategy to be evil. The.NET history seems incomplete. I recall downloading .NET beta for FreeBSD in the 90s or maybe beginning of 2000. I can’t seem to find anything about this anymore
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  IE’s problem was that it was too successful and Netscape couldn’t keep up. Further, MS had shorty coding practices so IE was deeply ingrained into Windows. But IE set a whole lot of standards and pushed the web forward. The one complaint with IE was that at some point it stagnated. This was unlikely due to malice on MS’s part and more likely because once again, MS’s shitty coding standards meant it just couldn’t improve. One way to know this is true is the fact that even after IE was surpassed and rapidly losing market share, MS wasn’t able to bring it up to speed with its competitors. It had to create an entirely new browser to even try and come close.
- cenal 4y ago
  Anyone who remembers that era of Internet Explorer with positivity must have been on an island of consumer facing websites like Geocities and never had to deal with ActiveX websites.
pmarreck 4y ago
> Microsoft was actively developing IE and had good intentions after it won the browser war Ahahahaha yeahhh you lost me at that ridiculous and baseless claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... And speaking as someone who had to develop for it, making a site both IE-compatible (around versions 5 thru 8) AND compatible with any other browser LITERALLY DOUBLED THE WORKLOAD. They made absolutely no effort to conform to standards by design because it forced companies (and there were many) to develop "IE-primarily" sites. That experience alone gave me a lifetime of hate for Microsoft.
- micahdeath 4y ago
  And now Chrome does the same thing.
  - EugeneOZ 4y ago
    Could you please confirm it using caniuse.com? I don't see red squares often in the “Chrome” column there (only some really ancient versions).
    - hakre 4y ago
      Take this perspective: The less boxes in a row, the less complex. Can I use is biased towards feature creep. If not supporting a feature (in terms of not having it, not half implemented) would count and this would be visually faire represented, what we be your choice?
      - EugeneOZ 4y ago
        I’m not choosing a browser here, I’m saying that Chrome is not repeating the most fatal mistake of IE: implementing many APIs in their own way, often very different from the standard. Until recently, Safari was repeating the IE approach, but right now it looks like they turned to the road of sanity.
    - bytesandbots 4y ago
im-a-baby 4y ago
The web was more decentralized prior to the rise of Google and Amazon. But web3 specifically refers to a future version of the internet, not the past.
tluyben2 4y ago
As someone who worked on software from the 80s to today, I don't know about MS internally, but from the outside it definitely didn't feel like good intentions. It didn't help that interviews or articles with or about Gates or Ballmer were about destroying competitors. They have a trackrecord in those years of doing that at all cost and I believe IE was part of that strategy. I have never seen anything to the contrary, but happy to hear insider info to the contrary. A bit of time after they won, IE development basically stalled, which I see some people attribute to other things, but, again, where is the documentation this was not malice? Simply: we won, the rest is dead, why spend money on dev for something that doesn't make money? Isn't that the most obvious? ActiveX (while there was Java, oh boy J++) was another sign that there was no intention of making this open tech but just peddle more windows (granted, there was IE for Mac and Solaris, for a while). Again, I might be wrong, I had issues with MS in those days because of their behaviour which probably colors my memory, but reading back now, I was not alone in this. Maybe someone can point me in another direction with more documentation and proof instead of memories.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Ms was definitely evil. Vendor lock-in. They stole Java (.NET). They sabotaged Fahrenheit/chronos. Kept office formats proprietary. Did a smear campaign against Linux and open source in general. IE didn’t adhere to standards

danielvaughn 4y ago

Curious to hear about these good intentions from MS/IE after the browser wars. Honestly, not being sarcastic. From what I've heard they stopped innovating because they no longer had competition, until Firefox in the early 2000's.

