11 ms·

I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past. As such, they have a higher bar to jump over if they want me to acknowledge that

I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past. As such, they have a higher bar to jump over if they want me to acknowledge that they have created a "modern" browser. They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. And only then will I even consider giving them a ounce of recognition. Not that Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) cares what I think, but that's the price I've set in order for MS to pay off the debt it's worked up over the years as I wasted weeks, possibly months of my life getting things to work in their turd of a.... a.... a looking-at-the-web-kind-of-application-thing. I wont even call it a browser. Or better yet, I wish IE was thrown away and forgotten about, and like Voldemort, it's name would only ever be heard in hushed whispers lest it's evil spirit be awoken. It would become a ghost story web developers tell their web developing kids; "Be standards compliant, or IE6 will come and get yoooOOOOU!". But then I'm old and cranky. The kids will probably love IE19b Custard Pro Home Edition and they'll rally behind it to get IE back to the number 1 slot because it's somehow retro and cool, and I'll laugh in their spotty faces when IE regains it supremacy and Microsoft turns around and shits in their stupid faces all over again, and the internet becomes a desolate wasteland where Bing is the only search engine and the top hit is always an Encarta entry. Wow, I'm in a special kind of a bad mood today.

ripter 13y ago
I feel the same way. I've wasted so many hours on IE specific bugs that they have to really prove themselves before I'll even consider trusting them again.
BillyMaize 13y ago
I feel the same way about everything MS has produced/is planning on producing in the near future. IE, Windows 8, Xbox One, Microsoft Office, the list just goes on.
- sixothree 13y ago
  Everything about Windows 8 to me just feels like a kick in the groin from Microsoft. For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development; yet it seems they've shoved it into the back seat and likely next into the trunk of deprecation.
  - Already__Taken 13y ago
    How'd you work that out? .Net is the hook to get people to take powershell seriously. But I'm no Microsoft developer.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    There was lots of cool .NET stuff to see at BUILD 2013, not sure what you mean.
    - kryten 13y ago
      There was no cool stuff. They fixed a load of stuff, threw new versions out and spun it as marketing. It's not cool if you have to pay for it at a rapidly growing pace.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        Visual Studio does have quite a few improvements, specially in what concerns debugging asynchronous code and DirectX. Unity is now a first class citizen for development of games on Windows. Windows 8.1 brings quite a few new APIs, better interaction with .NET projections. JIT, GC and ASP.NET improvements. The message is, they could have thrown a RSS Reader attitude to .NET, instead they are paying developers to fix those issues. As for paying for stuff, welcome to the commercial world. Microsoft is not the only vendor selling developer tools, although it looks like that when reading HN. With MSDN subscriptions you get lots of those things for "free" for the timeframe the subscription is valid.
        kryten 13y ago
        I am an MSDN subscriber as are the other 100 people we employ. Definitely not free. Really don't care about Windows 8.1 APIs. The only thing that concerns me is web and WPF Desktop apps in C# as that's what powers my industry. Compare to the Java EE ecosystem. Costing: IDE - free (Eclipse/NetBeans) Server - free (GlassFish/Tomcat on Ubuntu) Database - free (PostgreSQL on Ubuntu). Not only that, your profiler, code review, automated build, version control and testing platforms are also 100% free compared to DotTrace, TFS etc.
runjake 13y ago
> I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past. As a person who seems to defend Microsoft quite often on HN, I can't shake the feeling that if they get to first place in anything, they'll become massive tools once again. I like seeing them as the underdog, it forces Microsoft to be kinder and more free, but I think innovation and progress would be seriously hindered (once again) if they grabbed the crown in a particular space.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  What does "being massive tools" mean?
  - eksith 13y ago
    A "tool" in this context is something to be avoided : http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tool http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tool
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    At least in American slang "a tool" is synonymous with someone who is rude, uncaring, and generally arrogant. A "massive tool" is someone who takes all of those properties up a level.
  - Toshio 13y ago
    Excerpted from Urban Dictionary: "The tool is usually someone who is unwelcome but no one has the balls to tell them to get lost. The tool is alwasys making comments that are out-of-place, out-of-line or just plain stupid. The tool is always trying too hard to fit in, and because of this, never will."
  - gpvos 13y ago
    http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tool#Noun http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tool#Noun I guess it's #7: An obnoxious or uptight person.
  - jtms 13y ago
    in this context a "tool" is a synonym for "dick"... basically stating that Microsoft are a bunch of dicks.
fady 13y ago
lol. This was a joy to read, especially the voldemort reference.
mmastrac 13y ago
Thank you for putting into words exactly how I've felt lately. It's not just Microsoft's past that's turned me off them - patent trolling Android manufacturers and other recent activities have basically solidified in my head that I will not choose Microsoft if I have a choice. I'd be willing to put the past behind me if they Just Stopped with all of this crap.
- aerique 13y ago
  They will not stop, they have always been like this. There's a reason seasoned nerds do not like Microsoft and it is not just because the nerds are raging Linux fanboys. It is because of actual experience dealing with MS over a couple of decades. Sometimes MS comes out with something good but at a point (usually within 3 years) marketing will take over and run it into the ground.
eksith 13y ago
I thank your bad mood for brightening up mine! That was spectacular and joyful to read and I agree wholeheartedly. The sad thing is that when I was "designing for IE" as a young lad, I had no idea that's what I was doing. "The browser" was what came with the computer and that was Netscape and later IE. It took a while to wean myself off of : if (document.all) { } And when I discovered other continents to explore, I realized I was living in a desolate quarter of Antarctica.
- nwilliams 13y ago
  That comment reminded me of the Microsoft ad video targeted at web devs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9FAOPBiDk&hd=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9FAOPBiDk&hd=1 Interesting and funny video, regardless of if you think anything changed.
  - eksith 13y ago
    If they really did come up with the Karaoke web standard, my opinion of them will likely soften. Until, of course, developers only start developing with the Non Participant variant, in which case, they can all die in a fire! http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6825830/8-types-of-karaoke-singers http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6825830/8-types-of-karao... My past experience says it will likely be the Old Faded Glory for Firefox and The Unironic Ironic for BB10 with The Clown for Chrome. Great. Now we have 4 more standards thanks to Microsoft!
