10 ms·

>and replace them with compatibility shims christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by th

>and replace them with compatibility shims christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Its so bombastic the US Justice department hauls your pepsi sipping CEO in for a round of slouching, hand-waving antitrust litigation but somehow you manage to make it out by smirking through interviews and the grace of a nation thats just awakening to the dawn of the internet. then fast forward 20 years later, your dumpster-fire web browser with all its lock-in and exploits still exists in the OS but the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software. So you sunset the horrorshow that was IE in favour of your competitors browser engine to power your new browser but the haggard burro of a thing you call an OS is so inextricably encumbered by your blues-traveler era nineties myopia you now need a team of H1B's to start writing shims and the burger from lunch feels like its starting to come back up... ...now eight years later whatever frankenstein browser you convinced yourself was a good idea to build is still nowhere near as popular as your competitors, and thats after you added built-in gaslighting to your search engine to dissuade anyone from even searching for your competitors browser. you even came up with your own prefix to force links in your daytime infomercial of an OS to open directly in your new pet browser but people still dont want to use it. heck, you routinely reset their default browser and the only thing its managed to do is galvanize what by all indicators is a nearly white-hot detest for your pet chrome that has 45 seconds of unavoidable fullscreen lecture on first load, built in ads and tours, and a weird buy now pay later feature.

