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25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

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Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#51

Post by 13of40 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #38
kenjackson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This subculture exists everywhere. I play basketball and the most revered player is Kobe Bryant. He isn’t the best, but his work ethic and competitiveness was beyond all others. He’d probably be a jerk to play with, but most people are never in a position to do hard work to deliver something that they consider valuable. Now what is valuable differs to each person. Basketball is just a sport. Chess just a game. A surg…

Well Kobe Bryant isn't a scab like these people that work overtime for a monopolist.

The work I did at Microsoft helped build thousands of businesses, and later on I helped secure thousands more. I find it truly strange that I shouldn't feel proud of that.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#52

Post by Firehawke »

x0x0 wrote: post #28
GrumpyNl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He forgot to mention that it wasnt a "great" product, they left us frontend developers with several headaches.

ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time. My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall. By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of…

Yep. IE took off not just because of Microsoft's position as the default browser, but because Netscape totally sucked on Windows. I'd switched to IE2 because the Netscape build my ISP offered was horrible and constantly crashed.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#53

Post by coldacid »

kristianp wrote: post #31

IE 4 was better than Netscape, partly because Netscape dropped the ball around version 4. Someone can correct me, but I think after ns3 they decided to re-implement a lot of the user interface code which caused a big delay and allowed IE to pull ahead.

There were a LOT of boneheaded decisions around "Communicator" 4, some of which had nothing to do with the user interface. Netscape management had lost its way after Navigator 3 was released.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#54

Post by sbarre »

armchairhacker wrote: post #44
sbarre wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say one thing, and I know it will come off as cliche: If you weren't there, you may not understand. In the early days of the consumer Internet (mid/late 90s) there was a real wild west / gold rush feeling to things and it did feel like we were changing the world (spoiler: most of us weren't). I am not defending or excusing anything here, just saying that I'm sure it was a lot easier for some people, perhaps alre…

But it was kind of a gold rush, race-to-first? I mean look at the Web today using TCP, IPv4, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, with companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon. If the internet was created with what we know now it would look much different. You will never be able to create a technology or company so flawed like that today.

I don't think most of us knew what the Internet would look like in 25 years. My guess back then was way more regulation, as opposed to the commercial monopolies we have today, but what did I know, I was barely in my 20s..

All the stuff you listed above (except for HTML/CSS/JS) already existed and was not invented in the 90s, and was already the foundation of the Internet at that point.

There was not much chance of changing or disrupting those things.

Also hindsight is 20/20 of course. Easy to look back two decades and say "what were they thinking?" etc..

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#55

Post by joophro »

LanceJones wrote: post #17
piker wrote: post #4

> Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it. Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few millions today, but that's some price.

Ugh... that term, "broken families". I divorced when my sons were 10 and 7, and the divorce actually healed our family.

Cope. It didn’t for your kids.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#56

Post by magicalist »

twoodfin wrote: post #47
warning26 wrote: post #7

> Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it thought “we won.” (...) Years later, Internet Explorer would plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web developers. Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget how good earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a punchline, but there really was something to it; IE…

My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities. You can imagine that a development culture like the one described in this Twitter thread would have a near-allergic reaction to working in an environment where the lawyers had to clear every major enhancement. Microsoft management wasn’t excited abou…

> My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities.

Not sure where you got this impression, but not the case. The IE team was largely retasked to work on OS features that actually did have DOJ oversight.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#57

Post by aparsons »

The IE effort was gargantuan - it was not NT in terms of sheer difficulty, but 1) we had built operating systems before NT, but never a web browser, and 2) Microsoft wanted to keep it under wraps as much as they could.

The IE team had a carte blanche to succeed by any means necessary. If they wanted a system call to work differently, you had to get it done or risk getting a meeting with your boss’ angry boss.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#58

Post by aparsons »

GrumpyNl wrote: post #22
linguae wrote: post #8

From Hadi Partovi's thread: "The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working! "Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that…

He forgot to mention that it wasnt a "great" product, they left us frontend developers with several headaches.

You’re thinking mid-2000s IE. In the 90s, IE was far ahead of everything else. The gap between 2008 IE and Chrome was FAR smaller than the gap between 1997 IE and Netscape/Mosaic

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#59

Post by x0x0 »

Firehawke wrote: post #52
x0x0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time. My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall. By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of…

Yep. IE took off not just because of Microsoft's position as the default browser, but because Netscape totally sucked on Windows. I'd switched to IE2 because the Netscape build my ISP offered was horrible and constantly crashed.

Yeah, I've literally spent months of my life hunting the html sequences causing netscape to crash. It was viscerally loathed by my team. Particularly the fragility around tables... good thing it was hilariously fragile with css too!

You can still see remnants of some of it online, eg this

http://old.macedition.com/cb/nn4crashers/index.html

We were early to the idea of shipping professional apps via the browser, and it was a choppy beginning.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#60

Post by dang »

joophro wrote: post #55
LanceJones wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh... that term, "broken families". I divorced when my sons were 10 and 7, and the divorce actually healed our family.

Cope. It didn’t for your kids.

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