sbilstein 13y ago
What you are saying is totally legit. Microsoft is a company, and as engineer/web dev/creative/whatever, choosing to rely on IE for development or anything else implies you trust the Microsoft brand to help you get something out of using their toolset. We've all been burned in the past by MSFT and even if their claims about a modern browser are true, and even if it ships today with the best codebase out of any browser, there is little evidence for any of us to suddenly start trusting the spirit behind this new push.
eterm 13y ago
This is how I feel not just about microsoft but about all closed-source software. It's great that it exists and wants to compete and keep the open source stuff on its toes but ultimately I prefer the top dogs to be the open source guys because I know if it ever does go off the rails it can be forked.
chasing 13y ago
Agree 100%. As someone who's been doing web development since 1995, I have wasted an enormous amount of my life dealing with IE-specific bugs. This is enough for me to feel uncomfortable even thinking about Internet Explorer and has tainted me against Microsoft products in general...
- agrias 13y ago
  When our company decided to stop supporting IE.. I had the best day of my life at work yanking out all of the 'kind of' working IE quickfixes/hacks we had used out of the source code. I couldn't agree more.
- stan_rogers 13y ago
  Do you remember NS 4.x and JSSS/translated CSS at all? I do. IE was many, many times better and easier to develop for. (And, frankly, their box model, equivalent to border-box, was the right way to go.)
  - yuhong 13y ago
    I read about the Netscape "Mariner" cancellation shudder.
Maascamp 13y ago
Wow. An especially low brow comment. Thought we could do better than this.
nwilliams 13y ago
Well, the case of Opera's Presto engine being forced to die in the past few years proved that the holy grail of everything being fine and dandy if browser engines and websites follow web standards is a big lie. Opera is/was known for its standards support, . Google Service Drops Support for Opera https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298 G+ doesn't support Opera... why? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738099 Gmail sometimes shows "Gmail too slow? Switch to Chrome, a faster browser." for Opera uses and a similar message shows up on Youtube Google Docs. Chrome and Firefox started their own take on HTML beta and experimental features and led to a race of broken standard support. Too many standards are half baked, and are implemented by some browser makers in a half baked manner and are frequently rolled back in an incompatible way, HTML5 storage being just one example. From "Judgment Day Arrives: Opera Implements the CSS3 Webkit Prefix" http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/ http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/ "In February 2012, we reported the minutes of W3C meeting where Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft discussed implementing -webkit prefixes in non-webkit browsers. The reason: some developers use only webkit prefixes — their sites look good in some browsers, but broken in others even when they offer the same level of CSS3 support. The issue is especially prevalent on mobile browsers and many developers fail to look beyond their high-end Apple or Android devices." "Opera analyzed stylesheets from 10,000 popular websites to determine which CSS values/properties would receive -webkit aliases:" Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features. Take a look at this HN thread about a broken Google site and you see a lot of people defending non-standard HTML because it works on their choice of browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594913 These things are evidence of a currently broken web regardless of IE's involvement, with webkit being the new IE. And it actually explains how some of IE's features and bugs came about in the early 2000s resulted in pain for alternate browsers. Prime example of a great thing: XMLHTTPRequest was not part of a web standard. Though Webkit is open source, I am a bit wary of Chrome's dominance as Google spends a ton of money to bundle it with everything and promote it at every chance over Firefox/Opera since they don't have to continue paying them hundreds of millions for being default and building a big moat for their search engine in the process against competing and future search engines.
megaman821 13y ago
I have cursed at working around IE quirks more times than I can remember, but I don't dump all the blame on Microsoft. Why is this the top comment, it is just a rant/whine? What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web? Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not, and by in large they haven't. Then it becomes Microsoft's fault for not forcing them to upgrade. I don't think people need all their choices made for them. Why is it not web developer's fault for continuing to develop for outdate browsers? or computer manufacturers' fault for not loading a different, more consumer oriented default browser? or the users themselves for not taking a few minutes to update or download an alternative browser?
- masklinn 13y ago
  > What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web? Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and GP fears the same will happen again if they're allowed to gain dominant position again.
  - Legion 13y ago
    Exactly. The web had to bend to IE, not the other way around. The fact that that bending resulted in IE6 still being able to mostly display websites today is not any sort of testament to IE6's quality as a browser.
  - encoderer 13y ago
    > Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did. Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC. The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.
Already__Taken 13y ago
> They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. Didn't we get that? Wasn't that ie6. What went wrong was the internet didn't go away and we didn't all want desktop software. No I think we should all know how that story ends by now. The answer has got to be open source or open standards at the very least. We need to be in a place where your browser doesn't matter, there's 50 out there choose the green one if you like green.
GhotiFish 13y ago
This is my position as well. However I expect if IE becomes dominate, Microsoft will revert to monopolistic practices. On those grounds alone I will never accept IE, even if they pass your bar.
drewcoo 13y ago
You may be cranky, but you're obviously not that old. In ye olden times IE was actually the decent browser (that you didn't have to pay for). It's just that they won the browser wars and let things stagnate. Once they stopped leading they became followers (when they moved at all). This is not recent history. It is lore. But lore that the elder devs should know. As an ex-'softie I can tell you that the engineers from IE were generally not happy with this situation. Or with all of the acrobatics to support non-standard crap. But I have yet to meet anyone who really understands how the winds of decision-making at Microsoft get their first breaths. Basically, it was situation == nobody happy, even most folks at the borg. I apologize if my response isn't full of data. I don't understand how a troll post hit the top of the discussion page and thought it deserved a response, even a fluffy one full of hearsay.
keithnoizu 13y ago
I know, how dare they not always follow convention and go out and create things like xml requests/ajax, etc.
prakashk 13y ago
> They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. I will add one more thing. They have to make the browser not just for Windows platform, but for all major platforms (Mac and Linux).

