8 ms·

Microsoft forced people to install their browser (2010)

110 points by dannyw 3y ago

Turing_Machine 3y ago
Besides the highly questionable business ethics discussed in this article, IE just plain sucked. On one medium-sized project I worked on back then, I calculated that around 30% of the code was there just to work around various IE bullshittery. I have to smile when I see young people complaining about Safari incompatibilities now. You have no idea, young padawans. :-)
- EGreg 3y ago
  I used to think it was spelled padouin. Like French style. Anyone think like me?
- throwaway167 3y ago
  30% of the code but 80% of the time I touched UI.
- lmm 3y ago
  IE had the right box model years ahead of everything else, a better way of doing embeds, an element transformation language that's still ahead of anything you can do with CSS, .... Sure it wasn't "standards compliant" but I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't.
  - danybittel 3y ago
    Not only that, but IE4 was the first browser you could do, what we would now call "web apps". It had a stable javascript implementation and css, which let you create and edit elements dynamically. It really paved the way of how we do things today.
    - kevindamm 3y ago
      and IE5 introduced dynamic web requests (originally ActiveXObject, then as the familiar XHR) which was way better than holding open a long page response
      - JimDabell 3y ago
        There was also a way of doing it with the DOM that Mozilla implemented. I don’t recall the specifics, it was something like you would instantiate a new Document object and then call open() on it with a URL. It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think.
        denton-scratch 3y ago
        XMLHttpRequest long predates the foundation of WHATWG. XMLHttpRequest was introduced with IE5 in 2001. WHATWG wasn't founded until 2004, when its first mailing list started.
        JimDabell 3y ago
        If you check my comment again, I’m saying it was abandoned after WHATWG formalised XHR. It existed a long time before that. I think XHR was a little earlier, but they were roughly contemporaneous. And of course, people were doing XHR stuff before XHR existed with things like invisible iframes, but those were just hacks.
        denton-scratch 3y ago
        > It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think. "It" was using the Document object to load a URL. WHATWG was not responsible for standardizing XMLHTTPRequest.
        JimDabell 3y ago
        https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#specification-history https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#specification-history
  - kibwen 3y ago
    > I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard Hm? Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox changed tons of behavior in order to match Internet Explorer specifically, which was the de facto standard at the time.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    > I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't. This is not even remotely true. There’s thousands upon thousands of bugs publicly available in Bugzilla showing fixes to standards conformance, not to mention the Acid Test and things like that. As far as “got their behaviour declared as the standard”, in several important cases the opposite is true. The reason why Netscape 4 was so terrible with CSS is because there were two competing approaches for styling – CSS, which Microsoft had already started implementing; and JSSS which Netscape had already started implementing. The W3C picked CSS, and Netscape scrambled to catch up by transcoding CSS into JSSS as a stopgap measure. Which is also why Netscape 4 lost CSS support when JavaScript was disabled.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Is Safari incompatible with the standards or with Chrome?
  - realusername 3y ago
    Kind of both, it's lagging behind Firefox and Chrome for sure but the most annoying for me isn't really that but the bugs on basic web features. It definitely feels less stable, you never know what the next version will break.
LunicLynx 3y ago
Still makes me wonder why the iPhone and android are allowed to exist in their current form.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Because instead of one company with 95% market share, it's two companies with 50% market share each. This makes every argument more complicated since you have to refute "if you don't like one you're free to buy the other"
  - EGreg 3y ago
    That’s how we end up with digital feudalism and cartels https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Should they both just come with a terminal program and an ftp client so end users can just download all of the software they need?
  - blackoil 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      And your own citation has a link criticizing it for not being affective https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windows-browser-ballot-comes-to-an-end-as-ec-obligation-expires/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo...
LaGrange 3y ago
Miss the times when IE5 compatibility was holding the internet back. Internet should be held back some more.
- nine_k 3y ago
  But were it happening now, you'd be held back on your iOS devices! Oh wait...
- Dah00n 3y ago
  That is how it is on iOS devices and sites wanting to work for Apple users today.
darkwater 3y ago
Old greybeard moment: I remember all of this and how people on newsgroups (Usenet) defended Microsoft, said that the IE integration in the OS was a technical requirement and not an MS tactic. It clearly was a deliberated tactic to retain power, just like Chrome is today (even if they look less evil)
- Sharlin 3y ago
  I’d love to know whether the act of integrating your web browser and your file browser did in fact have any engineering-level benefits or if it was more like a big mess of impedance mismatch.
