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> Internet Explorer had a number of iffy behaviours and lagged behind other browsers for many visual effects, even regarding basic properties like opacity. Thus
by tosti 1mo ago
> Internet Explorer had a number of iffy behaviours and lagged behind other browsers for many visual effects, even regarding basic properties like opacity. Thus, Microsoft brought in bespoke filter functionality.
That's not accurate at all. At the time IE4 launched, it was ahead of the competition. It also had quite a lot of non-standard extras as part of Microsofts strategy to embrace, extend and extinguish. IE4 was extend. In other cases the strategy worked, but not for the web.
The DirectX filters weren't used pretty much anywhere until it turned out it could do things that were specced and implemented by others years later.
- agos 1mo agobut that is not about IE4
- tosti 1mo agoI see. Although filters were implemented in IE4, DirectX filters came about in IE5.5 However, the extend phase wasn't just IE4. They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6. By the time IE7 came out, it was clear the web is here to stay.
- duskwuff 1mo ago> They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6. IE6 also stuck around a lot longer than previous versions. It was released in 2001; IE7 didn't show up until 2006, and was an optional update which many users skipped.
- icedchai 1mo agoMany forget that IE was basically the only decent browser for most of the early 2000's. It was the defacto standard. Netscape 4.x was ancient and crashed every half hour. Mozilla/Firefox wasn't stable yet. Chrome wasn't out.
- duskwuff 1mo agoThere was even an unpleasant period in the early 2000s where MSIE was the only viable browser on Mac OS. Safari and Firefox hadn't been released yet, Netscape 4.x never made the jump to OS X, and ports of the Mozilla suite were never particularly usable on the platform.
- tosti 1mo agoYes, but the mac version had a better engine than ie on windows. I jumped ship when ME came out. KDE had a good browser (Konqueror), the engine of which is now known as WebKit and powers Safari. When I wasn't using Konqueror I ran NN or whatever Mozilla version they had in the day. It worked great but ran slow and was a huge memory hog.
- mitxela 1mo agoHow come when Microsoft does it, it's EEE, but when Google does it, it's just progress? Nobody stopped other browsers from implementing things the Microsoft way.