10 ms·

Thoughts on the fading away of the age of IE

37 points by socrateslee 3y ago

tempaway5345 3y ago
First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update. This can't be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren't as frequent as Chrome's The answer of why IE hung around for so long probably has to do with corporate intranets and Microsofts huge enterprise customers needing to preserve backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is one of Microsoft's strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them. The answer of why it lost to Chrome is that Chrome was a very strong entrant in the battle from day 1 of its release. Remember the Chrome launch comic? https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
- ifdefdebug 3y ago
  As of the article, major version updates only with new versions of windows. And "why it lost to Chrome is that Chrome was a very strong entrant" begs the question.
- wheybags 3y ago
  Windows updates could be turned off back then. And often was
- hooby 3y ago
  > Backwards compatibility is one of Microsoft's strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them. I know that Microsoft in general puts a lot of thought and resources into backwards compatibility. But the thing is, with IE, I never felt it. Back in the day, whenever a new version of IE came out, so much stuff would break, and the whole company would scramble to get everything fixed and compatible again - and getting things to work on multiple versions of IE simultaneously (and flawlessly) was such a pain. We never had any similar problems with Firefox or Chrome... those updates never hurt as much. IE was the only browser, where new versions would cause all-hands-on-deck meetings...
- daveoc64 3y ago
  >This can't be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren't as frequent as Chrome's It was typically the case that Internet Explorer major version updates were optional, so you could use IE6 on Windows XP SP3, despite IE8 being out at that time. IE6 was actually supported until 2016 on embedded versions of Windows XP!
hooby 3y ago
There's many company-intern intranet applications still in use out there, which rely on old IE features like ActiveX and whatnot. Afaik, older versions of .NET came with features that required IE. Also Asia always was and to my knowledge still is using a lot of IE - not sure about the reason why. A little history lesson: * Netscape wanted to dominate the web, gain a monopoly and gain full control. * IE came late to the party - long after Netscape was already established * MS invested a *ton* of resources to catch up, rapid development pace, quick updates, constantly new features and improvements * MS too wanted dominance and full control of the web * MS gained marked share through "dirty tricks" leveraging their OS dominance * MS got repeatedly sued for unfair competition, paid large sums, paid lip-service to the courts but never truly changed their strategy * that hurt Netscape but didn't kill it * what killed off Netscape was their own doing: a costly code rewrite, that took way to much time and delivered subpar results * Microsoft won, they had what they wanted: full control of the web, and the power to shape it however they saw fit * they did nothing. they just stuck with IE6, no new features or improvements for years, even bugfixes and security fixes became really slow. all momentum was lost. * Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape - MS still did nothing. * Firefox gained significant market share - that finally kicked MS into gear * MS re-started updating and improving IE - but they were technologically behind and had to play catch-up again * Chrome entered the ring and boosted the pace of development * IE never fully caught up * Chrome gained full dominance of the market - but unlike IE did not slow down development * MS tried all their dirty tricks again - but they still continued to loose market share * they rebranded IE to Edge (still using the same render engine, but dropping backwards compatibility) * they dropped their own render engine, and switched to using webkit * despite even more dirty tricks, no breakthrough success in terms of market share I believe the fading of IE pretty much started with Microsoft resting on their (un-earned) laurels, after Netscape died. And yes, that's even before IE peaked - while they still had upwards momentum.
- SpecialistK 3y ago
  That timeline all seems pretty accurate, but I'm unsure about EdgeHTML or Spartan or whatever it was called being "still the same render engine" - do you have more on that?
franciscop 3y ago
When I was a younger (and more-foolish) web dev few years ago, already well in the decline of IE, I met someone much older who said he was one of the developers of IE. He must have seen it coming in my face from my grin, or he had experience on the topic, so he quickly reminded me of something that was absolutely true; back then when IE was released it WAS at the top of web tech development, the problem came with the trail of users still active years/decades later, since the tech itself was pretty good when it was released. Sure in some releases they might not have been literally the best, and they did employ shady techniques, but it's true that they were always technically advanced and competent releases.
- cpach 3y ago
