8 ms·

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing for

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs to Safari.

Semaphor 3y ago
Later, IE was also hated for being tied to the OS (which was related but different to the "not evolving"). Another thing Safari has. So yeah, I also fully agree. Safari is still the new IE.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  The reason IE was hated for being tied in the OS was because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all, just because the OS provides a JS engine out of the box doesn't make it Windows Me grade.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I disagree. It made it, so people with an older OS could not get a current IE. So you had ancient IE version linger for years and years. And with Safari, I can’t test any specific issues because we only have one mac, and it’s old and can’t run a current Safari. The situation is slightly better than with IE, as multiple macOS versions apparently (or so I was told) can run a newer Safari, but still not all.
  - TheDong 3y ago
    > because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all I mean, I've had iOS crash while using safari more often than I had windows 98 crash while using IE. At least back in the IE days, when a user found a site they couldn't open in IE, they could go download firefox. When a user encounters a websites that doesn't work on iOS safari, they can't download a different browser. Even worse, when you report the bug to the site owner (say your friend), they'll then say "Oh, sorry, I don't own an iPhone or macbook, so I'd have to pay $800+ to reproduce your bug", while with IE, it ran on basically any computer, and I think windows back then still had a trial version you could use for free.
- oblio 3y ago
  On a somewhat funny, somewhat related note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX It doesn't disprove your point, it's just a cute bit of trivia.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  If you downvote me, please tell me why my comment is wrong. Otherwise, no one learns anything.
- smcleod 3y ago
  IE was hated for being unreliable, lax on security and lacking in modern features. Safari / WebKit is incredibly performant and reliable with a modern feature set. Personally I’m not a fan of the UI but I guess it gets the job done.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I said "also hated", as in "in addition".
    - smcleod 3y ago
      Ah, my apologies, I must’ve misread.
mrtksn 3y ago
> I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when anything that's using some advanced API. IE was hated after the fact of cornering the whole marketshare and making the web developers build all the websites to work on IE only. Initially, IE was very innovative browser too and they were the inventor of technologies like Ajax, introduced in IE5. Back in the pre-hate days, the web developers loved IE and it's innovative ways that let them to cool stuff. Chrome being still innovative doesn't mean much. Once they make sure that websites are built to work in Chrome only, they can relax and stop spending money on it and increase profits and stock prices by rent seeking.
- oblio 3y ago
  As crazy as that sounds, IE had a better development team until IE6 basically killed off its competition. It was more stable than equivalent browsers, it had more features, I think it was even developed faster than competitors. Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. The "problem" is that the browser projects are organised as big monoliths with limited internal competition for the components. Although it isn't really a problem yet. Chrome works fine, and switching web browsers isn't hard to do. But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.
    - oblio 3y ago
cowsandmilk 3y ago
> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”. The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions. > IE was absolutely hated for not evolving IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-angers-web-standards-advocates/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  It might be surprising, but that is not an exhaustive list of what Chrome has been doing "recently".
- cubefox 3y ago
  Thanks for that link. Though I'm a bit confused by the date, wasn't IE6 already out by then?
ralfn 3y ago
>I'm curious what "its own vision" was Making Windows a requirement for the web. Things like ActiveX.
tarsinge 3y ago
Depends which of the two period: first it evolved a lot with custom features non available for competitors (that’s the phase Chrome is in). Then once everything was IE specific code and it achieved domination it stopped evolving. When people say Chrome is the new IE is to mean it’s on the same trajectory (IE early mid 00’s), not that it’s already at the IE6 in 2010 phase.
phpnode 3y ago
Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Ya, if I was told correctly by management at the time, Microsoft’s first large scale layoff (that would layoff people without perf reasons) was in the 2008. They actually moved a bunch of IE KLTO to China by the mid 2000s, and then took it back to Redmond in 2009/2010 when they realized chrome and Firefox were kicking their butts.
Fatnino 3y ago
When I learned html as a kid in 1998 IE was better than Netscape in my mind. Netscape had lame <blink> while IE had the very cool <marquee> instead.
- tommiegannert 3y ago
  Touché, the blink vs marquee was a big thing.
bartread 3y ago
> I'm curious what "its own vision" was Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so. So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out. You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result. Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc. You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage). IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off. Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too. And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be. Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do. Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.
onurcel 3y ago
To be accurate, IE was not hated by "end-users". It was hated by web developers (understandably) reluctant to support non-standard apis and by informed people.
- rvnx 3y ago
  If the API was used by 90%+ of the internet, then it was the standard.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It was also hated by many end users.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS. So they had a vision for a vector image markup, and that was what they did. SMIL-like extensions to HTML, and the use of behaviors in css were also part of their "vision" https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html visions, like ideas, are a dime a dozen - in a browser market it matters if your visions are standards because if not they break the web. IE's visions were not standardized and not supported by other browsers, they tried to instead do an end run around standardization. Chrome is the new IE. Chrome removing JPEG XL seems a pretty good indicator of that. Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things.
- codedokode 3y ago
  IE6 had a lot of bugs (not different vision of standards, but bugs). A kind of bugs that looked like developers were lazy to cover all possible cases. As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards. I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly. [1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time/#aa-the-double-margin-bug https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    I can see that article was from 2008, IE6 was release in 2001. So again on its initial release, IE6 was the best browser. Did it have bugs? You bet! Were those bugs as irritating as the ones in Netscape - well the XSL-T that was generating html for a site once put a p inside of an li and Netscape would blue screen my Windows machine 75% of the time when that happened, unfortunately it turns out you cannot do a quick CSS hack for that.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Perhaps the issue here is age? At the start IE was cutting edge, then MS didn't do anything useful with it for 10 years. Filters were certainly part of its own vision, AIR. MS seemed to innovate most in breaking hacks that helped to work around their "quirks".
helloooooooo 3y ago
Do end users hate Chrome? Or is this just the perspective bias of the crowds that frequent HN? It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.
- jen20 3y ago
  The thing they are doing right is being imposed upon people at every turn by every Google property, no?
  - helloooooooo 3y ago
    How? If I own a windows machine it comes with Edgium. If I own an apple machine it has Safari. If I use a desktop Linux distribution, it likely comes with Firefox. If I use a Chromebook, it comes with Chrome(which is highly integrated into the OS itself). Google isn’t imposing anything. Sure when you navigate to a Google site, it may nag you to download Chrome. Microsoft does the same on a Windows box. There is no imposition or compulsion involved.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Nagging is both imposition and compulsion.
- nerdix 3y ago
  Its pretty clear that isn't the case since there are viable alternatives and people have to go out of their way to install Chrome to begin with. If most people hated it, they would just install Firefox instead (or use Edge or Safari)
gumby 3y ago
> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it They do? That's quite a claim. I work with a number of people who were simply told that installing chrome is part of setting up your computer and don't really have any opinion -- "chrome" is the word for looking at a web page and "chrome is just how computers work". At least for the {desk,lap}top, I think that's the vast majority.
saiya-jin 3y ago
> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks). Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.
layer8 3y ago
> I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Yep, for various usability reasons, I used IE as my daily driver until Windows updates disabled it. Never liked Chrome. Using Firefox now.
throw_m239339 3y ago
> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.
aaa_aaa 3y ago
No it was not hated for evolving. It was hated because it made banks and many web sites enforcing people to use Windows. Chrome is nowhere near it.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  "It was hated because it made banks force people to use Windows"? For all IE's weaknesses, it didn't "make" banks do any such thing. They chose that.
pg_1234 3y ago
> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. Chrome is doing worse than not evolving ... ... it is evolving towards evil. Compared to this, stasis would be a blessing.