ripter 13y ago

I feel the same way. I've wasted so many hours on IE specific bugs that they have to really prove themselves before I'll even consider trusting them again.

BillyMaize 13y ago

I feel the same way about everything MS has produced/is planning on producing in the near future. IE, Windows 8, Xbox One, Microsoft Office, the list just goes on.

sixothree 13y ago
Everything about Windows 8 to me just feels like a kick in the groin from Microsoft. For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development; yet it seems they've shoved it into the back seat and likely next into the trunk of deprecation.
- Already__Taken 13y ago
  How'd you work that out? .Net is the hook to get people to take powershell seriously. But I'm no Microsoft developer.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  There was lots of cool .NET stuff to see at BUILD 2013, not sure what you mean.
  - kryten 13y ago
    There was no cool stuff. They fixed a load of stuff, threw new versions out and spun it as marketing. It's not cool if you have to pay for it at a rapidly growing pace.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Visual Studio does have quite a few improvements, specially in what concerns debugging asynchronous code and DirectX. Unity is now a first class citizen for development of games on Windows. Windows 8.1 brings quite a few new APIs, better interaction with .NET projections. JIT, GC and ASP.NET improvements. The message is, they could have thrown a RSS Reader attitude to .NET, instead they are paying developers to fix those issues. As for paying for stuff, welcome to the commercial world. Microsoft is not the only vendor selling developer tools, although it looks like that when reading HN. With MSDN subscriptions you get lots of those things for "free" for the timeframe the subscription is valid.
      - kryten 13y ago
        I am an MSDN subscriber as are the other 100 people we employ. Definitely not free. Really don't care about Windows 8.1 APIs. The only thing that concerns me is web and WPF Desktop apps in C# as that's what powers my industry. Compare to the Java EE ecosystem. Costing: IDE - free (Eclipse/NetBeans) Server - free (GlassFish/Tomcat on Ubuntu) Database - free (PostgreSQL on Ubuntu). Not only that, your profiler, code review, automated build, version control and testing platforms are also 100% free compared to DotTrace, TFS etc.