  I guess IE’s reputation was also shaded by the reputation of Microsoft. The Microsoft back in the 90s and early 00s was IMHO, not a very nice company. But how they have evolved! For someone starting out with Linux in the 90s I could never dream of Microsoft being a part of the open source ecosystem. In my book, Satya Nadella has been a very good steward of his company.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Personally, I preferred the Microsoft of the 90s and 00s who were concerned about getting my money at the cash register. These days, Microsoft are concerned about getting my money at my god damn desk every second of the god damn day.
    - xattt 3y ago
      Announcing Microsoft Nickel & Dime 365! No fiddling with “purchases” or “subscriptions”. Everything you earn is transferred directly to us!
  - samhuk 3y ago
    > But how they have evolved! I'de disagree with that statement as some of their moves (such as purchasing GitHub) could be equally viewed as part of their typical EEE strategy that permeated the entire business. WSL could also be, and indeed is by many, viewed the same way ("Microsoft is just trying to pseudo-own the linux ecosystem by embedding it within Windows"). Personally, seeing how EEE permeated the entire business in the infamous 90's & 00's era Microsoft and all of the dirty laundry that ended up being aired, I don't doubt for a second that the current-era Microsoft is just as bad, but better at hiding it. Apples don't fall far from the tree. Fool me once...
mindvirus 3y ago
It's pretty remarkable that Firefox and Chrome were able to succeed over a web browser that came installed on everyone's devices. A person had to use IE to go and find another software that does the same thing. And for a browser, there is relatively little UI to begin with - it's mostly an empty box to view websites. The technical folks are used to that, but the majority of market share is non technical people. The "be 10x better" paradigm is especially hard when it's your empty white box versus mine. Thinking back, I suspect adblocking and pop-up blocking was a big part. The IE era web was extremely user hostile, with pop-up windows and pop-behind windows everywhere. And Firefox* offered a solution to it by blocking those, which I think was hard for Microsoft to follow due to their partnerships with major websites. Tabs were another, but I think that was less important. * Then Mozilla, and Opera did it first
- dagaci 3y ago
  OS bundling is way overrated, historically. People choose the bundled item when they are literally forced to by the vendor, in the way Apple does. Netscape won the original Browser wars because it was better and faster and smarter. Over time it became slow and bloated as Netscape literally tried to bundle an OS into its browser. The original IE was faster and smarter than Netscape Navigator, people literally made conspiracy theories about why it was faster. Microsoft stopped developing IE effectively, then Open-Sourced Firefox came along to challenge, but it was inherited from the same Netscape codebase and made minimal market progress at the time. Google suddenly came out with Chrome, it was faster, smarter, and cleaner than IE and others. And worked best with google. Microsoft controlled the OS, but it did not control the web, and in various ways the web said use "Chrome" because Chrome was better.
  - RyanHamilton 3y ago
    >>OS bundling is way overrated >>the web said use "Chrome" because Chrome was better I think you may be ignoring that google bundled chrome on android and "bundled" it with every web platform they owned. Youtube/gmail/maps etc. have suffered firefox incompatabilities and shown large pop ups suggesting users move to chrome. If bundling is overrated why do you think google created chrome in the first place? and continued to fund it and push it on their platforms for years?
tcper 3y ago
Browser in those days, is not a good business. IE6 sticks years no updates, watching Firefox or Chrome grab the market, because Microsoft do not gain 1 cent from browser software, they were waiting for Google's bad luck. Until a decade later, everybody saw browser's value.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  Browser in any period is not a good business. I don"t think any business has made money on building and supplying a browser. So they have to get the money back from somewhere. Google from getting you to use other google things and getting more advertising revenue. MS by making you use Windows (yes IE was available for the Mac but I think that was to keep Apple afloat to stop anti-trust problems). Apple first to get out of IE and then to get a browser on iOS and then not have to use Chrome and now get paid by Google to use its search engine. Possibly blocking Flash also was a reason. Netscape - well that is the problem where do they get revenue - Google paying them to be the default search and probably to head off anti-trust. Opera? Vivaldi - from payments from search engines to use them and from clients why pay for bookmarks. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ I used OmniWeb on NeXT and OSX and did pay for that but they could not compete so not profitable.
samhuk 3y ago
