4 ms·

> 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 othe

by 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
    > OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. I said browser complexity, not OS complexity.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software. If a project is too complex for a single organisation, then break it up into 2-3 projects. That is how OSS software handles complex tasks. Someone could do a real LLVM-style browser project then we don't have to use javascript which'd catapult us all into the 21st century.
      - INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
        > What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software. This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.
        nordsieck 3y ago
        > This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software. You can try to close the door on that stable, but the horse that escaped has died of old age it's happened so long ago.
        axlee 3y ago
        Says who? This sounds more like preaching than anything else.
        oblio 3y ago
        Blame the OS vendors (Microsoft has 70% of the blame, Apple 25% and even Linux distro share a 5% amongst themselves). They killed[1] cross platform apps and they made software updates hard, so everyone just flocked to the web. [1] Not through a single blow, death by a million cuts.
- tclancy 3y ago
  Kind of sounds like EA Sports Madden.
wongarsu 3y ago
Also ActiveX, which brought a lot of "desktop only" capabilities to the web, at the cost of the ultimate lock-in. We should probably be glad that Microsoft basically stopped all IE investment when the dot-com crash happened (IE6 came out 2001), if they had kept investing the internet might still be dominated by MS
- pydry 3y ago
  Probably had more to do with the DoJ antitrust suit than the dot com crash. Microsoft approached anything that sniffed of antitrust violations with trepidation for a good 5-7 years. But yes, ultimately a good thing.
  - mattferderer 3y ago
    Yes, this is often forgotten. I've always assumed it's the biggest reason for Microsoft basically doing less & being more or a cash cow during the Ballmer years (similar to Apple's current philosophy with a CFO as CEO). Though the phone fail was a huge fail. Those initial Windows phones were really awesome. These were the ones that competed with Blackberry before Apple took over the market.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Microsoft phones only died because they were bad at making an App store. Microsoft made the exact same mistake with the later Zune HD. Despite having a massively superior IMO experience for the user, Windows phone was doomed.
- rvnx 3y ago
  The lock-in is mostly because competitors were not good enough to implement a similar solution, not because of artificial restrictions.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  As an example of that lock-in... It's 2023, and my Fortune 250 corporate laptop image still has IE (along with Edge, Firefox, AND Chrome), because we STILL have web applications that were tied to ActiveX, and still need it.
arp242 3y ago
The IE block model was better though, and everyone is using it today with box-sizing: border-box. I still maintain that the pragmatic and sensible thing to do was to just modify the standard – "best viewed in IE" was a self-inflicted wound. Also remember the context: Netscape was just as gung-ho with standards as IE and everyone was kind of figuring out what did and didn't work on the fly. To just ossify a standard at some point just made no sense, and to keep bashing on IE for their better box model "because Micro$hit bad" made even less sense. Good standards respond to what's going on in reality.
- cubefox 3y ago
  The standards are there for a reason (interoperability), so following them makes sense even if a browser vendor reasonably thinks it should have been done differently. If everyone just implemented what they think is best, no standard would be required in the first place. Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.
  - arp242 3y ago
    In this case, the standard reduced interoperability. As a general point you're correct of course, but you need to consider the context and specific situation. No one implemented standards back then, and IE WAS the de-facto "standard" as it had something like ~98% market share. I'm not saying standards should have been made bug-compatible with IE or even that they should have gone out of their way to accommodate IE, but a "CSS 2.2" cold have updated stuff like the box model which was 1) actually better (or, at the least, equivalent), and 2) a huge pain for everyone. It would have reduced headaches for everyone, and would have been a lot easier than changing every website. Especially non-IE users would have benefited: the people who suffered the most from this weren't the IE users and devs who only cared about IE, they were the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera people and devs who cared about them. One has to wonder if uptake of things like Firefox or Opera wouldn't have been much faster in an alternative universe where these changes were made. Mindlessly following standards just makes no sense. Also see GNU and POSIX_ME_HARDER/POSIXLY_CORRECT.
joshuaissac 3y ago
> The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently This was required for compatibility with Netscape. Developers coded for the Netscape box model when it was dominant, so Microsoft had to follow the same model to prevent the pages from breaking when viewed in Internet Explorer.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Neither Mozilla nor Opera did that, so apparently they didn't have to.
  - joshuaissac 3y ago
    > Neither Mozilla nor Opera did that, so apparently they didn't have to. Both of them did that. The box model in question was invented by Mozilla (internal code name for Netscape), and Opera 7 also implemented it.

