3 ms·

> I could have written the rest of the history of web browsers on that day -- no other outcomes were possible. It's really amazing how much things can change.

by amyjess 12y ago

> I could have written the rest of the history of web browsers on that day -- no other outcomes were possible. It's really amazing how much things can change. Eric wrote this in 2003, when IE was dominant by a ridiculous margin and everything else was a tiny niche. It was written from the perspective that IE had won the browser wars forever. Now, of course, IE has fallen from grace hard, and it's all about browsers based on WebKit, Blink, and Gecko. There are a number of things you can thank for that. One is MS sitting on their browser for 5 years and doing nothing with it while everyone else kept innovating. Another, probably more important one is the rise of mobile. Mobile IE only ran on WinMo, when the early history of smartphones was dominated by Symbian and its WebKit-based browser, and then iOS and Android took over with their own WebKit-based browsers...

pjc50 12y ago
sitting on their browser for 5 years and doing nothing with it This was a consequence of the backfiring of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy and the enforcement of the consent decree. IE could no longer be a product distributed free with Windows; it had to be part of the OS, because that's what they'd argued in court. So nothing could change until the release of Vista. Remember, IE was reactive (in the strategic sense). Microsoft didn't really want rich portable web applications to become a thing, they much preferred businesses to tie their internal processes to VB client-server apps or implement their functionality as ActiveX controls. A lot of them did and ended up stuck to IE6 for a decade. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer
- amyjess 12y ago
  Well, I remember at some point late in Vista's development, a bunch of news articles appeared about how Microsoft was putting the long-ago-disbanded IE team back together in response to Firefox's growing market share. It's not like they were developing IE7 alongside Vista all those years but couldn't release it until the rest of Vista was ready.

by amyjess 12y ago

pjc50 12y ago

sitting on their browser for 5 years and doing nothing with it This was a consequence of the backfiring of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy and the enforcement of the consent decree. IE could no longer be a product distributed free with Windows; it had to be part of the OS, because that's what they'd argued in court. So nothing could change until the release of Vista. Remember, IE was reactive (in the strategic sense). Microsoft didn't really want rich portable web applications to become a thing, they much preferred businesses to tie their internal processes to VB client-server apps or implement their functionality as ActiveX controls. A lot of them did and ended up stuck to IE6 for a decade. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Internet_Explorer

amyjess 12y ago
Well, I remember at some point late in Vista's development, a bunch of news articles appeared about how Microsoft was putting the long-ago-disbanded IE team back together in response to Firefox's growing market share. It's not like they were developing IE7 alongside Vista all those years but couldn't release it until the rest of Vista was ready.