I'm too young to be any kind of oracle on IE and it's history, however I'm personally glad that IE was already fading away by the time I began my software engineering career. This is because, from the stories I've heard from older colleagues, IE rapidly turned into another loser EEE Microsoft boondoggle; trying to own the ecosystem and crush competition by: 1. Moving standards so fast, so randomly, and so opaquely, that nobody can keep up. 2. Abusing market share and WinOS (then sued for it) 3. Etc... In my eyes, IE was never going to recover from all of that bad blood. It was ill-fated and doomed to die once greed took a hold.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  I think the biggest pain of IE was there were few standards at all and the ones it did support it moved extremely slowly on. E.g. if you wanted to something as basic as add a drop shadow to an element you would do it with a DirectX filter. Sure, it was available before a standards process figured it out... but implemented in such a proprietary way Microsoft didn't even bother trying to put such functionality into the version of IE for Mac. In the meantime, anyone that wanted to move to the much simpler CSS way had to write two versions to do so as it took IE a long time to get the standards implementations and then a long time for the users to actually upgrade.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Microsoft itself should never recover from this bad blood either. When you get a bully on the ground, you keep kicking and you don’t stop. Otherwise they’ll just come back and make you wish you’d never been born.
le-mark 3y ago
Why did IE last so long and refuse to die? Simple: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7”> During the oughts a lot of large companies had a lot of applications written using Microsoft DHTML “behaviors” and other specific tech. At an insurance company I worked on an app in the late teens that required IE7 and moving that to Chrome/Firefox was a 4 developers for 6 months effort. Which was actually really good since no one thought it could be done. Many of these companies “standardized” on ie11 and wouldn’t even install chrome or Firefox. That’s why IE lasted so long.
- hinkley 3y ago
  I think people forget how much query played a role in peeling the fingers of IE’s death grip away as well. Better alternatives plus compatibility layers. There are lots of antiquated techs that deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history, but I feel like some people have done jquery dirty by pretending that we never needed it in the first place.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    jQuery?
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Looks like autocorrect got one but not the second, yes.
dan_m2k 3y ago
An interesting retrospective and nice to read, though I had to chuckle at "soft" discs. Is 'floppy' now considered offensive? I started my web dev career when MSIE was accelerating and achieved crazy levels of dominance. Developing for IE was shit. I mean, I was never out of work, but the wasted time figuring out which quirk you were coding around was, frankly, ridiculous when you look back on it. But you had an arsenal of workarounds and techniques which that generation of developer fantastic problem-solvers and have lots of initiative. Despite how they did it, it is essential that nobody in or around the industry forgets how good MSIE was for mainstream adoption of the internet/www. It literally made it so that everyone was online. This was when the beige box in the corner was your window to the www and very few people had that kind of connectivity in their pocket. Reflecting on how MS achieved dominance and then essentially backburnered MSIE development really befuddles me to this day. Some of the thoughts in the comments make sense; Was it arrogance and MS seriously thought Win32/.NET would remain dominant? Or simply that they'd dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre?
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Or simply that they'd dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre? You aren't entirely wrong; Microsoft tripped over themselves trying to get XP's successor out of development hell. It was five years from Windows XP to Windows Vista, compared to one to two years between Windows releases up to XP. And then as we all know, Windows Vista completely flopped because it was too advanced for its time. It took eight years from Windows XP to Windows 7 until Microsoft finally had a new Windows release that people would come out and buy. In a way, they really were too busy elsewhere to care about IE.
CodesInChaos 3y ago
I wonder if we will have to handle more outdated browsers soon, now that Chrome dropped support for Windows 7/8 and older Androids.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Windows 7 is already down to ~3% of Desktop browsers on Windows and Android 6 or older represent even less than that as a share of the Android version. 2-3 browsers out of 100 probably spells trouble for e.g. government sites but by the time these are outdated enough versions to cause real concern for normal sites it might even be down farther. When IE 8 was still 30% of the share it made sense to put the extra time into it, when legacy become so low the opportunity cost of holding the whole site years back or maintaining multiple versions is hard to justify.
h0l0cube 3y ago
What we need now is the fading away of Windows Outlook and its Word based html renderer. Emails need to start using conditional rendering to show an “Outlook is no longer supported. Please upgrade to Thunderbird” message
- incrudible 3y ago
  Hard no, HTML in emails should be kept at bay as much as possible. If that means supporting a weird subset of Word HTML, so be it.
  - h0l0cube 3y ago
    The state of affairs is html. Just broken, outdated, and wildly inconsistent
