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Internet Explorer is evil (1996)

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Re: Internet Explorer is evil (1996)

#11

Post by revel »

inetknght wrote: post #10
steiner_j wrote: post #8

"In conclusion, people are finally beginning to understand the hard way: Web Browsers really make poor client application runtimes for all but the most basic of things. ActiveX is a security nightmare and counter to making cross-platform applications. The web is a constantly changing and evolving standard separate from Microsoft or any specific operating system, as such implementing an application for just one specif…

To this day I detest sites that require javascript, inject tens or hundreds of MB into cache, and make ridiculous demands of rendering.

isn't that all of them?

Re: Internet Explorer is evil (1996)

#14

Post by tech-historian »

LocalH wrote: post #12
tech-historian wrote: post #6

If you want some IE nostalgia, here's a visual history of IE starting in 1995 (v1.0): https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/internet-explorer Factoid: There were versions of IE for both Mac and Solaris.

Factoid addendum: there was also IE for HP-UX

Yes!

And here's a 1999 Wayback Machine archive of the IE for Unix site on microsoft.com:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991128115223/http://www.microso...

"Internet Explorer 5 for UNIX offers the most complete support of Internet standards and technologies, including XML and DHTML"

Re: Internet Explorer is evil (1996)

#15

Post by OliverJones »

Yes, the Redmond Middle School Science project called Internet Explorer, now in the dumpster of history where it always belonged, was evil.

Its over-engineered idiocy (monikers? apartment threading? quirks mode? wtf?) slowed down the development of good internet applications by decades, and caused tens of thousands of lost developer and tester hours that we can never get back.

Gates was too greedy to understand why it was a problem. Ballmer was too stupid. Now, Nadella finally figured out that developers might stop hating his company if he finally flushed that toilet. And flush it he did.

Edgium is good. As good as all the takes-16-hours-to-compile stuff running on modern desktops.

Re: Internet Explorer is evil (1996)

#16

Post by ebiester »

steiner_j wrote: post #8

"In conclusion, people are finally beginning to understand the hard way: Web Browsers really make poor client application runtimes for all but the most basic of things. ActiveX is a security nightmare and counter to making cross-platform applications. The web is a constantly changing and evolving standard separate from Microsoft or any specific operating system, as such implementing an application for just one specif…

But nobody chose the alternatives.

Java or single operating system applications were the alternative. Where would we be today if you couldn't swap between Mac and Windows laptops -- or worse, had to have both -- because you depended on applications that had no common operating system?

The reason we can use linux as a desktop is because of web applications. Now, it's possible that we could have ended up with Web Start or some alternative, but we didn't.

Even today, cross-platform applications are terrible or expensive or both. Even today, it's a giant pain to write cross-platform apps in anything but C or C++. (QT's documentation is not great for the alternatives IMO, and you end up needing to understand C++ anyway.)

If we want to get back to this, we need a better option. It turns out that nobody is willing to put in the effort when we already have web applications.

Worse is better.

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