Semaphor 3y ago

Later, IE was also hated for being tied to the OS (which was related but different to the "not evolving"). Another thing Safari has. So yeah, I also fully agree. Safari is still the new IE.

mrtksn 3y ago
The reason IE was hated for being tied in the OS was because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all, just because the OS provides a JS engine out of the box doesn't make it Windows Me grade.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I disagree. It made it, so people with an older OS could not get a current IE. So you had ancient IE version linger for years and years. And with Safari, I can’t test any specific issues because we only have one mac, and it’s old and can’t run a current Safari. The situation is slightly better than with IE, as multiple macOS versions apparently (or so I was told) can run a newer Safari, but still not all.
- TheDong 3y ago
  > because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all I mean, I've had iOS crash while using safari more often than I had windows 98 crash while using IE. At least back in the IE days, when a user found a site they couldn't open in IE, they could go download firefox. When a user encounters a websites that doesn't work on iOS safari, they can't download a different browser. Even worse, when you report the bug to the site owner (say your friend), they'll then say "Oh, sorry, I don't own an iPhone or macbook, so I'd have to pay $800+ to reproduce your bug", while with IE, it ran on basically any computer, and I think windows back then still had a trial version you could use for free.
oblio 3y ago
On a somewhat funny, somewhat related note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX It doesn't disprove your point, it's just a cute bit of trivia.
Semaphor 3y ago
If you downvote me, please tell me why my comment is wrong. Otherwise, no one learns anything.
smcleod 3y ago
IE was hated for being unreliable, lax on security and lacking in modern features. Safari / WebKit is incredibly performant and reliable with a modern feature set. Personally I’m not a fan of the UI but I guess it gets the job done.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I said "also hated", as in "in addition".
  - smcleod 3y ago
    Ah, my apologies, I must’ve misread.

mrtksn 3y ago

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when anything that's using some advanced API. IE was hated after the fact of cornering the whole marketshare and making the web developers build all the websites to work on IE only. Initially, IE was very innovative browser too and they were the inventor of technologies like Ajax, introduced in IE5. Back in the pre-hate days, the web developers loved IE and it's innovative ways that let them to cool stuff. Chrome being still innovative doesn't mean much. Once they make sure that websites are built to work in Chrome only, they can relax and stop spending money on it and increase profits and stock prices by rent seeking.