1970-01-01 4y ago
A lot of heavy lifting for e-commerce and online business was done by MS in this era. Here are some examples from MSDN: Auth design, process isolation, and why you should be using SSL and certs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/web-security-part-2-introducing-the-web-application-manager-client-authentication-options-and-process-isolation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... XML and XPath: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/july/the-xml-files-addressing-infosets-with-xpath https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000... Introduction of .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000/september/microsoft-net-framework-delivers-the-platform-for-an-integrated-service-oriented-web https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2000...
- hakre 4y ago
  IE didn't support XPath, a bit loose if style at all how the hrefs are dropping here.
- JustLurking2022 4y ago
  As a .NET developer since the early days, it's purpose has always been to sell more Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. For the first 15 years, there was no official support for other platforms. More recently, the runtime is cross platform but many libraries only have support for MSFT products out of the box (e.g. WPF, or entity framework relying on external maintainers to write providers for most popular OSS DBs).
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  .NET exists because ms didn’t want to pay licenses Also, they had visual J++. That was a nice ide, with an embrace and extend strategy to be evil. The.NET history seems incomplete. I recall downloading .NET beta for FreeBSD in the 90s or maybe beginning of 2000. I can’t seem to find anything about this anymore
rhaway84773 4y ago
IE’s problem was that it was too successful and Netscape couldn’t keep up. Further, MS had shorty coding practices so IE was deeply ingrained into Windows. But IE set a whole lot of standards and pushed the web forward. The one complaint with IE was that at some point it stagnated. This was unlikely due to malice on MS’s part and more likely because once again, MS’s shitty coding standards meant it just couldn’t improve. One way to know this is true is the fact that even after IE was surpassed and rapidly losing market share, MS wasn’t able to bring it up to speed with its competitors. It had to create an entirely new browser to even try and come close.
cenal 4y ago
Anyone who remembers that era of Internet Explorer with positivity must have been on an island of consumer facing websites like Geocities and never had to deal with ActiveX websites.

pmarreck 4y ago

> Microsoft was actively developing IE and had good intentions after it won the browser war Ahahahaha yeahhh you lost me at that ridiculous and baseless claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... And speaking as someone who had to develop for it, making a site both IE-compatible (around versions 5 thru 8) AND compatible with any other browser LITERALLY DOUBLED THE WORKLOAD. They made absolutely no effort to conform to standards by design because it forced companies (and there were many) to develop "IE-primarily" sites. That experience alone gave me a lifetime of hate for Microsoft.

micahdeath 4y ago
And now Chrome does the same thing.
- EugeneOZ 4y ago
  Could you please confirm it using caniuse.com? I don't see red squares often in the “Chrome” column there (only some really ancient versions).
  - hakre 4y ago
    Take this perspective: The less boxes in a row, the less complex. Can I use is biased towards feature creep. If not supporting a feature (in terms of not having it, not half implemented) would count and this would be visually faire represented, what we be your choice?
    - EugeneOZ 4y ago
      I’m not choosing a browser here, I’m saying that Chrome is not repeating the most fatal mistake of IE: implementing many APIs in their own way, often very different from the standard. Until recently, Safari was repeating the IE approach, but right now it looks like they turned to the road of sanity.
  - bytesandbots 4y ago

im-a-baby 4y ago

The web was more decentralized prior to the rise of Google and Amazon. But web3 specifically refers to a future version of the internet, not the past.

tluyben2 4y ago

As someone who worked on software from the 80s to today, I don't know about MS internally, but from the outside it definitely didn't feel like good intentions. It didn't help that interviews or articles with or about Gates or Ballmer were about destroying competitors. They have a trackrecord in those years of doing that at all cost and I believe IE was part of that strategy. I have never seen anything to the contrary, but happy to hear insider info to the contrary. A bit of time after they won, IE development basically stalled, which I see some people attribute to other things, but, again, where is the documentation this was not malice? Simply: we won, the rest is dead, why spend money on dev for something that doesn't make money? Isn't that the most obvious? ActiveX (while there was Java, oh boy J++) was another sign that there was no intention of making this open tech but just peddle more windows (granted, there was IE for Mac and Solaris, for a while). Again, I might be wrong, I had issues with MS in those days because of their behaviour which probably colors my memory, but reading back now, I was not alone in this. Maybe someone can point me in another direction with more documentation and proof instead of memories.

jbverschoor 4y ago
Ms was definitely evil. Vendor lock-in. They stole Java (.NET). They sabotaged Fahrenheit/chronos. Kept office formats proprietary. Did a smear campaign against Linux and open source in general. IE didn’t adhere to standards