michaelt 4y ago
> inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS Well, it's kind of explicable: It was at about that time Microsoft rolled out HTML Help, so they needed an HTML rendering engine on every PC to be able to read the documentation. Using a web browser as your native app's rendering engine is what all the cool kids are doing these days, so in a way they were just 15 years ahead of the curve.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  This is one of the reasons a lot of people see the Microsoft anti-trust suit as a mistake (in that it wasn't based on any sound legal theory, and history has shown that every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for it; essentially, the government stepped on the neck of one private company in an asymmetrical way because the administration at the time didn't like their face.)
  - dccoolgai 4y ago
    100 pct. They blew their powder on this, gave tech antitrust a bad name and let stuff 1000x worse go unchallenged for decades and now we are where we are.
  - testTED 4y ago
    Was it because they wanted cooperation on surveillance and other law enforcement projects from the winner-who-had-taken-all?
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Microsoft's antitrust suit was mostly about illegal business practices, wide bullying of vendors and OEMs to block conpetition. How was it not based on sound legal theory ? [Edit: I'm actually thinking of the EU lawsuit that was probably broader and better managed than the US one. Memories are now vague, it took me a while to even remember US and EU had different suits, but sure th US one was a lot worse in many aspects as Microsoft was on their home turf.] > every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for If you believe this, is the fault on those who smacked MS or the regulators who didn't smack the later violations ? Is your argument that a crime shouldn't be punished in the past if people fail to punish it later in the future ?
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      > Is your argument that a crime shouldn't be punished in the past if people fail to punish it later in the future ? Not precisely, but I do believe punishing one corporation and then not punishing their competition starts to smell a lot like using the force of the law to create an unfair market disadvantage.
PreInternet01 4y ago
> can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out Yup. And I can also imagine all the reasons why you dislike (to various extents, from mild to extreme hate) that. Yet, at the time, everyone was trying to do the exact same thing: capture the desktop. The mechanisms were different, but the end-objective all the same. There is an alternate universe where we're all running JavaStations. I kinda like this version...
- pantulis 4y ago
  And yet the desktop was somewhat captured not by IE+ActiveX controls but by Ajax technologies, another invention of IE. (And Flash, to another extent) Oh what days were those... Today we are all basically running JavascriptStations.
andrepd 4y ago
What an amazing read.
horsawlarway 4y ago
This is a very strange comment. Personally... I absolutely understand exactly how they ended up in this situation. There are actually several good reasons to embed the browser into the OS, the top two easily understood ones are... --- 1. They've put a lot of work into the browser, and they've shared many components of it with other tooling. EX: Internet EXPLORER and EXPLORER the file system browser don't share their name by mistake. They're so similar I can load the same COM addin in both. 2. From a pure usability perspective, it makes a boat load of sense to prevent a user from accidentally uninstalling the last browser on the machine. When dealing with edge cases and possible support calls, making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable. Safari is also not removable... for similar reasons. --- Further - I think it's actually a fairly good credit to MSFT that they're bothering with shims at all, and are maintaining a good chunk of compatibility for applications that were written literally decades ago. Both Google and Apples's approach to this would literally be: "We're so sorry, that's no longer supported and you're f*#$ed. Go upgrade, get your vendors to upgrade, or eat shit." MSFT isn't writing shims because they still need them... they're writing shims because they have enterprise customers who want them, and they actually give a fuck about that.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable. And, indeed, you can't remove Windows Update. Nor (in more recent versions) the Add or Remove Features component in Control Panel— er, sorry, the Settings app. So long as you can still re-install Internet Explorer without a web browser (which I think you have always been able to, ever since the days IE came in a box), there's no reason to stop you removing it. Microsoft did have legitimate reasons to integrate the browser engine in Windows 95, what with the whole Active Desktop, HTML Application, the-web-is-the-future schtick they were going for. But that isn't one of them.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > Google and Apples's ... and Linux (well, Ubuntu specifically). I'm staring down the need to upgrade from Ubuntu LTS 20.04 to Ubuntu LTS 22.04 because some software I maintain now relies on GLIBC v2.32, which is an absolute bear to back-port. The party line is "So just upgrade," but there's no guarantee my hardware is compatible with Ubuntu LTS 22.04 because the vendor doesn't support that config and I'm not really interested in dealing with all the joys of figuring out every fiddly-widget little config on a laptop to make it work myself. Microsoft is nearly unique in caring that much about backwards compatibility. It's the value-add they bring to the market these days relative to the competition.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dilippkumar 4y ago
> …you now need a team of H1B's to start writing shims… This was uncalled for. You could’ve just said engineers. For those of us in an unending battle with a broken immigration system every day of our lives for over a decade, this really rubs the wrong way.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Some HN comments are down right elitist bordering on xenofobic, assuming that only westerners must be responsible for writing the "good" consumer facing software everyone loves, and that the "boring" corporate software everyone hates or sees no use for must be written by unskilled immigrants from third world countries.
  - albatross13 4y ago
    [flagged]
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Hmm, I didn't feel like they were insulting the H1Bs themselves, just insulting the fact that Microsoft hires a ridiculous amount of them so they can treat the workers like crap and force them to do unpleasant grunt work like this
- 93po 4y ago
  Agree with other poster - I think he's criticizing the tech industry's abuse of workers who are immigrants, and their motivation to do so that's based on greed and profits and the power imbalance.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  He's probably a Midwestern engineer, if you know what I mean. Or someone not from a coastal state (or Texas).
- midoridensha 4y ago
quanticle 4y ago
but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Was Internet Explorer ever actually a core and critical part of Windows? Sure, Microsoft claimed that it was. But of course, they would have done that, given that the alternative was to admit that the Justice Department's argument was correct, and that Internet Explorer was being bundled in an anti-competitive manner to deprive Netscape of sales.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's been a long time. I'm trying to remember if they'd rewired things so the Help function actually ran atop the IE rendering agent, or if I'm thinking of MacOSX and Safari.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    The CHM viewer used for many help files is a webview, yeah.
- CodesInChaos 4y ago
  The webview control based on the internet explorer engine was rather important. Internet Explorer the application less so.
- dylan604 4y ago
  You could enter an http address into File Explore in place of the C:\ nonsense, and it would replace the folder view contents with the website. See, embedded at the core. /s
cuteboy19 4y ago
Describing the "nudges" as gaslighting is very funny indeed
mandeepj 4y ago
Hilarious! That's one way to describe history of three decades of that company.
justeleblanc 4y ago
Try to uninstall Safari from Mac OS or iOS, or Chrome from Android. Tell me how that works out for you.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- testTED 4y ago
  Google* Android
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Android always has a browser you can’t remove. It’s just not always chrome.
    - testTED 4y ago
      The OS needs a browser engine for its WebView, which many apps etc rely on. On non Google Android releases these can pretty easily be swapped. Possibly on Google Android as well.
      - skinnymuch 4y ago
        People are talking about no browser. Not swapping them
        testTED 4y ago
        Yes, I understand. I'm explaining that you need a WebView for basic functionality of many apps.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        The out of the box experience with Android is that you can not replace the OS browser. The fact that you can recompile AOSP to have a different browser is not particularly noteworthy, you could do that for any mandatory component.
dylan604 4y ago
>the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software. One of the marketing style slagging quote, "Internet Explorer. The most used browser to download another browser." I remember the first time a buddy said that to me, and it has aged oh so well.
rodgerd 4y ago
> christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Elsewhere on HN: Everyone should be forced to install Chrome because I can't be bothered testing against Safari and Firefox.
isoprophlex 4y ago
That was a great read. > daytime infomercial of an OS I'm not sure how you managed to write this post but I'm totally on board with the linguistic energy of it
j45 4y ago
Hubris? No such thing at that time. They had to find a way to get things done, which were breaking all the time. Imagine node breaking something every release but a web browser. There was little choice then, compared to too many options today. Firefox was able to be a bit more of a stable presence than the rest in that time. Devs had to manage every incompatibility between every tag implementation in every browser, especially ways to gracefully downgrade for older and older versions of IE especially in early B2B SaaS. Ironically, these skills have turned out to be incredibly valuable now for other applications for optimizing user experiences even if they're anonymous. It was that way for a long time that made browser makers learn the hard way why compatibility was a good thing and would not be less competitive. Looking forward to safari is everything on iOS going away soon. Thankfully such opinions of the past have to live with the fact that modern javascript apps in many ways, with AJAX calls were invented by Microsoft, no less for the online version of Microsoft Outlook.
stcroixx 4y ago
Here, here. To top it all off, the next generation of techies think the company that did this is one of the good ones and voluntarily use their software(VSCode?).