  - xkjyeah 3y ago
    It probably allowed their engineers to code the design bits in an easier language (imagine, HTML vs C++!), allowing them to iterate and customise the design more quickly. It's probably in the same vein as how phone apps that need a new feature quickly may decide to simply start a WebView.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      Microsoft hid their web views well in many places. The special decorations rendered by Windows explorer were largely done through HTML, but they managed to make them feel native. I think their efforts to make their own browser-based controls feel like native controls was what proved thst Microsoft did actually want the web control for convenience. Sadly, these days that native feel is hard to come by. UI toolkits are now super complex and the "solution" seems to be to port the entire UI toolkit to a Javascript runtime, then not maintain that for a while and let it deviate from the native standard, and launch a new Javascript runtime to make up for it. Updating anything in the OS has become easy, so you don't need to design give years ahead. In two years, you can just roll out an update and change the look and feel of the built-in applications.
- bediger4000 3y ago
  The amount of sucking up to Microsoft, and hero worship of Bill Gates 1995-2010 (or thereabouts) was absolutely astonishing. I always felt at least some had to be paid for, but nobody has ever confessed to stuff like being part of Waggoner Edstrom's propaganda machine.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I miss when the IE5.5 reference was all I needed to use (worked somewhere that mandated that browser). I don’t recall any big issues with it but we did as little JS as possible.
- emj 3y ago
  That mindset made it impossible to upgrade from IE6, if you kept away from a dynamic front end it was a bit easier. That said the current landscape is worse, the javascript tooling can make old apps impossible to improve upon just 5 years after release unless you have continuously worked on it.
cm2187 3y ago
All of these practices feel fairly benign compared to what microsoft is doing now. At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. I don't think this would even raise an eyebrow now. They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers. /s of course this is a problem developers do not need to deal with anymore! The Microsoft we are dealing with now gives you warnings if you are trying to install another browser and makes it difficult to change your default browser. And in that space Apple has done way worse: breaking internet standards by deprecating flash (and other unsupported features), banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely. And using their dominant position to force the deprecation of internet standards is another thing google is not shy about either.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > breaking internet standards by deprecating flash Flash was never an "internet standard"; it was a proprietary product of Adobe. OK, it depends on what you mean by "internet standard"; in general, I take "X standard" to mean a specification for X issued by some standards body, such that a third-party can implement X by following the spec.
  - Ygg2 3y ago
    It was a defacto standard. Everyone had Flash. Granted, there were reason to abandon it. But I can understand people being upset with it gone.
    - wolletd 3y ago
      Didn't really take long for replacements like https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ to emerge, though.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        > Didn't really take long ... You're meaning that sarcastically, yeah?
- 3y ago
creatonez 3y ago
> Outlook 98 used IE 4 to compose and render HTML e-mail messages (rather than just translating to RTF) as well as a summary page of messages, tasks, and calendar events called "Outlook Today". Everybody was perfectly happy to ignore the fact that this opened up Outlook to all of the bugs and exploits present in IE 4. This one is funny in retrospect, because nowadays we would probably say that replacing a custom parser with a standard out-of-the-box runtime is a better tradeoff for security, as long as it is a full replacement suited for the task, and you are not greatly extending the functionality/looseness of the spec[^1]. Outlook 95's RTF format was likely afflicted by all sorts of vulnerabilities that are still undiscovered today, simply because it was less audited than modern Chromium and Firefox versions that get near-weekly security updates. These days we have several interesting solutions that support this idea: - The deprecation of Flash and replacement with HTML5 ports and Flash emulation via WASM - This has probably done a huge blow to the number of RCE exploits on the web. - Firefox uses PDF.js to display PDF files inside of the web sandbox. We have wasted a ton of CPU time doing this, especially when compared to Okular - a particularly energy-efficient PDF reader, but Firefox having a builtin web-sandboxed PDF reader has likely has saved many users from the numerous RCE exploits in outdated version of other reader software. - The proliferation of Electron and CEF. This has been troubled in terms of security due to lack of consistent updates for many applications, and because it's more privileged than web browsers it opens up a new attack surface for applications that could have just been true web apps -- however, when done correctly, using a standard known runtime allows important bugfixes to be centralized. But this is another one that has wasted a ton of CPU time for what is usually a more complex solution. - The switch from C to memory-safe interpreted and bytecode languages, and the later un-proliferation of these as folks mostly switched to Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Lua, and Javascript So, some great solutions, along with some technical debt we're not satisfied with. The core problem with all these solutions is that they risk putting too much weight on one failure point. --- ^1: The fact that they shipped IE4 in Outlook 98 with known exploits is very bad on this front