by mrtksn 3y ago

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
  > OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. I said browser complexity, not OS complexity.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software. If a project is too complex for a single organisation, then break it up into 2-3 projects. That is how OSS software handles complex tasks. Someone could do a real LLVM-style browser project then we don't have to use javascript which'd catapult us all into the 21st century.
    - INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
      > What difference do you see between a browser and an OS? A browser is an OS. They perform the same role. A context to run whatever 3rd party software. This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.
      - nordsieck 3y ago
        > This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software. You can try to close the door on that stable, but the horse that escaped has died of old age it's happened so long ago.
      - axlee 3y ago
        Says who? This sounds more like preaching than anything else.
      - oblio 3y ago
        Blame the OS vendors (Microsoft has 70% of the blame, Apple 25% and even Linux distro share a 5% amongst themselves). They killed[1] cross platform apps and they made software updates hard, so everyone just flocked to the web. [1] Not through a single blow, death by a million cuts.
tclancy 3y ago
Kind of sounds like EA Sports Madden.

wongarsu 3y ago

Also ActiveX, which brought a lot of "desktop only" capabilities to the web, at the cost of the ultimate lock-in. We should probably be glad that Microsoft basically stopped all IE investment when the dot-com crash happened (IE6 came out 2001), if they had kept investing the internet might still be dominated by MS

pydry 3y ago
Probably had more to do with the DoJ antitrust suit than the dot com crash. Microsoft approached anything that sniffed of antitrust violations with trepidation for a good 5-7 years. But yes, ultimately a good thing.
- mattferderer 3y ago
  Yes, this is often forgotten. I've always assumed it's the biggest reason for Microsoft basically doing less & being more or a cash cow during the Ballmer years (similar to Apple's current philosophy with a CFO as CEO). Though the phone fail was a huge fail. Those initial Windows phones were really awesome. These were the ones that competed with Blackberry before Apple took over the market.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Microsoft phones only died because they were bad at making an App store. Microsoft made the exact same mistake with the later Zune HD. Despite having a massively superior IMO experience for the user, Windows phone was doomed.
rvnx 3y ago
The lock-in is mostly because competitors were not good enough to implement a similar solution, not because of artificial restrictions.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
As an example of that lock-in... It's 2023, and my Fortune 250 corporate laptop image still has IE (along with Edge, Firefox, AND Chrome), because we STILL have web applications that were tied to ActiveX, and still need it.

arp242 3y ago

The IE block model was better though, and everyone is using it today with box-sizing: border-box. I still maintain that the pragmatic and sensible thing to do was to just modify the standard – "best viewed in IE" was a self-inflicted wound. Also remember the context: Netscape was just as gung-ho with standards as IE and everyone was kind of figuring out what did and didn't work on the fly. To just ossify a standard at some point just made no sense, and to keep bashing on IE for their better box model "because Micro$hit bad" made even less sense. Good standards respond to what's going on in reality.

cubefox 3y ago
The standards are there for a reason (interoperability), so following them makes sense even if a browser vendor reasonably thinks it should have been done differently. If everyone just implemented what they think is best, no standard would be required in the first place. Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.
- arp242 3y ago
  In this case, the standard reduced interoperability. As a general point you're correct of course, but you need to consider the context and specific situation. No one implemented standards back then, and IE WAS the de-facto "standard" as it had something like ~98% market share. I'm not saying standards should have been made bug-compatible with IE or even that they should have gone out of their way to accommodate IE, but a "CSS 2.2" cold have updated stuff like the box model which was 1) actually better (or, at the least, equivalent), and 2) a huge pain for everyone. It would have reduced headaches for everyone, and would have been a lot easier than changing every website. Especially non-IE users would have benefited: the people who suffered the most from this weren't the IE users and devs who only cared about IE, they were the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera people and devs who cared about them. One has to wonder if uptake of things like Firefox or Opera wouldn't have been much faster in an alternative universe where these changes were made. Mindlessly following standards just makes no sense. Also see GNU and POSIX_ME_HARDER/POSIXLY_CORRECT.

joshuaissac 3y ago

> The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently This was required for compatibility with Netscape. Developers coded for the Netscape box model when it was dominant, so Microsoft had to follow the same model to prevent the pages from breaking when viewed in Internet Explorer.

cubefox 3y ago
Neither Mozilla nor Opera did that, so apparently they didn't have to.
- joshuaissac 3y ago
  > Neither Mozilla nor Opera did that, so apparently they didn't have to. Both of them did that. The box model in question was invented by Mozilla (internal code name for Netscape), and Opera 7 also implemented it.