michaelt 4y ago

> inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS Well, it's kind of explicable: It was at about that time Microsoft rolled out HTML Help, so they needed an HTML rendering engine on every PC to be able to read the documentation. Using a web browser as your native app's rendering engine is what all the cool kids are doing these days, so in a way they were just 15 years ahead of the curve.

shadowgovt 4y ago
This is one of the reasons a lot of people see the Microsoft anti-trust suit as a mistake (in that it wasn't based on any sound legal theory, and history has shown that every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for it; essentially, the government stepped on the neck of one private company in an asymmetrical way because the administration at the time didn't like their face.)
- dccoolgai 4y ago
  100 pct. They blew their powder on this, gave tech antitrust a bad name and let stuff 1000x worse go unchallenged for decades and now we are where we are.
- testTED 4y ago
  Was it because they wanted cooperation on surveillance and other law enforcement projects from the winner-who-had-taken-all?
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Microsoft's antitrust suit was mostly about illegal business practices, wide bullying of vendors and OEMs to block conpetition. How was it not based on sound legal theory ? [Edit: I'm actually thinking of the EU lawsuit that was probably broader and better managed than the US one. Memories are now vague, it took me a while to even remember US and EU had different suits, but sure th US one was a lot worse in many aspects as Microsoft was on their home turf.] > every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for If you believe this, is the fault on those who smacked MS or the regulators who didn't smack the later violations ? Is your argument that a crime shouldn't be punished in the past if people fail to punish it later in the future ?
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > Is your argument that a crime shouldn't be punished in the past if people fail to punish it later in the future ? Not precisely, but I do believe punishing one corporation and then not punishing their competition starts to smell a lot like using the force of the law to create an unfair market disadvantage.

PreInternet01 4y ago

> can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out Yup. And I can also imagine all the reasons why you dislike (to various extents, from mild to extreme hate) that. Yet, at the time, everyone was trying to do the exact same thing: capture the desktop. The mechanisms were different, but the end-objective all the same. There is an alternate universe where we're all running JavaStations. I kinda like this version...

pantulis 4y ago
And yet the desktop was somewhat captured not by IE+ActiveX controls but by Ajax technologies, another invention of IE. (And Flash, to another extent) Oh what days were those... Today we are all basically running JavascriptStations.

andrepd 4y ago

What an amazing read.

horsawlarway 4y ago

This is a very strange comment. Personally... I absolutely understand exactly how they ended up in this situation. There are actually several good reasons to embed the browser into the OS, the top two easily understood ones are... --- 1. They've put a lot of work into the browser, and they've shared many components of it with other tooling. EX: Internet EXPLORER and EXPLORER the file system browser don't share their name by mistake. They're so similar I can load the same COM addin in both. 2. From a pure usability perspective, it makes a boat load of sense to prevent a user from accidentally uninstalling the last browser on the machine. When dealing with edge cases and possible support calls, making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable. Safari is also not removable... for similar reasons. --- Further - I think it's actually a fairly good credit to MSFT that they're bothering with shims at all, and are maintaining a good chunk of compatibility for applications that were written literally decades ago. Both Google and Apples's approach to this would literally be: "We're so sorry, that's no longer supported and you're f*#$ed. Go upgrade, get your vendors to upgrade, or eat shit." MSFT isn't writing shims because they still need them... they're writing shims because they have enterprise customers who want them, and they actually give a fuck about that.

wizzwizz4 4y ago
> making sure that the user has at least one application that can download files from the web is pretty damn reasonable. And, indeed, you can't remove Windows Update. Nor (in more recent versions) the Add or Remove Features component in Control Panel— er, sorry, the Settings app. So long as you can still re-install Internet Explorer without a web browser (which I think you have always been able to, ever since the days IE came in a box), there's no reason to stop you removing it. Microsoft did have legitimate reasons to integrate the browser engine in Windows 95, what with the whole Active Desktop, HTML Application, the-web-is-the-future schtick they were going for. But that isn't one of them.
shadowgovt 4y ago
> Google and Apples's ... and Linux (well, Ubuntu specifically). I'm staring down the need to upgrade from Ubuntu LTS 20.04 to Ubuntu LTS 22.04 because some software I maintain now relies on GLIBC v2.32, which is an absolute bear to back-port. The party line is "So just upgrade," but there's no guarantee my hardware is compatible with Ubuntu LTS 22.04 because the vendor doesn't support that config and I'm not really interested in dealing with all the joys of figuring out every fiddly-widget little config on a laptop to make it work myself. Microsoft is nearly unique in caring that much about backwards compatibility. It's the value-add they bring to the market these days relative to the competition.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dilippkumar 4y ago