- jefftk 3y ago
  I'm confused; aren't "Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Lua, and Javascript" examples of "memory-safe interpreted and bytecode languages"?
karmasimida 3y ago
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer now. And it is creating its own cardinal sins
- monkburger 3y ago
  Google's Motto was "Don't be evil" Now it's "Do the right thing" The irony.
  - supermatt 3y ago
    "do the right thing (to maximise profits for the shareholders)".
- Dah00n 3y ago
  I think there's a case for arguing Safari is the new IE.
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    In a way, but as long as Apple doesn’t have a 95% market share it’s not an abuse of a monopoly like it was with MS. As such, Apple cannot use embrace, extend and extinguish tactics either. Google can and could, given Android’s dominance in some markets (eg. ~95% in India), though globally its share (~70%) is not enough to allow really abusive tactics.
    - blackoil 3y ago
      Marketshare is only one factor. In mid-late 2000s, you could have pushed users to install Firefox and then Chrome and say IE is not fully supported, didn't work with enterprises but for captive audience and startups it made sense. Now that isn't an option as users can't migrate away from Safari. So, it is worse now, Safari will decide the baseline and if it doesn't support some feature that you need, you'll have to let go richest x% customers or move to the walled garden.
    - greiskul 3y ago
      See, the thing is that you are not thinking of each companies incentives. Google makes money out of the web. Apple and Microsoft make money from people using their operating system. They don't want web standards to be more powerful and to replace native apps. And the market share doesn't matter, cause for iOS users, 100% of them use Safari, and you are not allowed to build a competing browser for it. This freezes web standard development, since it is a major player in the space the is literally against improvement in the space.
isodev 3y ago
I loved those screenshots from my youth, but my smile quickly faded when each of the "bad stuff" Microsoft used to do back then are currently embedded into every aspect of our digital landscape by ... Google, of course! Look at them covering all their bases and making sure anything that isn't Chrome doesn't feel up to task ... or just simply making sure that one way or another, you end up seeing their ads.
- mattkevan 3y ago
  My pet theory is that all the people responsible for the things Microsoft did in the 1990s and 2000s moved to Google. Hence Chrome being the new IE, dreadful product names and endless product churn and rebranding. Google must have gone through at least as many chat apps as Microsoft went through media stores. Google Talk, Chat, Messages, Duet, Allo, Hangouts, Meet, Meet (original) vs. Microsoft PlaysForSure, Zune, Media Player, Live Music, Xbox music…
  - greiskul 3y ago
    How is Chrome the new IE? Safari is the new IE. If you disagree, please make a better browser for iOS. Oh wait you literally are not allowed to.
    - mattkevan 3y ago
      Hardly comparable. IE was as influential as it was due to its massive market share (95% at its peak). Even now Safari is only 13% on desktop and 25% on mobile. Chrome is at 61% and 65% respectively. Chrome is the new IE because it can set de-facto standards due to its market size. Because ‘Works best with Chrome’ is the new ‘Works best with IE’. It’s such a monoculture that sites don’t bother to test on anything else. Because Google takes a leaf from Microsoft’s playbook and degrades performance of its platforms on other browsers, e.g. Firefox and YouTube. Because Google have a fundamental conflict of interest between allowing an open web browser and making money from advertising. See the upcoming changes to block ad blockers and initiatives like FLoC. The more Google need to show growth and squeeze out more profit, the tighter things will get locked up. Saying Safari is the new IE is just saying it doesn’t support all the features you’d like, while ignoring what made IE IE, which was its overwhelming market power.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
For the vast majority of use cases today, you no longer have to spend most of your time adding hacks for every kind of browser just to get a page to render correctly. That's pretty huge. Say what you will about the shenanigans corporations pull on the web today, it's far less painful to make a web app now. (Overcomplicated, sure, but overall less painful)
- factorialboy 3y ago
  This statement holds true on desktops but not on mobiles. Apple cripples Safari (and other browsers) on iOS, and mobile ads are an abomination on all platforms if the user is not savvy enough to know how to block them.
  - hhh 3y ago
    In what way is it crippled?
- fbdab103 3y ago
  No hacks needed anymore. Now websites will just tell me that I have to use Chrome or GTFO.
Panzer04 3y ago
"Web Browsers really make poor client application runtimes for all but the most basic of things." I found this the most amusing line of the post, given the current state of many staple desktop applications. Besides games, how many programs these days are designed to run natively on desktop as opposed to in a browser? It feels like the default is now browser-based!