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      I think they are saying they'd rather it stay outdated and broken so people are disincentivized to make complex emails. Dunno I agree, but they seem aware its already in use and just dislike it.
      - h0l0cube 3y ago
        It's hard to actually know precisely why they are resistant to HTML in emails just by the comment. Seems like just a vibe
- zamadatix 3y ago
  The new Outlook client is WebView2 (Edge, i.e. Chromium) based. It will be replacing the consumer focused Mail app in Windows as well, which I think was using the original Edge (non-Chromium) WebView.
  - h0l0cube 3y ago
    Right. Well I'm just going to suggest to clients that we use <div>s from now on and see if anyone complains.
bbmhg 3y ago
[flagged]
andrewstuart 3y ago
Some companies simply stop advancing when they’ve “won”.
zamadatix 3y ago
Just this morning I accidentally found an ancient (well, recently updated but never rebuilt), quoting tool I use from Intangi has an embedded web view when you click the help button. Being an old school 32 bit Windows app, I had a suspicion it was still IE based so I started browsing around their help site for a bit, trying to find a way out to a search engine where I could go to a page of my choosing. To make a long story short I used the path: Intangi help -> Intangi search -> Intangi forum post with a GitHub link -> GitHub's legal notice pages -> a link to the Creative Commons license on the CC website -> CC main page -> CC search in the bottom right -> a search and CC blog post for a collaborating with Google from 2013 -> The link to the Google page about the collaboration -> some generic Google intermediary page with a Google products listing -> the Google search page. In all of this most pages except the Intangi pages and the Google search page were broken somewhere between unrecognizable to "I'm surprised anything loaded at all" with a ton of JS script error messages along the way, which is why it wasn't as simple as GitHub search -> Google Search. This gave me the hint it wasn't the usual system IE 11 rather some kind of legacy embed. Searching for my user agent led me to see it was reporting itself as IE7 and running the ACID2 test did indeed show the failed rendering I'd expect from IE7. This gave me quite the chuckle as it was as a kid it wasn't until the Internet Explorer 8 betas in early 2008 when the idea the browser was just a loadable program and I there might be others that are better hit me... and this was predating even that! Props to whoever at Google insists on maintaining legacy versions of the search page. At this point it's just the main home page, search results are new and somewhat broken for old browsers, but it's still something. It even works when I load up an early IPv6 development stack into NT 4! And let me tell you, there are very few sites using IPv6 which work in browsers that old.
socrateslee 3y ago
I have been thinking about two questions for a long time. First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Because it came bundled with Windows and because the internet was designed for IE. You can see that even today: Chrome is bundled with Android, and the internet is designed for Chrome. >Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Because IE, and specifically IE6, was a product of 2001. When Firefox (NOT Chrome) finally usurped the throne, it was because almost five years had passed since IE6 had released and the technologies for the internet and computers in general were being held back by what was then an ancient decrepit relic that was IE6. Firefox introduced (mostly) W3C compliant (X)HTML, advanced CSS, JavaScript, tabbed browsing (nonchalantly stolen from Opera), and browser extensions/plugins among other things. Firefox was plain better than IE6 which at that point was frozen ancient technology, and Firefox usurped the throne from IE6. Microsoft's kneejerk reactions that were IE7 onwards and Trident!Edge came far too slow far too late and they never recovered from the loss. Now you're probably asking why Chrome is the dominant monopoly browser today, and that answer is also easy: Chrome incorporated what Firefox introduced but marketed themselves more aggressively, continued to improve where Firefox languished upon obtaining the throne, and for better or worse threw out a lot of conventional computer nerd traditions which ultimately made for a more performant browser in line with common user desires.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    > Now you're probably asking why Chrome is the dominant monopoly browser today, and that answer is also easy: Chrome incorporated what Firefox introduced but marketed themselves more aggressively That's one way of putting it. But I think the article indirectly explained it better: > We know that binding IE with Windows is the key to IE’s domination of the browser market. Google did a similar thing with Chrome. They bound it to Google's services. You got nagged every time you visited www.google.com. Understandably google's more advanced stuff didn't work with IE. But it also often didn't work with Firefox. This is what mozilla had to say about that https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... : A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption. He is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations in the past eight months; however, his allegations span far beyond current events and accuse Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.