> …you now need a team of H1B's to start writing shims… This was uncalled for. You could’ve just said engineers. For those of us in an unending battle with a broken immigration system every day of our lives for over a decade, this really rubs the wrong way.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Some HN comments are down right elitist bordering on xenofobic, assuming that only westerners must be responsible for writing the "good" consumer facing software everyone loves, and that the "boring" corporate software everyone hates or sees no use for must be written by unskilled immigrants from third world countries.
- albatross13 4y ago
  [flagged]
Firmwarrior 4y ago
Hmm, I didn't feel like they were insulting the H1Bs themselves, just insulting the fact that Microsoft hires a ridiculous amount of them so they can treat the workers like crap and force them to do unpleasant grunt work like this
93po 4y ago
Agree with other poster - I think he's criticizing the tech industry's abuse of workers who are immigrants, and their motivation to do so that's based on greed and profits and the power imbalance.
renewiltord 4y ago
He's probably a Midwestern engineer, if you know what I mean. Or someone not from a coastal state (or Texas).
midoridensha 4y ago

quanticle 4y ago

but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Was Internet Explorer ever actually a core and critical part of Windows? Sure, Microsoft claimed that it was. But of course, they would have done that, given that the alternative was to admit that the Justice Department's argument was correct, and that Internet Explorer was being bundled in an anti-competitive manner to deprive Netscape of sales.

shadowgovt 4y ago
It's been a long time. I'm trying to remember if they'd rewired things so the Help function actually ran atop the IE rendering agent, or if I'm thinking of MacOSX and Safari.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  The CHM viewer used for many help files is a webview, yeah.
CodesInChaos 4y ago
The webview control based on the internet explorer engine was rather important. Internet Explorer the application less so.
dylan604 4y ago
You could enter an http address into File Explore in place of the C:\ nonsense, and it would replace the folder view contents with the website. See, embedded at the core. /s

cuteboy19 4y ago

Describing the "nudges" as gaslighting is very funny indeed

mandeepj 4y ago

Hilarious! That's one way to describe history of three decades of that company.

justeleblanc 4y ago

Try to uninstall Safari from Mac OS or iOS, or Chrome from Android. Tell me how that works out for you.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
testTED 4y ago
Google* Android
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Android always has a browser you can’t remove. It’s just not always chrome.
  - testTED 4y ago
    The OS needs a browser engine for its WebView, which many apps etc rely on. On non Google Android releases these can pretty easily be swapped. Possibly on Google Android as well.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      People are talking about no browser. Not swapping them
      - testTED 4y ago
        Yes, I understand. I'm explaining that you need a WebView for basic functionality of many apps.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      The out of the box experience with Android is that you can not replace the OS browser. The fact that you can recompile AOSP to have a different browser is not particularly noteworthy, you could do that for any mandatory component.

dylan604 4y ago

>the average user sees it as nothing more than a glorified blue icon to immediately download what has become your direct competitors far more competent and meaningful execution of browser software. One of the marketing style slagging quote, "Internet Explorer. The most used browser to download another browser." I remember the first time a buddy said that to me, and it has aged oh so well.

rodgerd 4y ago

> christ can you imagine the raw hubris in 1995 to roll this out and inexplicably make it not only uninstallable by the user, but a core and critical functionality of your entire OS such that any attempt to sidestep or evade it would be met with ruination? Elsewhere on HN: Everyone should be forced to install Chrome because I can't be bothered testing against Safari and Firefox.

isoprophlex 4y ago

That was a great read. > daytime infomercial of an OS I'm not sure how you managed to write this post but I'm totally on board with the linguistic energy of it

j45 4y ago

Hubris? No such thing at that time. They had to find a way to get things done, which were breaking all the time. Imagine node breaking something every release but a web browser. There was little choice then, compared to too many options today. Firefox was able to be a bit more of a stable presence than the rest in that time. Devs had to manage every incompatibility between every tag implementation in every browser, especially ways to gracefully downgrade for older and older versions of IE especially in early B2B SaaS. Ironically, these skills have turned out to be incredibly valuable now for other applications for optimizing user experiences even if they're anonymous. It was that way for a long time that made browser makers learn the hard way why compatibility was a good thing and would not be less competitive. Looking forward to safari is everything on iOS going away soon. Thankfully such opinions of the past have to live with the fact that modern javascript apps in many ways, with AJAX calls were invented by Microsoft, no less for the online version of Microsoft Outlook.

stcroixx 4y ago

Here, here. To top it all off, the next generation of techies think the company that did this is one of the good ones and voluntarily use their software(VSCode?).