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Both can be true though. The fact that with a pile of duct tape and spit you can get it to work doesn't mean that web browsers make really poor application runtimes for all but the most basic of thing. It's horrible how all this stuff works under the hood, it's just one kludge on top of another, the fact that it's mostly abstracted away doesn't make it is suddenly all good.
askonomm 3y ago
It's so much worse now. Ever tried installing a different browser on Win11 now? Edge tries to dark pattern all your info with 10 sneaky popups when you first open it. Then on Chrome's website Edge will show a popup indicating that Edge is better, and you should use Edge instead. Then setting Chrome to be default is also a pain, as you have to do that manually for each file type and protocol now.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Ever tried installing a different browser on Win11 now? Yes. Running Windows 11, I use Chromium for my daily usage and Pale Moon for specific tasks, along with Edge for things I want to cordon in another browser altogether. Windows 11 hasn't given me grief in my so far ~1.5 years of daily driving it, and I don't necessarily hold Edge's nagging against it since it's browsers catfighting each other. Chrome and Firefox also act likewise when given the chance. I will note that I have Windows Update completely blocked and disabled via Group Policy, which means my system settings never get reset under the guise of "updates" every month unlike most people's setups. In fact, I'm still running 21H2, NT kernel version 10.0.22000.1281. Windows 11 is quite well behaved if the administrator actually wields his administrative powers, as it turns out.
  - gchamonlive 3y ago
    How is disabling OS updates a sensible decision?
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      It gives me a known, unchanging environment that I can rely on to serve my needs day in and day out. My computers are tools, and the operating system is subservient to its administrator who is absolutely not Microsoft. I do not appreciate my computers reinstalling their operating systems every damn week without my knowledge nor permission. Been working this way since Windows Update has been a thing, and I've never been let down. Judging by the many tales of people getting grief from Windows Update, I'm perfectly content to continue as I have. I will run system updates when it pleases me, and no sooner.
usrbinbash 3y ago
Those who refuse to learn from history... So today, instead of building their own infrastructure, and using free (as in freedom) OSS for their organizational software needs, governments and public agencies pay massive amounts of taxpayer money, that could be put to use elsewhere, in licensing fees.
- subwrmodblocker 3y ago
  [dead]
rvba 3y ago
One of my computers has Windows 10 (I know it is getting close to end of support... in theory, they will support it since lots of companies still sit on it). Microsoft still tries to add back Edge as the default browser after every patch. They always reset your setting silently (how is this shit even legal?) Also IMHO nowadays they are pushing updates much more often and those constant updates slow down the computer to a crawl - they do this because they try to force you to upgrade. Seriously the amount of updates nowadays is incredible - and as an user you simply cannot disable windows update due to multiple dark patterns (e.g. windows ignoring the settings in the windows update menu... + you you cannot disable the service since there is another service that turns it on). Windows keeps downloading patches when you do something else - every few days the computet becomes unusable and requires a restart. To add insult to in injury: windows 11 requires computers with this new bios, so even if you gave up and wanted to pay microsoft their extortion money... you cant, since the new Windows wont work on your older computer. Seriously due to updates every few days random services take 10% of processor time, or updates eat all internet bandwith.. even when every windows update is turned off. The only solution is to use hard to audit programs from the internet that can disable updates completly. [Downloading such things is nor very safe... so I dont do it] Yes I scanned the computer for trojans - its the updates that make it slow. My old machine used to play doom and browse websites randomly slows down every few days because they use a dark pattern of patches that try to convince you to throw away a perfectly fine computer and buy windows 11. Which wont even work. So I wonder what is a safe way to disable windows updates? It makes the computer behave normally (e.g .if it has no connection for 3 weeks of behaves ok for 3 weeks. Connect to inetenet - updates...)
tonetheman 3y ago
[dead]
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based". This, of course, got Microsoft's attention. "[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers." -- Marc Andreesen, then CEO of Netscape Microsoft was right to worry. The browser is the only app most people use on the laptop today. What should they have done? I'm asking this not as a rhetorical question, to justify their behaviour, but because I think it's interesting, and they still haven't answered it.
blackoil 3y ago
"Standards compliant" is a bit of revisionists history. Mid 90s were wild west of browser development. Netscape and later MS were releasing browser every 6-12 months (fast for the time). Standards were defined post-hoc. JS, CSS, ActiveX, Applets were all created along-side or before standards. MS practices were mostly ruthless and some illegal, but as a product it was in later times similar to or little better than Navigator.
ok123456 3y ago
This is literally "The New Old Thing."
natas 3y ago
Windows is still the best OS for grandmas and people that just want to waste their time on facebook.
rochak 3y ago
I feel sorry for the people who have to use Windows.