37 points by socrateslee 3y ago

First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update. This can't be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren't as frequent as Chrome's The answer of why IE hung around for so long probably has to do with corporate intranets and Microsofts huge enterprise customers needing to preserve backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is one of Microsoft's strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them. The answer of why it lost to Chrome is that Chrome was a very strong entrant in the battle from day 1 of its release. Remember the Chrome launch comic? https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

ifdefdebug 3y ago
As of the article, major version updates only with new versions of windows. And "why it lost to Chrome is that Chrome was a very strong entrant" begs the question.
wheybags 3y ago
Windows updates could be turned off back then. And often was
hooby 3y ago
> Backwards compatibility is one of Microsoft's strengths but with IE it became a weakness for them. I know that Microsoft in general puts a lot of thought and resources into backwards compatibility. But the thing is, with IE, I never felt it. Back in the day, whenever a new version of IE came out, so much stuff would break, and the whole company would scramble to get everything fixed and compatible again - and getting things to work on multiple versions of IE simultaneously (and flawlessly) was such a pain. We never had any similar problems with Firefox or Chrome... those updates never hurt as much. IE was the only browser, where new versions would cause all-hands-on-deck meetings...
daveoc64 3y ago
>This can't be right though, because IE always had updates too, via Windows Update. Although they weren't as frequent as Chrome's It was typically the case that Internet Explorer major version updates were optional, so you could use IE6 on Windows XP SP3, despite IE8 being out at that time. IE6 was actually supported until 2016 on embedded versions of Windows XP!

hooby 3y ago

There's many company-intern intranet applications still in use out there, which rely on old IE features like ActiveX and whatnot. Afaik, older versions of .NET came with features that required IE. Also Asia always was and to my knowledge still is using a lot of IE - not sure about the reason why. A little history lesson: * Netscape wanted to dominate the web, gain a monopoly and gain full control. * IE came late to the party - long after Netscape was already established * MS invested a *ton* of resources to catch up, rapid development pace, quick updates, constantly new features and improvements * MS too wanted dominance and full control of the web * MS gained marked share through "dirty tricks" leveraging their OS dominance * MS got repeatedly sued for unfair competition, paid large sums, paid lip-service to the courts but never truly changed their strategy * that hurt Netscape but didn't kill it * what killed off Netscape was their own doing: a costly code rewrite, that took way to much time and delivered subpar results * Microsoft won, they had what they wanted: full control of the web, and the power to shape it however they saw fit * they did nothing. they just stuck with IE6, no new features or improvements for years, even bugfixes and security fixes became really slow. all momentum was lost. * Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape - MS still did nothing. * Firefox gained significant market share - that finally kicked MS into gear * MS re-started updating and improving IE - but they were technologically behind and had to play catch-up again * Chrome entered the ring and boosted the pace of development * IE never fully caught up * Chrome gained full dominance of the market - but unlike IE did not slow down development * MS tried all their dirty tricks again - but they still continued to loose market share * they rebranded IE to Edge (still using the same render engine, but dropping backwards compatibility) * they dropped their own render engine, and switched to using webkit * despite even more dirty tricks, no breakthrough success in terms of market share I believe the fading of IE pretty much started with Microsoft resting on their (un-earned) laurels, after Netscape died. And yes, that's even before IE peaked - while they still had upwards momentum.

SpecialistK 3y ago
That timeline all seems pretty accurate, but I'm unsure about EdgeHTML or Spartan or whatever it was called being "still the same render engine" - do you have more on that?

franciscop 3y ago

When I was a younger (and more-foolish) web dev few years ago, already well in the decline of IE, I met someone much older who said he was one of the developers of IE. He must have seen it coming in my face from my grin, or he had experience on the topic, so he quickly reminded me of something that was absolutely true; back then when IE was released it WAS at the top of web tech development, the problem came with the trail of users still active years/decades later, since the tech itself was pretty good when it was released. Sure in some releases they might not have been literally the best, and they did employ shady techniques, but it's true that they were always technically advanced and competent releases.

