10 ms·

> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have the

> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use? You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? Microsoft has a loooong history of the behavior they still have, nothing is new here. Forcing people to use Microsoft EdgeXplorer? They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser. Don't act all surprised when a company who have been acting one way, continues to act that very way still.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago
> You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only". > But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives. I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff". Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    We often look at companies as a single monolith but that isn't conductive to productive discussions. OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one. One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the perspective.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      Maybe if they stopped trying to become monoliths, people would stop considering them as monoliths? What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously trying to do everything, via a centralized organization which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want to become, a monolith. Regardless of what other people in the organization is doing, the organization as a whole is represented by everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads, cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,
      - kbenson 3y ago
        That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because one state does something you don't agree with. In a large organization different departments may do different things and have different incentives, and until they overstep too much may have quite a bit of autonomy. Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.
        cumshitpiss 3y ago
        [dead]
        3y ago
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  > They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1]. [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--microsoft-settle-suit-in-billion-dollar-pact.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--micro...
  - DownGoat 3y ago
    I think he means the newer versions of the stack, from the release of .NET Core 1 in 2016 and onward.
    - jsiepkes 3y ago
      Ok, but even if it's about .NET Core; As far as I can tell the creation of .NET Core was a business decision and not because MS suddenly wanted to create a better product. More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - sn_master 3y ago
        Aside from the cost of licensing Windows which makes small-sized non-Windows VMs cheaper, there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.
        lokar 3y ago
        It’s a preference, not a bias
        jasonm23 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mikewarot 3y ago
  >They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example. C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.
  - JustSomeNobody 3y ago
    I spend all my time writing services and HALs and even when I do need a UI, it's in the browser, that I forget there are people who still code actual GUIs for Windows.
  - hirako2000 3y ago
    How so? Because they sort of open source the tech and made it possible to build for other platforms? C# is a great language taking over the advances of Java and C/++ making things a bit better, but intentions didn't make it any better: owning the devs. VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs Buy out of github, owning the devs Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals. Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
    - porker 3y ago
      > Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
- ayewo 3y ago
  > They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. And VSCode. One thing all three have in common is that they are all FREE to use--they don't make Microsoft any money directly. And, for the segment of the developer tools market that wrangles C# code, if VSCode gets too good, it becomes a threat to a cash cow: Visual Studio. Start here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#issuecomment-1157074523 https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#is...
  - giobox 3y ago
    The relationship between VSCode and commercial versions of Visual Studio is the worst part of .net, especially the omnisharp debacle. Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive Azure/cloud compute sales. VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight from a github repo page - I don't think you need a crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on their development machine - just pop a browser and get to work. > https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/github-vs-code.aspx https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/github-...
- shrubble 3y ago
  The "portable" language that doesn't run on FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, etc.?
  - 0x457 3y ago
    Uhm, I'm currently running abour 4 binaries that have that famous `exe` file extension on FreeBSD. C# runs on FreeBSD just fine. There is no bootstrap available for FreeBSD - must either cross-compile or use linux emulation.
- azangru 3y ago
  > They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. And typescript!
  - aksss 3y ago
    And Azure. But aside from C#, .Net, Typescript, and Azure, what have Romans done for us?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Yeah, I beg to differ about including Azure in that list.
      - Rury 3y ago
        No mentions of Excel? I still haven't found better spreadsheet software...
- stall84 3y ago
  Its interesting to look at their 'product' history b/c they have a few shining moments of 'getting it' as far as OP means. .NET especially realizing Linux was a real thing and to at least outwardly 'embrace' it.. Then there are moments like these the OP points to . I guess that's about .. literally.. average.
- olyjohn 3y ago
  Nobody said that they have never made a good product. But in no way does this mean that the company focus has been on making good products vs strong-arming their way into things.
- Teever 3y ago
  > But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives. People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to know squat about the internal org structure of some monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.
- javcasas 3y ago
  You think those licenses for Visual Studio and those Azure VMs sell themselves?
acidburnNSA 3y ago
Encarta 96 was incredible.
- fs111 3y ago
  100% agree, but it has been a while since that came out...
- therein 3y ago
  Spent countless hours on it as a child. I didn't even really know English. "Flight mode" was a lovely curiosity at that time. Example from Encarta 98, but I thought 96 also had it. https://youtu.be/7ytQQ4XdQmM?t=131 https://youtu.be/7ytQQ4XdQmM?t=131
tralarpa 3y ago
> They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser. Before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
- tanseydavid 3y ago
  To me, this is the proof that the dark patterns are a result of corporate culture that stretches all the way back to the DOS days. They simply cannot resist the urge to cheat in this manner.
atlanta90210 3y ago
“DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"
- rilindo 3y ago
  That is not accurate, incidentally. > "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft." > Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades? [0] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
- oldgradstudent 3y ago
  Speaking as a Lotus Notes survivor, it would have been really helpful if had prevented lotus notes from running on windows as well.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    Lotus notes was like the ultimate in write-only software.
maerF0x0 3y ago
> have they no pride or desire to become a great company Yes. But their definition of those terms are stuck in the 90s
cobbaut 3y ago
> Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?
- nick_kline 3y ago
  Like all big companies, when something comes along that is growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some of them they might spend lots of time and money building huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase product had a pretty nice sql language with stored procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far. It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots of new things over time - new execution system, new query optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Arguably, Microsoft is why a browser's user-agent is so useless for determining supported features. https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is: > And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
- recursive 3y ago
  Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why. You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could see someone arguing the other way, though. Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.
    - wolpoli 3y ago
      Switching to a system of "user agent claims" have been up to any one of the browsers, when they had a majority of marketshare, to push through. Mosaic/Netscape/IE all had a chance in the Web 1.0 world, unfortunately, none of them did.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