110 points by dannyw 3y ago

Besides the highly questionable business ethics discussed in this article, IE just plain sucked. On one medium-sized project I worked on back then, I calculated that around 30% of the code was there just to work around various IE bullshittery. I have to smile when I see young people complaining about Safari incompatibilities now. You have no idea, young padawans. :-)

EGreg 3y ago
I used to think it was spelled padouin. Like French style. Anyone think like me?
throwaway167 3y ago
30% of the code but 80% of the time I touched UI.
lmm 3y ago
IE had the right box model years ahead of everything else, a better way of doing embeds, an element transformation language that's still ahead of anything you can do with CSS, .... Sure it wasn't "standards compliant" but I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't.
- danybittel 3y ago
  Not only that, but IE4 was the first browser you could do, what we would now call "web apps". It had a stable javascript implementation and css, which let you create and edit elements dynamically. It really paved the way of how we do things today.
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    and IE5 introduced dynamic web requests (originally ActiveXObject, then as the familiar XHR) which was way better than holding open a long page response
    - JimDabell 3y ago
      There was also a way of doing it with the DOM that Mozilla implemented. I don’t recall the specifics, it was something like you would instantiate a new Document object and then call open() on it with a URL. It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think.
      - denton-scratch 3y ago
        XMLHttpRequest long predates the foundation of WHATWG. XMLHttpRequest was introduced with IE5 in 2001. WHATWG wasn't founded until 2004, when its first mailing list started.
        JimDabell 3y ago
        If you check my comment again, I’m saying it was abandoned after WHATWG formalised XHR. It existed a long time before that. I think XHR was a little earlier, but they were roughly contemporaneous. And of course, people were doing XHR stuff before XHR existed with things like invisible iframes, but those were just hacks.
        denton-scratch 3y ago
        > It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think. "It" was using the Document object to load a URL. WHATWG was not responsible for standardizing XMLHTTPRequest.
        JimDabell 3y ago
        https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#specification-history https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#specification-history
- kibwen 3y ago
  > I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard Hm? Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox changed tons of behavior in order to match Internet Explorer specifically, which was the de facto standard at the time.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  > I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't. This is not even remotely true. There’s thousands upon thousands of bugs publicly available in Bugzilla showing fixes to standards conformance, not to mention the Acid Test and things like that. As far as “got their behaviour declared as the standard”, in several important cases the opposite is true. The reason why Netscape 4 was so terrible with CSS is because there were two competing approaches for styling – CSS, which Microsoft had already started implementing; and JSSS which Netscape had already started implementing. The W3C picked CSS, and Netscape scrambled to catch up by transcoding CSS into JSSS as a stopgap measure. Which is also why Netscape 4 lost CSS support when JavaScript was disabled.
steve1977 3y ago
Is Safari incompatible with the standards or with Chrome?
- realusername 3y ago
  Kind of both, it's lagging behind Firefox and Chrome for sure but the most annoying for me isn't really that but the bugs on basic web features. It definitely feels less stable, you never know what the next version will break.

LunicLynx 3y ago

Still makes me wonder why the iPhone and android are allowed to exist in their current form.

kalleboo 3y ago
Because instead of one company with 95% market share, it's two companies with 50% market share each. This makes every argument more complicated since you have to refute "if you don't like one you're free to buy the other"
- EGreg 3y ago
  That’s how we end up with digital feudalism and cartels https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
scarface_74 3y ago
Should they both just come with a terminal program and an ftp client so end users can just download all of the software they need?
- blackoil 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    And your own citation has a link criticizing it for not being affective https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windows-browser-ballot-comes-to-an-end-as-ec-obligation-expires/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo...

LaGrange 3y ago

Miss the times when IE5 compatibility was holding the internet back. Internet should be held back some more.

nine_k 3y ago
But were it happening now, you'd be held back on your iOS devices! Oh wait...
Dah00n 3y ago
That is how it is on iOS devices and sites wanting to work for Apple users today.

darkwater 3y ago

Old greybeard moment: I remember all of this and how people on newsgroups (Usenet) defended Microsoft, said that the IE integration in the OS was a technical requirement and not an MS tactic. It clearly was a deliberated tactic to retain power, just like Chrome is today (even if they look less evil)