cpach 3y ago
I guess IE’s reputation was also shaded by the reputation of Microsoft. The Microsoft back in the 90s and early 00s was IMHO, not a very nice company. But how they have evolved! For someone starting out with Linux in the 90s I could never dream of Microsoft being a part of the open source ecosystem. In my book, Satya Nadella has been a very good steward of his company.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Personally, I preferred the Microsoft of the 90s and 00s who were concerned about getting my money at the cash register. These days, Microsoft are concerned about getting my money at my god damn desk every second of the god damn day.
  - xattt 3y ago
    Announcing Microsoft Nickel & Dime 365! No fiddling with “purchases” or “subscriptions”. Everything you earn is transferred directly to us!
- samhuk 3y ago
  > But how they have evolved! I'de disagree with that statement as some of their moves (such as purchasing GitHub) could be equally viewed as part of their typical EEE strategy that permeated the entire business. WSL could also be, and indeed is by many, viewed the same way ("Microsoft is just trying to pseudo-own the linux ecosystem by embedding it within Windows"). Personally, seeing how EEE permeated the entire business in the infamous 90's & 00's era Microsoft and all of the dirty laundry that ended up being aired, I don't doubt for a second that the current-era Microsoft is just as bad, but better at hiding it. Apples don't fall far from the tree. Fool me once...

mindvirus 3y ago

It's pretty remarkable that Firefox and Chrome were able to succeed over a web browser that came installed on everyone's devices. A person had to use IE to go and find another software that does the same thing. And for a browser, there is relatively little UI to begin with - it's mostly an empty box to view websites. The technical folks are used to that, but the majority of market share is non technical people. The "be 10x better" paradigm is especially hard when it's your empty white box versus mine. Thinking back, I suspect adblocking and pop-up blocking was a big part. The IE era web was extremely user hostile, with pop-up windows and pop-behind windows everywhere. And Firefox* offered a solution to it by blocking those, which I think was hard for Microsoft to follow due to their partnerships with major websites. Tabs were another, but I think that was less important. * Then Mozilla, and Opera did it first

dagaci 3y ago
OS bundling is way overrated, historically. People choose the bundled item when they are literally forced to by the vendor, in the way Apple does. Netscape won the original Browser wars because it was better and faster and smarter. Over time it became slow and bloated as Netscape literally tried to bundle an OS into its browser. The original IE was faster and smarter than Netscape Navigator, people literally made conspiracy theories about why it was faster. Microsoft stopped developing IE effectively, then Open-Sourced Firefox came along to challenge, but it was inherited from the same Netscape codebase and made minimal market progress at the time. Google suddenly came out with Chrome, it was faster, smarter, and cleaner than IE and others. And worked best with google. Microsoft controlled the OS, but it did not control the web, and in various ways the web said use "Chrome" because Chrome was better.
- RyanHamilton 3y ago
  >>OS bundling is way overrated >>the web said use "Chrome" because Chrome was better I think you may be ignoring that google bundled chrome on android and "bundled" it with every web platform they owned. Youtube/gmail/maps etc. have suffered firefox incompatabilities and shown large pop ups suggesting users move to chrome. If bundling is overrated why do you think google created chrome in the first place? and continued to fund it and push it on their platforms for years?

tcper 3y ago

Browser in those days, is not a good business. IE6 sticks years no updates, watching Firefox or Chrome grab the market, because Microsoft do not gain 1 cent from browser software, they were waiting for Google's bad luck. Until a decade later, everybody saw browser's value.

pasc1878 3y ago
Browser in any period is not a good business. I don"t think any business has made money on building and supplying a browser. So they have to get the money back from somewhere. Google from getting you to use other google things and getting more advertising revenue. MS by making you use Windows (yes IE was available for the Mac but I think that was to keep Apple afloat to stop anti-trust problems). Apple first to get out of IE and then to get a browser on iOS and then not have to use Chrome and now get paid by Google to use its search engine. Possibly blocking Flash also was a reason. Netscape - well that is the problem where do they get revenue - Google paying them to be the default search and probably to head off anti-trust. Opera? Vivaldi - from payments from search engines to use them and from clients why pay for bookmarks. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/ I used OmniWeb on NeXT and OSX and did pay for that but they could not compete so not profitable.

samhuk 3y ago

I'm too young to be any kind of oracle on IE and it's history, however I'm personally glad that IE was already fading away by the time I began my software engineering career. This is because, from the stories I've heard from older colleagues, IE rapidly turned into another loser EEE Microsoft boondoggle; trying to own the ecosystem and crush competition by: 1. Moving standards so fast, so randomly, and so opaquely, that nobody can keep up. 2. Abusing market share and WinOS (then sued for it) 3. Etc... In my eyes, IE was never going to recover from all of that bad blood. It was ill-fated and doomed to die once greed took a hold.