runjake 13y ago

> I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past. As a person who seems to defend Microsoft quite often on HN, I can't shake the feeling that if they get to first place in anything, they'll become massive tools once again. I like seeing them as the underdog, it forces Microsoft to be kinder and more free, but I think innovation and progress would be seriously hindered (once again) if they grabbed the crown in a particular space.

loup-vaillant 13y ago
What does "being massive tools" mean?
- eksith 13y ago
  A "tool" in this context is something to be avoided : http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tool http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tool
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  At least in American slang "a tool" is synonymous with someone who is rude, uncaring, and generally arrogant. A "massive tool" is someone who takes all of those properties up a level.
- Toshio 13y ago
  Excerpted from Urban Dictionary: "The tool is usually someone who is unwelcome but no one has the balls to tell them to get lost. The tool is alwasys making comments that are out-of-place, out-of-line or just plain stupid. The tool is always trying too hard to fit in, and because of this, never will."
- gpvos 13y ago
  http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tool#Noun http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tool#Noun I guess it's #7: An obnoxious or uptight person.
- jtms 13y ago
  in this context a "tool" is a synonym for "dick"... basically stating that Microsoft are a bunch of dicks.

fady 13y ago

lol. This was a joy to read, especially the voldemort reference.

mmastrac 13y ago

Thank you for putting into words exactly how I've felt lately. It's not just Microsoft's past that's turned me off them - patent trolling Android manufacturers and other recent activities have basically solidified in my head that I will not choose Microsoft if I have a choice. I'd be willing to put the past behind me if they Just Stopped with all of this crap.

aerique 13y ago
They will not stop, they have always been like this. There's a reason seasoned nerds do not like Microsoft and it is not just because the nerds are raging Linux fanboys. It is because of actual experience dealing with MS over a couple of decades. Sometimes MS comes out with something good but at a point (usually within 3 years) marketing will take over and run it into the ground.

eksith 13y ago

I thank your bad mood for brightening up mine! That was spectacular and joyful to read and I agree wholeheartedly. The sad thing is that when I was "designing for IE" as a young lad, I had no idea that's what I was doing. "The browser" was what came with the computer and that was Netscape and later IE. It took a while to wean myself off of : if (document.all) { } And when I discovered other continents to explore, I realized I was living in a desolate quarter of Antarctica.

nwilliams 13y ago
That comment reminded me of the Microsoft ad video targeted at web devs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9FAOPBiDk&hd=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9FAOPBiDk&hd=1 Interesting and funny video, regardless of if you think anything changed.
- eksith 13y ago
  If they really did come up with the Karaoke web standard, my opinion of them will likely soften. Until, of course, developers only start developing with the Non Participant variant, in which case, they can all die in a fire! http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6825830/8-types-of-karaoke-singers http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6825830/8-types-of-karao... My past experience says it will likely be the Old Faded Glory for Firefox and The Unironic Ironic for BB10 with The Clown for Chrome. Great. Now we have 4 more standards thanks to Microsoft!

sbilstein 13y ago

What you are saying is totally legit. Microsoft is a company, and as engineer/web dev/creative/whatever, choosing to rely on IE for development or anything else implies you trust the Microsoft brand to help you get something out of using their toolset. We've all been burned in the past by MSFT and even if their claims about a modern browser are true, and even if it ships today with the best codebase out of any browser, there is little evidence for any of us to suddenly start trusting the spirit behind this new push.

eterm 13y ago

This is how I feel not just about microsoft but about all closed-source software. It's great that it exists and wants to compete and keep the open source stuff on its toes but ultimately I prefer the top dogs to be the open source guys because I know if it ever does go off the rails it can be forked.

chasing 13y ago

Agree 100%. As someone who's been doing web development since 1995, I have wasted an enormous amount of my life dealing with IE-specific bugs. This is enough for me to feel uncomfortable even thinking about Internet Explorer and has tainted me against Microsoft products in general...

agrias 13y ago
When our company decided to stop supporting IE.. I had the best day of my life at work yanking out all of the 'kind of' working IE quickfixes/hacks we had used out of the source code. I couldn't agree more.
stan_rogers 13y ago
Do you remember NS 4.x and JSSS/translated CSS at all? I do. IE was many, many times better and easier to develop for. (And, frankly, their box model, equivalent to border-box, was the right way to go.)
- yuhong 13y ago
  I read about the Netscape "Mariner" cancellation shudder.