Sharlin 3y ago
I’d love to know whether the act of integrating your web browser and your file browser did in fact have any engineering-level benefits or if it was more like a big mess of impedance mismatch.
- xkjyeah 3y ago
  It probably allowed their engineers to code the design bits in an easier language (imagine, HTML vs C++!), allowing them to iterate and customise the design more quickly. It's probably in the same vein as how phone apps that need a new feature quickly may decide to simply start a WebView.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Microsoft hid their web views well in many places. The special decorations rendered by Windows explorer were largely done through HTML, but they managed to make them feel native. I think their efforts to make their own browser-based controls feel like native controls was what proved thst Microsoft did actually want the web control for convenience. Sadly, these days that native feel is hard to come by. UI toolkits are now super complex and the "solution" seems to be to port the entire UI toolkit to a Javascript runtime, then not maintain that for a while and let it deviate from the native standard, and launch a new Javascript runtime to make up for it. Updating anything in the OS has become easy, so you don't need to design give years ahead. In two years, you can just roll out an update and change the look and feel of the built-in applications.
bediger4000 3y ago
The amount of sucking up to Microsoft, and hero worship of Bill Gates 1995-2010 (or thereabouts) was absolutely astonishing. I always felt at least some had to be paid for, but nobody has ever confessed to stuff like being part of Waggoner Edstrom's propaganda machine.

quickthrower2 3y ago

I miss when the IE5.5 reference was all I needed to use (worked somewhere that mandated that browser). I don’t recall any big issues with it but we did as little JS as possible.

emj 3y ago
That mindset made it impossible to upgrade from IE6, if you kept away from a dynamic front end it was a bit easier. That said the current landscape is worse, the javascript tooling can make old apps impossible to improve upon just 5 years after release unless you have continuously worked on it.

cm2187 3y ago

All of these practices feel fairly benign compared to what microsoft is doing now. At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. I don't think this would even raise an eyebrow now. They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers. /s of course this is a problem developers do not need to deal with anymore! The Microsoft we are dealing with now gives you warnings if you are trying to install another browser and makes it difficult to change your default browser. And in that space Apple has done way worse: breaking internet standards by deprecating flash (and other unsupported features), banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely. And using their dominant position to force the deprecation of internet standards is another thing google is not shy about either.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> breaking internet standards by deprecating flash Flash was never an "internet standard"; it was a proprietary product of Adobe. OK, it depends on what you mean by "internet standard"; in general, I take "X standard" to mean a specification for X issued by some standards body, such that a third-party can implement X by following the spec.
- Ygg2 3y ago
  It was a defacto standard. Everyone had Flash. Granted, there were reason to abandon it. But I can understand people being upset with it gone.
  - wolletd 3y ago
    Didn't really take long for replacements like https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ to emerge, though.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > Didn't really take long ... You're meaning that sarcastically, yeah?
3y ago

creatonez 3y ago

> Outlook 98 used IE 4 to compose and render HTML e-mail messages (rather than just translating to RTF) as well as a summary page of messages, tasks, and calendar events called "Outlook Today". Everybody was perfectly happy to ignore the fact that this opened up Outlook to all of the bugs and exploits present in IE 4. This one is funny in retrospect, because nowadays we would probably say that replacing a custom parser with a standard out-of-the-box runtime is a better tradeoff for security, as long as it is a full replacement suited for the task, and you are not greatly extending the functionality/looseness of the spec[^1]. Outlook 95's RTF format was likely afflicted by all sorts of vulnerabilities that are still undiscovered today, simply because it was less audited than modern Chromium and Firefox versions that get near-weekly security updates. These days we have several interesting solutions that support this idea: - The deprecation of Flash and replacement with HTML5 ports and Flash emulation via WASM - This has probably done a huge blow to the number of RCE exploits on the web. - Firefox uses PDF.js to display PDF files inside of the web sandbox. We have wasted a ton of CPU time doing this, especially when compared to Okular - a particularly energy-efficient PDF reader, but Firefox having a builtin web-sandboxed PDF reader has likely has saved many users from the numerous RCE exploits in outdated version of other reader software. - The proliferation of Electron and CEF. This has been troubled in terms of security due to lack of consistent updates for many applications, and because it's more privileged than web browsers it opens up a new attack surface for applications that could have just been true web apps -- however, when done correctly, using a standard known runtime allows important bugfixes to be centralized. But this is another one that has wasted a ton of CPU time for what is usually a more complex solution. - The switch from C to memory-safe interpreted and bytecode languages, and the later un-proliferation of these as folks mostly switched to Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Lua, and Javascript So, some great solutions, along with some technical debt we're not satisfied with. The core problem with all these solutions is that they risk putting too much weight on one failure point. --- ^1: The fact that they shipped IE4 in Outlook 98 with known exploits is very bad on this front

jefftk 3y ago
I'm confused; aren't "Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Lua, and Javascript" examples of "memory-safe interpreted and bytecode languages"?