zamadatix 3y ago
I think the biggest pain of IE was there were few standards at all and the ones it did support it moved extremely slowly on. E.g. if you wanted to something as basic as add a drop shadow to an element you would do it with a DirectX filter. Sure, it was available before a standards process figured it out... but implemented in such a proprietary way Microsoft didn't even bother trying to put such functionality into the version of IE for Mac. In the meantime, anyone that wanted to move to the much simpler CSS way had to write two versions to do so as it took IE a long time to get the standards implementations and then a long time for the users to actually upgrade.
hinkley 3y ago
Microsoft itself should never recover from this bad blood either. When you get a bully on the ground, you keep kicking and you don’t stop. Otherwise they’ll just come back and make you wish you’d never been born.

le-mark 3y ago

Why did IE last so long and refuse to die? Simple: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7”> During the oughts a lot of large companies had a lot of applications written using Microsoft DHTML “behaviors” and other specific tech. At an insurance company I worked on an app in the late teens that required IE7 and moving that to Chrome/Firefox was a 4 developers for 6 months effort. Which was actually really good since no one thought it could be done. Many of these companies “standardized” on ie11 and wouldn’t even install chrome or Firefox. That’s why IE lasted so long.

hinkley 3y ago
I think people forget how much query played a role in peeling the fingers of IE’s death grip away as well. Better alternatives plus compatibility layers. There are lots of antiquated techs that deserve to be relegated to the dustbin of history, but I feel like some people have done jquery dirty by pretending that we never needed it in the first place.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  jQuery?
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Looks like autocorrect got one but not the second, yes.

dan_m2k 3y ago

An interesting retrospective and nice to read, though I had to chuckle at "soft" discs. Is 'floppy' now considered offensive? I started my web dev career when MSIE was accelerating and achieved crazy levels of dominance. Developing for IE was shit. I mean, I was never out of work, but the wasted time figuring out which quirk you were coding around was, frankly, ridiculous when you look back on it. But you had an arsenal of workarounds and techniques which that generation of developer fantastic problem-solvers and have lots of initiative. Despite how they did it, it is essential that nobody in or around the industry forgets how good MSIE was for mainstream adoption of the internet/www. It literally made it so that everyone was online. This was when the beige box in the corner was your window to the www and very few people had that kind of connectivity in their pocket. Reflecting on how MS achieved dominance and then essentially backburnered MSIE development really befuddles me to this day. Some of the thoughts in the comments make sense; Was it arrogance and MS seriously thought Win32/.NET would remain dominant? Or simply that they'd dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre?

Dalewyn 3y ago
>Or simply that they'd dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre? You aren't entirely wrong; Microsoft tripped over themselves trying to get XP's successor out of development hell. It was five years from Windows XP to Windows Vista, compared to one to two years between Windows releases up to XP. And then as we all know, Windows Vista completely flopped because it was too advanced for its time. It took eight years from Windows XP to Windows 7 until Microsoft finally had a new Windows release that people would come out and buy. In a way, they really were too busy elsewhere to care about IE.

CodesInChaos 3y ago

I wonder if we will have to handle more outdated browsers soon, now that Chrome dropped support for Windows 7/8 and older Androids.

zamadatix 3y ago
Windows 7 is already down to ~3% of Desktop browsers on Windows and Android 6 or older represent even less than that as a share of the Android version. 2-3 browsers out of 100 probably spells trouble for e.g. government sites but by the time these are outdated enough versions to cause real concern for normal sites it might even be down farther. When IE 8 was still 30% of the share it made sense to put the extra time into it, when legacy become so low the opportunity cost of holding the whole site years back or maintaining multiple versions is hard to justify.

