4 ms·

The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support, box model, etc, was broken and non standard. So you would need to exploit CSS parser bugs to gi

The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support, box model, etc, was broken and non standard. So you would need to exploit CSS parser bugs to give IE a separate CSS, use DXImageTransformFilter to make png transparency work, etc. Maybe by WebKit you mean Blink and by Blink you mean V8, because when somebody does a "Show HN: something that doesn't work in Safari or FireFox" it's usually a javascript problem not a CSS or rendering problem. And every 6 months someone complains that Safari is literally worse than IE 5 because it doesn't support some non-standard privacy nightmare API that Google added last week.

ttfkam 3y ago
I came to hate IE with every fiber of my being, but let's call a spade a spade here: IE basically invented modern CSS. Netscape 3/4 and IE 3/4 had very different views on how web pages should be dynamic and how they should be styled. IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on bgcolor, font tags, etc. Netscape introduced the <layer> tag. IE just made every tag a potential layer. Remember AJAX? Loading content from a script and injecting it into a page? That was 100% IE. The issue wasn't that IE 5, 5.5, and 6 were bad when they came out. They weren't. Not one bit. They were absolutely the cutting edge. Then Netscape died, Microsoft had no more competition in the field, and so they basically just stopped. For years. Mozilla (and shortly after, Firefox) prompted an eventual response, which was IE7: I minor update to an otherwise abandoned codebase. Once it was clear folks were seriously looking at dumping IE, IE8 followed shortly after. The CSS Acid Test showed how far IE had fallen behind, so IE9 and IE10 moved to stop the bleeding. IE 11 was the final release before Microsoft finally dropped the legacy IE baggage, aka the Trident engine. By that time Chrome had stormed the field, and Edge's renderer just couldn't keep up relative to the amount of money Microsoft was willing to pay. So they dumped their own engine and moved to Blink. (If you can't beat em…) But let's be clear, between 1998 and 2003, IE was at the forefront. Its CSS support wasn't broken. It was the best and only. Its box model wasn't broken. There were no other box models to compare it to. You didn't need to give it separate CSS, because it was the only one around really to parse it. It didn't have non-standard AJAX support. It WAS the standard since no XMLHttpRequest object existed at the time. You could write VBScript on a web page instead of JavaScript and have a >90% chance that client could run it. Flash didn't have to be bundled or installed separately, ActiveX just took care of it in the middle of your browsing session. It was the Bronze Age of the web. IE was the one that moved us beyond stone tools. Later supplanted by Firefox and Safari's Iron Age, but still an important and arguably necessary step toward the modern web we know today, including the box model.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I remember those days well. IE was really the only usable browser for a long time. Netscape was incredibly unstable, didn't support any modern standards. Mozilla (before Firefox) was too new, also unstable until roughly 2005.
  - JadeNB 3y ago
    > Mozilla (before Firefox) was too new, also unstable until roughly 2005. That doesn't match my memory at all, unless you include Phoenix under the Firefox umbrella. I switched … I don't remember exactly when, probably in late 2003, but certainly when it was called Phoenix, and it was such a breath of fresh air coming from IE. I'm sure there were breakages, because it was the early noughties and that's what the internet was like, but I don't remember a single time wishing for something that IE provided that Phoenix didn't. But I was just coming to it as a user, not as a dev—maybe you're referring to the dev perspective.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      I was including all "Mozilla" browsers (Phoenix, Firebird, whatever) under that umbrella. I didn't start using Firefox seriously until roughly 1.5. Maybe it was just me!
      - ttfkam 3y ago
        I was there too. Actually ever since Mozilla M1 or M2 I think. Things were pretty rough back then (so much blue!). Then the browser-only Phoenix followed by the rename. I (and presumably others) hated the notion of a Microsoft/Windows-only web. Younger folks just don't realize how close we came and the debt owed to those Mozilla devs.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    I think Opera was preferabke at some point at that time?
- cogman10 3y ago
jwells89 3y ago
That DirectX filter hack for PNG transparency haunts me. What makes it so much worse is that Tasman, the engine used in IE for Mac, had awesome support for CSS, transparent PNGs, and more years earlier, but for some reason it got dumpstered when IE for Mac was discontinued while the inferior Trident lived on in Windows.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Microsoft did a lot of weird things like that - also with Outlook, which used to use Trident to render emails, when IE was finally getting a bit better the Office team decided to switch Outlook to use the far, far worse Word HTML rendering engine instead... Even thinking of that makes me very happy I haven't had to worry about formatting email newsletters for more than 10 years now, brings back bad memories...
jimmaswell 3y ago
Safari has been a huge pain for me as a web dev for its nonstandard parsing/implementation of basic CSS and requiring special cases made for it for things like modal focus/scrolling, nothing to do with Google or privacy whatsoever.
- callalex 3y ago
  Is it non-standard, or non-exactly-like-Chrome? There’s a difference.
  - jimmaswell 3y ago
    Example: https://dev.to/snowleo208/how-to-fix-popups-scrolling-on-safari-3og6 https://dev.to/snowleo208/how-to-fix-popups-scrolling-on-saf...
  - realusername 3y ago
    It's definitely nonstandard, you can scroll below a full screen fixed div..
Izkata 3y ago
> The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support, box model, etc, was broken and non standard. Box model in particular was because they used the much saner border-box instead of the official spec's content-box, which was what everyone else used. You could make the other browsers act like IE by specifying it with box-sizing in the CSS, or from IE8 onwards you could make IE act like the others.