karmasimida 3y ago

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer now. And it is creating its own cardinal sins

monkburger 3y ago
Google's Motto was "Don't be evil" Now it's "Do the right thing" The irony.
- supermatt 3y ago
  "do the right thing (to maximise profits for the shareholders)".
Dah00n 3y ago
I think there's a case for arguing Safari is the new IE.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  In a way, but as long as Apple doesn’t have a 95% market share it’s not an abuse of a monopoly like it was with MS. As such, Apple cannot use embrace, extend and extinguish tactics either. Google can and could, given Android’s dominance in some markets (eg. ~95% in India), though globally its share (~70%) is not enough to allow really abusive tactics.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Marketshare is only one factor. In mid-late 2000s, you could have pushed users to install Firefox and then Chrome and say IE is not fully supported, didn't work with enterprises but for captive audience and startups it made sense. Now that isn't an option as users can't migrate away from Safari. So, it is worse now, Safari will decide the baseline and if it doesn't support some feature that you need, you'll have to let go richest x% customers or move to the walled garden.
  - greiskul 3y ago
    See, the thing is that you are not thinking of each companies incentives. Google makes money out of the web. Apple and Microsoft make money from people using their operating system. They don't want web standards to be more powerful and to replace native apps. And the market share doesn't matter, cause for iOS users, 100% of them use Safari, and you are not allowed to build a competing browser for it. This freezes web standard development, since it is a major player in the space the is literally against improvement in the space.

isodev 3y ago

I loved those screenshots from my youth, but my smile quickly faded when each of the "bad stuff" Microsoft used to do back then are currently embedded into every aspect of our digital landscape by ... Google, of course! Look at them covering all their bases and making sure anything that isn't Chrome doesn't feel up to task ... or just simply making sure that one way or another, you end up seeing their ads.

mattkevan 3y ago
My pet theory is that all the people responsible for the things Microsoft did in the 1990s and 2000s moved to Google. Hence Chrome being the new IE, dreadful product names and endless product churn and rebranding. Google must have gone through at least as many chat apps as Microsoft went through media stores. Google Talk, Chat, Messages, Duet, Allo, Hangouts, Meet, Meet (original) vs. Microsoft PlaysForSure, Zune, Media Player, Live Music, Xbox music…
- greiskul 3y ago
  How is Chrome the new IE? Safari is the new IE. If you disagree, please make a better browser for iOS. Oh wait you literally are not allowed to.
  - mattkevan 3y ago
    Hardly comparable. IE was as influential as it was due to its massive market share (95% at its peak). Even now Safari is only 13% on desktop and 25% on mobile. Chrome is at 61% and 65% respectively. Chrome is the new IE because it can set de-facto standards due to its market size. Because ‘Works best with Chrome’ is the new ‘Works best with IE’. It’s such a monoculture that sites don’t bother to test on anything else. Because Google takes a leaf from Microsoft’s playbook and degrades performance of its platforms on other browsers, e.g. Firefox and YouTube. Because Google have a fundamental conflict of interest between allowing an open web browser and making money from advertising. See the upcoming changes to block ad blockers and initiatives like FLoC. The more Google need to show growth and squeeze out more profit, the tighter things will get locked up. Saying Safari is the new IE is just saying it doesn’t support all the features you’d like, while ignoring what made IE IE, which was its overwhelming market power.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

For the vast majority of use cases today, you no longer have to spend most of your time adding hacks for every kind of browser just to get a page to render correctly. That's pretty huge. Say what you will about the shenanigans corporations pull on the web today, it's far less painful to make a web app now. (Overcomplicated, sure, but overall less painful)

factorialboy 3y ago
This statement holds true on desktops but not on mobiles. Apple cripples Safari (and other browsers) on iOS, and mobile ads are an abomination on all platforms if the user is not savvy enough to know how to block them.
- hhh 3y ago
  In what way is it crippled?
fbdab103 3y ago
No hacks needed anymore. Now websites will just tell me that I have to use Chrome or GTFO.

