3 ms·

I think there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to suggest the US vs Microsoft settlement played a significant part in the stagnation of Internet Expl

by bhauer 13y ago

I think there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to suggest the US vs Microsoft settlement played a significant part in the stagnation of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 6 was released on August 27, 2001 [1]. The anti-trust case was settled on November 2, 2001 [2]. After IE 6, Internet Explorer effectively went into hibernation for five years. Was there correlation? I don't know for certain--I wasn't there. But it seems likely that work stopped on IE in large part because of the settlement. For this reason, I would remind any web developer who complains about IE 6 to reserve a bit of their vitriol for the United States government for meddling in this marketplace. After a while, Microsoft started testing the browser water again, slowly at first. I now think IE 10 is as good a browser as Firefox or Chrome, perhaps in some different ways. I remain a Firefox fan, but I am glad that Microsoft is back in the browser game because I was already starting to feel nervous about Webkit domination in the past 1-2 years. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corporation#Settlement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp...

kevin_morrill 13y ago
I was there as an employee. It absolutely had a chilling effect. Up until then Microsoft was aggressively finding ways to tie the browser closer to the OS and make it more integrated. In IE4, they went so far as to rewire the OS shell to use IE in all its rendering. After IE6 it was clear the government was only going to punish the company for pursuing this. As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track, doing what was in the best interest of consumers. No one would buy an OS today that cannot browse the web out of the box. Furthermore, MS was lambasted for "forcing" OEMs to not bundle bloatware. Once they were prevented from doing this, PCs were packaged with all kinds of crap and you pretty much had to format them to get a decent experience. I left the company 5 years ago, partly out of frustration with the EU regulation. Our team was forced to spend hours documenting internal DB stored procedures so that some competitor could reverse engineer our product. Every year Microsoft donates thousands of man years of effort doing this crap that serves no purpose for Microsoft's customers.
- yuhong 13y ago
  On crapware: http://hal2020.com/2013/01/15/crapware-and-how-we-got-here/#comment-9413 http://hal2020.com/2013/01/15/crapware-and-how-we-got-here/#...
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  > As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track Every OS today ships with a browser--yes. But are the browsers tightly integrated, crucial components for the OS itself? I don't believe so. The trend I see is that browsers are separate apps that are carefully segregated from the rest of the OS. Wasn't the tight IE integration one of the things MS ended up having to rip apart to meet the desired level of security for Vista and onwards?
  - yuhong 13y ago
    Yea, they created IEFRAME and backported the required changes to XP too as part of IE7. I wrote about a bug in this logic: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2011/07/hotfix-kb972582-and-how-it-fixes-empty.html# http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2011/07/hotfix-kb972582-and-how...

by bhauer 13y ago

kevin_morrill 13y ago

I was there as an employee. It absolutely had a chilling effect. Up until then Microsoft was aggressively finding ways to tie the browser closer to the OS and make it more integrated. In IE4, they went so far as to rewire the OS shell to use IE in all its rendering. After IE6 it was clear the government was only going to punish the company for pursuing this. As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track, doing what was in the best interest of consumers. No one would buy an OS today that cannot browse the web out of the box. Furthermore, MS was lambasted for "forcing" OEMs to not bundle bloatware. Once they were prevented from doing this, PCs were packaged with all kinds of crap and you pretty much had to format them to get a decent experience. I left the company 5 years ago, partly out of frustration with the EU regulation. Our team was forced to spend hours documenting internal DB stored procedures so that some competitor could reverse engineer our product. Every year Microsoft donates thousands of man years of effort doing this crap that serves no purpose for Microsoft's customers.

yuhong 13y ago
On crapware: http://hal2020.com/2013/01/15/crapware-and-how-we-got-here/#comment-9413 http://hal2020.com/2013/01/15/crapware-and-how-we-got-here/#...
snowwrestler 13y ago
> As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track Every OS today ships with a browser--yes. But are the browsers tightly integrated, crucial components for the OS itself? I don't believe so. The trend I see is that browsers are separate apps that are carefully segregated from the rest of the OS. Wasn't the tight IE integration one of the things MS ended up having to rip apart to meet the desired level of security for Vista and onwards?
- yuhong 13y ago
  Yea, they created IEFRAME and backported the required changes to XP too as part of IE7. I wrote about a bug in this logic: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2011/07/hotfix-kb972582-and-how-it-fixes-empty.html# http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2011/07/hotfix-kb972582-and-how...