h0l0cube 3y ago

What we need now is the fading away of Windows Outlook and its Word based html renderer. Emails need to start using conditional rendering to show an “Outlook is no longer supported. Please upgrade to Thunderbird” message

incrudible 3y ago
Hard no, HTML in emails should be kept at bay as much as possible. If that means supporting a weird subset of Word HTML, so be it.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  The state of affairs is html. Just broken, outdated, and wildly inconsistent
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    I think they are saying they'd rather it stay outdated and broken so people are disincentivized to make complex emails. Dunno I agree, but they seem aware its already in use and just dislike it.
    - h0l0cube 3y ago
      It's hard to actually know precisely why they are resistant to HTML in emails just by the comment. Seems like just a vibe
zamadatix 3y ago
The new Outlook client is WebView2 (Edge, i.e. Chromium) based. It will be replacing the consumer focused Mail app in Windows as well, which I think was using the original Edge (non-Chromium) WebView.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  Right. Well I'm just going to suggest to clients that we use <div>s from now on and see if anyone complains.

bbmhg 3y ago

[flagged]

andrewstuart 3y ago

Some companies simply stop advancing when they’ve “won”.

zamadatix 3y ago

Just this morning I accidentally found an ancient (well, recently updated but never rebuilt), quoting tool I use from Intangi has an embedded web view when you click the help button. Being an old school 32 bit Windows app, I had a suspicion it was still IE based so I started browsing around their help site for a bit, trying to find a way out to a search engine where I could go to a page of my choosing. To make a long story short I used the path: Intangi help -> Intangi search -> Intangi forum post with a GitHub link -> GitHub's legal notice pages -> a link to the Creative Commons license on the CC website -> CC main page -> CC search in the bottom right -> a search and CC blog post for a collaborating with Google from 2013 -> The link to the Google page about the collaboration -> some generic Google intermediary page with a Google products listing -> the Google search page. In all of this most pages except the Intangi pages and the Google search page were broken somewhere between unrecognizable to "I'm surprised anything loaded at all" with a ton of JS script error messages along the way, which is why it wasn't as simple as GitHub search -> Google Search. This gave me the hint it wasn't the usual system IE 11 rather some kind of legacy embed. Searching for my user agent led me to see it was reporting itself as IE7 and running the ACID2 test did indeed show the failed rendering I'd expect from IE7. This gave me quite the chuckle as it was as a kid it wasn't until the Internet Explorer 8 betas in early 2008 when the idea the browser was just a loadable program and I there might be others that are better hit me... and this was predating even that! Props to whoever at Google insists on maintaining legacy versions of the search page. At this point it's just the main home page, search results are new and somewhat broken for old browsers, but it's still something. It even works when I load up an early IPv6 development stack into NT 4! And let me tell you, there are very few sites using IPv6 which work in browsers that old.

socrateslee 3y ago

I have been thinking about two questions for a long time. First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Because it came bundled with Windows and because the internet was designed for IE. You can see that even today: Chrome is bundled with Android, and the internet is designed for Chrome. >Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Because IE, and specifically IE6, was a product of 2001. When Firefox (NOT Chrome) finally usurped the throne, it was because almost five years had passed since IE6 had released and the technologies for the internet and computers in general were being held back by what was then an ancient decrepit relic that was IE6. Firefox introduced (mostly) W3C compliant (X)HTML, advanced CSS, JavaScript, tabbed browsing (nonchalantly stolen from Opera), and browser extensions/plugins among other things. Firefox was plain better than IE6 which at that point was frozen ancient technology, and Firefox usurped the throne from IE6. Microsoft's kneejerk reactions that were IE7 onwards and Trident!Edge came far too slow far too late and they never recovered from the loss. Now you're probably asking why Chrome is the dominant monopoly browser today, and that answer is also easy: Chrome incorporated what Firefox introduced but marketed themselves more aggressively, continued to improve where Firefox languished upon obtaining the throne, and for better or worse threw out a lot of conventional computer nerd traditions which ultimately made for a more performant browser in line with common user desires.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  > Now you're probably asking why Chrome is the dominant monopoly browser today, and that answer is also easy: Chrome incorporated what Firefox introduced but marketed themselves more aggressively That's one way of putting it. But I think the article indirectly explained it better: > We know that binding IE with Windows is the key to IE’s domination of the browser market. Google did a similar thing with Chrome. They bound it to Google's services. You got nagged every time you visited www.google.com. Understandably google's more advanced stuff didn't work with IE. But it also often didn't work with Firefox. This is what mozilla had to say about that https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... : A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption. He is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations in the past eight months; however, his allegations span far beyond current events and accuse Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.