Maascamp 13y ago

Wow. An especially low brow comment. Thought we could do better than this.

nwilliams 13y ago

Well, the case of Opera's Presto engine being forced to die in the past few years proved that the holy grail of everything being fine and dandy if browser engines and websites follow web standards is a big lie. Opera is/was known for its standards support, . Google Service Drops Support for Opera https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298 G+ doesn't support Opera... why? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738099 Gmail sometimes shows "Gmail too slow? Switch to Chrome, a faster browser." for Opera uses and a similar message shows up on Youtube Google Docs. Chrome and Firefox started their own take on HTML beta and experimental features and led to a race of broken standard support. Too many standards are half baked, and are implemented by some browser makers in a half baked manner and are frequently rolled back in an incompatible way, HTML5 storage being just one example. From "Judgment Day Arrives: Opera Implements the CSS3 Webkit Prefix" http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/ http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/ "In February 2012, we reported the minutes of W3C meeting where Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft discussed implementing -webkit prefixes in non-webkit browsers. The reason: some developers use only webkit prefixes — their sites look good in some browsers, but broken in others even when they offer the same level of CSS3 support. The issue is especially prevalent on mobile browsers and many developers fail to look beyond their high-end Apple or Android devices." "Opera analyzed stylesheets from 10,000 popular websites to determine which CSS values/properties would receive -webkit aliases:" Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features. Take a look at this HN thread about a broken Google site and you see a lot of people defending non-standard HTML because it works on their choice of browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594913 These things are evidence of a currently broken web regardless of IE's involvement, with webkit being the new IE. And it actually explains how some of IE's features and bugs came about in the early 2000s resulted in pain for alternate browsers. Prime example of a great thing: XMLHTTPRequest was not part of a web standard. Though Webkit is open source, I am a bit wary of Chrome's dominance as Google spends a ton of money to bundle it with everything and promote it at every chance over Firefox/Opera since they don't have to continue paying them hundreds of millions for being default and building a big moat for their search engine in the process against competing and future search engines.

megaman821 13y ago

I have cursed at working around IE quirks more times than I can remember, but I don't dump all the blame on Microsoft. Why is this the top comment, it is just a rant/whine? What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web? Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not, and by in large they haven't. Then it becomes Microsoft's fault for not forcing them to upgrade. I don't think people need all their choices made for them. Why is it not web developer's fault for continuing to develop for outdate browsers? or computer manufacturers' fault for not loading a different, more consumer oriented default browser? or the users themselves for not taking a few minutes to update or download an alternative browser?

masklinn 13y ago
> What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web? Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and GP fears the same will happen again if they're allowed to gain dominant position again.
- Legion 13y ago
  Exactly. The web had to bend to IE, not the other way around. The fact that that bending resulted in IE6 still being able to mostly display websites today is not any sort of testament to IE6's quality as a browser.
- encoderer 13y ago
  > Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did. Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC. The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.

Already__Taken 13y ago

> They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. Didn't we get that? Wasn't that ie6. What went wrong was the internet didn't go away and we didn't all want desktop software. No I think we should all know how that story ends by now. The answer has got to be open source or open standards at the very least. We need to be in a place where your browser doesn't matter, there's 50 out there choose the green one if you like green.

GhotiFish 13y ago

This is my position as well. However I expect if IE becomes dominate, Microsoft will revert to monopolistic practices. On those grounds alone I will never accept IE, even if they pass your bar.

drewcoo 13y ago

You may be cranky, but you're obviously not that old. In ye olden times IE was actually the decent browser (that you didn't have to pay for). It's just that they won the browser wars and let things stagnate. Once they stopped leading they became followers (when they moved at all). This is not recent history. It is lore. But lore that the elder devs should know. As an ex-'softie I can tell you that the engineers from IE were generally not happy with this situation. Or with all of the acrobatics to support non-standard crap. But I have yet to meet anyone who really understands how the winds of decision-making at Microsoft get their first breaths. Basically, it was situation == nobody happy, even most folks at the borg. I apologize if my response isn't full of data. I don't understand how a troll post hit the top of the discussion page and thought it deserved a response, even a fluffy one full of hearsay.

keithnoizu 13y ago

I know, how dare they not always follow convention and go out and create things like xml requests/ajax, etc.

prakashk 13y ago

> They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be. I will add one more thing. They have to make the browser not just for Windows platform, but for all major platforms (Mac and Linux).