ttfkam 3y ago

I came to hate IE with every fiber of my being, but let's call a spade a spade here: IE basically invented modern CSS. Netscape 3/4 and IE 3/4 had very different views on how web pages should be dynamic and how they should be styled. IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on bgcolor, font tags, etc. Netscape introduced the <layer> tag. IE just made every tag a potential layer. Remember AJAX? Loading content from a script and injecting it into a page? That was 100% IE. The issue wasn't that IE 5, 5.5, and 6 were bad when they came out. They weren't. Not one bit. They were absolutely the cutting edge. Then Netscape died, Microsoft had no more competition in the field, and so they basically just stopped. For years. Mozilla (and shortly after, Firefox) prompted an eventual response, which was IE7: I minor update to an otherwise abandoned codebase. Once it was clear folks were seriously looking at dumping IE, IE8 followed shortly after. The CSS Acid Test showed how far IE had fallen behind, so IE9 and IE10 moved to stop the bleeding. IE 11 was the final release before Microsoft finally dropped the legacy IE baggage, aka the Trident engine. By that time Chrome had stormed the field, and Edge's renderer just couldn't keep up relative to the amount of money Microsoft was willing to pay. So they dumped their own engine and moved to Blink. (If you can't beat em…) But let's be clear, between 1998 and 2003, IE was at the forefront. Its CSS support wasn't broken. It was the best and only. Its box model wasn't broken. There were no other box models to compare it to. You didn't need to give it separate CSS, because it was the only one around really to parse it. It didn't have non-standard AJAX support. It WAS the standard since no XMLHttpRequest object existed at the time. You could write VBScript on a web page instead of JavaScript and have a >90% chance that client could run it. Flash didn't have to be bundled or installed separately, ActiveX just took care of it in the middle of your browsing session. It was the Bronze Age of the web. IE was the one that moved us beyond stone tools. Later supplanted by Firefox and Safari's Iron Age, but still an important and arguably necessary step toward the modern web we know today, including the box model.

icedchai 3y ago
I remember those days well. IE was really the only usable browser for a long time. Netscape was incredibly unstable, didn't support any modern standards. Mozilla (before Firefox) was too new, also unstable until roughly 2005.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  > Mozilla (before Firefox) was too new, also unstable until roughly 2005. That doesn't match my memory at all, unless you include Phoenix under the Firefox umbrella. I switched … I don't remember exactly when, probably in late 2003, but certainly when it was called Phoenix, and it was such a breath of fresh air coming from IE. I'm sure there were breakages, because it was the early noughties and that's what the internet was like, but I don't remember a single time wishing for something that IE provided that Phoenix didn't. But I was just coming to it as a user, not as a dev—maybe you're referring to the dev perspective.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    I was including all "Mozilla" browsers (Phoenix, Firebird, whatever) under that umbrella. I didn't start using Firefox seriously until roughly 1.5. Maybe it was just me!
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      I was there too. Actually ever since Mozilla M1 or M2 I think. Things were pretty rough back then (so much blue!). Then the browser-only Phoenix followed by the rename. I (and presumably others) hated the notion of a Microsoft/Windows-only web. Younger folks just don't realize how close we came and the debt owed to those Mozilla devs.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  I think Opera was preferabke at some point at that time?
cogman10 3y ago

jwells89 3y ago

That DirectX filter hack for PNG transparency haunts me. What makes it so much worse is that Tasman, the engine used in IE for Mac, had awesome support for CSS, transparent PNGs, and more years earlier, but for some reason it got dumpstered when IE for Mac was discontinued while the inferior Trident lived on in Windows.

stephen_g 3y ago
Microsoft did a lot of weird things like that - also with Outlook, which used to use Trident to render emails, when IE was finally getting a bit better the Office team decided to switch Outlook to use the far, far worse Word HTML rendering engine instead... Even thinking of that makes me very happy I haven't had to worry about formatting email newsletters for more than 10 years now, brings back bad memories...

jimmaswell 3y ago

Safari has been a huge pain for me as a web dev for its nonstandard parsing/implementation of basic CSS and requiring special cases made for it for things like modal focus/scrolling, nothing to do with Google or privacy whatsoever.

callalex 3y ago
Is it non-standard, or non-exactly-like-Chrome? There’s a difference.
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  Example: https://dev.to/snowleo208/how-to-fix-popups-scrolling-on-safari-3og6 https://dev.to/snowleo208/how-to-fix-popups-scrolling-on-saf...
- realusername 3y ago
  It's definitely nonstandard, you can scroll below a full screen fixed div..

Izkata 3y ago

> The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support, box model, etc, was broken and non standard. Box model in particular was because they used the much saner border-box instead of the official spec's content-box, which was what everyone else used. You could make the other browsers act like IE by specifying it with box-sizing in the CSS, or from IE8 onwards you could make IE act like the others.