Panzer04 3y ago

"Web Browsers really make poor client application runtimes for all but the most basic of things." I found this the most amusing line of the post, given the current state of many staple desktop applications. Besides games, how many programs these days are designed to run natively on desktop as opposed to in a browser? It feels like the default is now browser-based!

jacquesm 3y ago
Both can be true though. The fact that with a pile of duct tape and spit you can get it to work doesn't mean that web browsers make really poor application runtimes for all but the most basic of thing. It's horrible how all this stuff works under the hood, it's just one kludge on top of another, the fact that it's mostly abstracted away doesn't make it is suddenly all good.

askonomm 3y ago

It's so much worse now. Ever tried installing a different browser on Win11 now? Edge tries to dark pattern all your info with 10 sneaky popups when you first open it. Then on Chrome's website Edge will show a popup indicating that Edge is better, and you should use Edge instead. Then setting Chrome to be default is also a pain, as you have to do that manually for each file type and protocol now.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>Ever tried installing a different browser on Win11 now? Yes. Running Windows 11, I use Chromium for my daily usage and Pale Moon for specific tasks, along with Edge for things I want to cordon in another browser altogether. Windows 11 hasn't given me grief in my so far ~1.5 years of daily driving it, and I don't necessarily hold Edge's nagging against it since it's browsers catfighting each other. Chrome and Firefox also act likewise when given the chance. I will note that I have Windows Update completely blocked and disabled via Group Policy, which means my system settings never get reset under the guise of "updates" every month unlike most people's setups. In fact, I'm still running 21H2, NT kernel version 10.0.22000.1281. Windows 11 is quite well behaved if the administrator actually wields his administrative powers, as it turns out.
- gchamonlive 3y ago
  How is disabling OS updates a sensible decision?
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    It gives me a known, unchanging environment that I can rely on to serve my needs day in and day out. My computers are tools, and the operating system is subservient to its administrator who is absolutely not Microsoft. I do not appreciate my computers reinstalling their operating systems every damn week without my knowledge nor permission. Been working this way since Windows Update has been a thing, and I've never been let down. Judging by the many tales of people getting grief from Windows Update, I'm perfectly content to continue as I have. I will run system updates when it pleases me, and no sooner.

usrbinbash 3y ago

Those who refuse to learn from history... So today, instead of building their own infrastructure, and using free (as in freedom) OSS for their organizational software needs, governments and public agencies pay massive amounts of taxpayer money, that could be put to use elsewhere, in licensing fees.

subwrmodblocker 3y ago
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rvba 3y ago

One of my computers has Windows 10 (I know it is getting close to end of support... in theory, they will support it since lots of companies still sit on it). Microsoft still tries to add back Edge as the default browser after every patch. They always reset your setting silently (how is this shit even legal?) Also IMHO nowadays they are pushing updates much more often and those constant updates slow down the computer to a crawl - they do this because they try to force you to upgrade. Seriously the amount of updates nowadays is incredible - and as an user you simply cannot disable windows update due to multiple dark patterns (e.g. windows ignoring the settings in the windows update menu... + you you cannot disable the service since there is another service that turns it on). Windows keeps downloading patches when you do something else - every few days the computet becomes unusable and requires a restart. To add insult to in injury: windows 11 requires computers with this new bios, so even if you gave up and wanted to pay microsoft their extortion money... you cant, since the new Windows wont work on your older computer. Seriously due to updates every few days random services take 10% of processor time, or updates eat all internet bandwith.. even when every windows update is turned off. The only solution is to use hard to audit programs from the internet that can disable updates completly. [Downloading such things is nor very safe... so I dont do it] Yes I scanned the computer for trojans - its the updates that make it slow. My old machine used to play doom and browse websites randomly slows down every few days because they use a dark pattern of patches that try to convince you to throw away a perfectly fine computer and buy windows 11. Which wont even work. So I wonder what is a safe way to disable windows updates? It makes the computer behave normally (e.g .if it has no connection for 3 weeks of behaves ok for 3 weeks. Connect to inetenet - updates...)

tonetheman 3y ago

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amadeuspagel 3y ago

> Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based". This, of course, got Microsoft's attention. "[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers." -- Marc Andreesen, then CEO of Netscape Microsoft was right to worry. The browser is the only app most people use on the laptop today. What should they have done? I'm asking this not as a rhetorical question, to justify their behaviour, but because I think it's interesting, and they still haven't answered it.

blackoil 3y ago

"Standards compliant" is a bit of revisionists history. Mid 90s were wild west of browser development. Netscape and later MS were releasing browser every 6-12 months (fast for the time). Standards were defined post-hoc. JS, CSS, ActiveX, Applets were all created along-side or before standards. MS practices were mostly ruthless and some illegal, but as a product it was in later times similar to or little better than Navigator.

ok123456 3y ago

This is literally "The New Old Thing."

natas 3y ago

Windows is still the best OS for grandmas and people that just want to waste their time on facebook.

rochak 3y ago

I feel sorry for the people who have to use Windows.