oblio 3y ago
As crazy as that sounds, IE had a better development team until IE6 basically killed off its competition. It was more stable than equivalent browsers, it had more features, I think it was even developed faster than competitors. Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.
- roenxi 3y ago
  OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. The "problem" is that the browser projects are organised as big monoliths with limited internal competition for the components. Although it isn't really a problem yet. Chrome works fine, and switching web browsers isn't hard to do. But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.
  - oblio 3y ago

cowsandmilk 3y ago

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”. The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions. > IE was absolutely hated for not evolving IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-angers-web-standards-advocates/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.

madeofpalk 3y ago
It might be surprising, but that is not an exhaustive list of what Chrome has been doing "recently".
cubefox 3y ago
Thanks for that link. Though I'm a bit confused by the date, wasn't IE6 already out by then?

ralfn 3y ago

>I'm curious what "its own vision" was Making Windows a requirement for the web. Things like ActiveX.

tarsinge 3y ago

Depends which of the two period: first it evolved a lot with custom features non available for competitors (that’s the phase Chrome is in). Then once everything was IE specific code and it achieved domination it stopped evolving. When people say Chrome is the new IE is to mean it’s on the same trajectory (IE early mid 00’s), not that it’s already at the IE6 in 2010 phase.

phpnode 3y ago

Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Ya, if I was told correctly by management at the time, Microsoft’s first large scale layoff (that would layoff people without perf reasons) was in the 2008. They actually moved a bunch of IE KLTO to China by the mid 2000s, and then took it back to Redmond in 2009/2010 when they realized chrome and Firefox were kicking their butts.

Fatnino 3y ago

When I learned html as a kid in 1998 IE was better than Netscape in my mind. Netscape had lame <blink> while IE had the very cool <marquee> instead.

tommiegannert 3y ago
Touché, the blink vs marquee was a big thing.

bartread 3y ago

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so. So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out. You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result. Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc. You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage). IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off. Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too. And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be. Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do. Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.

onurcel 3y ago

To be accurate, IE was not hated by "end-users". It was hated by web developers (understandably) reluctant to support non-standard apis and by informed people.

rvnx 3y ago
If the API was used by 90%+ of the internet, then it was the standard.
JohnFen 3y ago
It was also hated by many end users.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

>IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS. So they had a vision for a vector image markup, and that was what they did. SMIL-like extensions to HTML, and the use of behaviors in css were also part of their "vision" https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html visions, like ideas, are a dime a dozen - in a browser market it matters if your visions are standards because if not they break the web. IE's visions were not standardized and not supported by other browsers, they tried to instead do an end run around standardization. Chrome is the new IE. Chrome removing JPEG XL seems a pretty good indicator of that. Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things.

codedokode 3y ago
IE6 had a lot of bugs (not different vision of standards, but bugs). A kind of bugs that looked like developers were lazy to cover all possible cases. As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards. I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly. [1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time/#aa-the-double-margin-bug https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  I can see that article was from 2008, IE6 was release in 2001. So again on its initial release, IE6 was the best browser. Did it have bugs? You bet! Were those bugs as irritating as the ones in Netscape - well the XSL-T that was generating html for a site once put a p inside of an li and Netscape would blue screen my Windows machine 75% of the time when that happened, unfortunately it turns out you cannot do a quick CSS hack for that.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

Perhaps the issue here is age? At the start IE was cutting edge, then MS didn't do anything useful with it for 10 years. Filters were certainly part of its own vision, AIR. MS seemed to innovate most in breaking hacks that helped to work around their "quirks".

helloooooooo 3y ago

Do end users hate Chrome? Or is this just the perspective bias of the crowds that frequent HN? It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.

jen20 3y ago
The thing they are doing right is being imposed upon people at every turn by every Google property, no?
- helloooooooo 3y ago
  How? If I own a windows machine it comes with Edgium. If I own an apple machine it has Safari. If I use a desktop Linux distribution, it likely comes with Firefox. If I use a Chromebook, it comes with Chrome(which is highly integrated into the OS itself). Google isn’t imposing anything. Sure when you navigate to a Google site, it may nag you to download Chrome. Microsoft does the same on a Windows box. There is no imposition or compulsion involved.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Nagging is both imposition and compulsion.
nerdix 3y ago
Its pretty clear that isn't the case since there are viable alternatives and people have to go out of their way to install Chrome to begin with. If most people hated it, they would just install Firefox instead (or use Edge or Safari)

gumby 3y ago

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it They do? That's quite a claim. I work with a number of people who were simply told that installing chrome is part of setting up your computer and don't really have any opinion -- "chrome" is the word for looking at a web page and "chrome is just how computers work". At least for the {desk,lap}top, I think that's the vast majority.

saiya-jin 3y ago

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks). Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.

layer8 3y ago

> I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Yep, for various usability reasons, I used IE as my daily driver until Windows updates disabled it. Never liked Chrome. Using Firefox now.

throw_m239339 3y ago

> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.

aaa_aaa 3y ago

No it was not hated for evolving. It was hated because it made banks and many web sites enforcing people to use Windows. Chrome is nowhere near it.

FireBeyond 3y ago
"It was hated because it made banks force people to use Windows"? For all IE's weaknesses, it didn't "make" banks do any such thing. They chose that.

pg_1234 3y ago

> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. Chrome is doing worse than not evolving ... ... it is evolving towards evil. Compared to this, stasis would be a blessing.