> You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.

capableweb 3y ago
> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only". > But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives. I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff". Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  We often look at companies as a single monolith but that isn't conductive to productive discussions. OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one. One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the perspective.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    Maybe if they stopped trying to become monoliths, people would stop considering them as monoliths? What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously trying to do everything, via a centralized organization which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want to become, a monolith. Regardless of what other people in the organization is doing, the organization as a whole is represented by everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads, cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,
    - kbenson 3y ago
      That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because one state does something you don't agree with. In a large organization different departments may do different things and have different incentives, and until they overstep too much may have quite a bit of autonomy. Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.
      - cumshitpiss 3y ago
        [dead]
      - 3y ago
jsiepkes 3y ago
> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1]. [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--microsoft-settle-suit-in-billion-dollar-pact.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--micro...
- DownGoat 3y ago
  I think he means the newer versions of the stack, from the release of .NET Core 1 in 2016 and onward.
  - jsiepkes 3y ago
    Ok, but even if it's about .NET Core; As far as I can tell the creation of .NET Core was a business decision and not because MS suddenly wanted to create a better product. More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sn_master 3y ago
      Aside from the cost of licensing Windows which makes small-sized non-Windows VMs cheaper, there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.
      - lokar 3y ago
        It’s a preference, not a bias
      - jasonm23 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikewarot 3y ago
>They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example. C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.
- JustSomeNobody 3y ago
  I spend all my time writing services and HALs and even when I do need a UI, it's in the browser, that I forget there are people who still code actual GUIs for Windows.
- hirako2000 3y ago
  How so? Because they sort of open source the tech and made it possible to build for other platforms? C# is a great language taking over the advances of Java and C/++ making things a bit better, but intentions didn't make it any better: owning the devs. VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs Buy out of github, owning the devs Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals. Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
  - porker 3y ago
    > Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
ayewo 3y ago
> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. And VSCode. One thing all three have in common is that they are all FREE to use--they don't make Microsoft any money directly. And, for the segment of the developer tools market that wrangles C# code, if VSCode gets too good, it becomes a threat to a cash cow: Visual Studio. Start here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#issuecomment-1157074523 https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#is...
- giobox 3y ago
  The relationship between VSCode and commercial versions of Visual Studio is the worst part of .net, especially the omnisharp debacle. Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive Azure/cloud compute sales. VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight from a github repo page - I don't think you need a crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on their development machine - just pop a browser and get to work. > https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/github-vs-code.aspx https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/github-...
shrubble 3y ago
The "portable" language that doesn't run on FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, etc.?
- 0x457 3y ago
  Uhm, I'm currently running abour 4 binaries that have that famous `exe` file extension on FreeBSD. C# runs on FreeBSD just fine. There is no bootstrap available for FreeBSD - must either cross-compile or use linux emulation.
azangru 3y ago
> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. And typescript!
- aksss 3y ago
  And Azure. But aside from C#, .Net, Typescript, and Azure, what have Romans done for us?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yeah, I beg to differ about including Azure in that list.
    - Rury 3y ago
      No mentions of Excel? I still haven't found better spreadsheet software...
stall84 3y ago
Its interesting to look at their 'product' history b/c they have a few shining moments of 'getting it' as far as OP means. .NET especially realizing Linux was a real thing and to at least outwardly 'embrace' it.. Then there are moments like these the OP points to . I guess that's about .. literally.. average.
olyjohn 3y ago
Nobody said that they have never made a good product. But in no way does this mean that the company focus has been on making good products vs strong-arming their way into things.
Teever 3y ago
> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives. People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to know squat about the internal org structure of some monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.
javcasas 3y ago
You think those licenses for Visual Studio and those Azure VMs sell themselves?

acidburnNSA 3y ago

Encarta 96 was incredible.

fs111 3y ago
100% agree, but it has been a while since that came out...
therein 3y ago
Spent countless hours on it as a child. I didn't even really know English. "Flight mode" was a lovely curiosity at that time. Example from Encarta 98, but I thought 96 also had it. https://youtu.be/7ytQQ4XdQmM?t=131 https://youtu.be/7ytQQ4XdQmM?t=131

tralarpa 3y ago

> They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser. Before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

tanseydavid 3y ago
To me, this is the proof that the dark patterns are a result of corporate culture that stretches all the way back to the DOS days. They simply cannot resist the urge to cheat in this manner.

atlanta90210 3y ago

“DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"

rilindo 3y ago
That is not accurate, incidentally. > "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft." > Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades? [0] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
oldgradstudent 3y ago
Speaking as a Lotus Notes survivor, it would have been really helpful if had prevented lotus notes from running on windows as well.
- tracker1 3y ago
  Lotus notes was like the ultimate in write-only software.

maerF0x0 3y ago

> have they no pride or desire to become a great company Yes. But their definition of those terms are stuck in the 90s

cobbaut 3y ago

> Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?

nick_kline 3y ago
Like all big companies, when something comes along that is growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some of them they might spend lots of time and money building huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase product had a pretty nice sql language with stored procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far. It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots of new things over time - new execution system, new query optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

Arguably, Microsoft is why a browser's user-agent is so useless for determining supported features. https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is: > And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.

recursive 3y ago
Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why. You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could see someone arguing the other way, though. Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.
  - wolpoli 3y ago
    Switching to a system of "user agent claims" have been up to any one of the browsers, when they had a majority of marketshare, to push through. Mosaic/Netscape/IE all had a chance in the Web 1.0 world, unfortunately, none of them did.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago