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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

#81

Post by lwhi »

laumars wrote: post #79
lwhi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nice overview, but it feels like the dates are out. Flat design came in much later than the 90s .. Web 2.0 was all about curved corners and gradients .. flat design was introduced in 2010s.

Noooo. I was a desktop software developer in the 90s and the conversation definitely started then. Remember we are talking about desktop software not web development (and by the late 90s bevels were seen as archaic as “under maintenance” GIFs). To illustrate the timeline: Windows MSIs were often compared to Install Shield with regards to the difference between the newer flat design elements of Microsoft vs the older…

The Wikipedia 'flat design' article might need updating with this information.

I see your point re. desktop UI elements, but I think 'flat design' became a zeitgeist term in the 2010s for the majority of creatives / graphic designers.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#82

Post by pavlov »

sharikous wrote: post #76
aparsons wrote: post #57

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.

Interesting. I would have thought that the state of the web 25 years ago was such that a browser would be a rather simple endeavor. Especially with a company with products like MS Word.

Sure, the standards-based web was quite simple 25 years ago. But of course that's not the web that Netscape and Microsoft cared about.

Netscape and Microsoft were engaged in a land rush to extend the web into their proprietary platforms. If they could grab enough marketshare, they'd get to define the web's direction. Initially it was Netscape in the driver's seat, but by 1999 Microsoft had taken control.

It was an opportunity to invent everything from scratch. There was no standard styling, no standard DOM, no standard plug-in API, no standard programming language...

Solutions and answers that seem predetermined in hindsight were anything but. For example, Netscape was pushing their own scripting language initially called LiveScript but then rebranded into JavaScript as part of a Sun partnership. Meanwhile Microsoft's browser supported multiple programming languages that could access a common object model: you could program web pages in VBScript, or Microsoft's own JavaScript look-a-like "JScript", or other languages not yet defined.

Maybe a language-agnostic model would have been better for the web than JavaScript dominance? We might have had something like WebAssembly much sooner. We'll never know. But the answer to these design challenges certainly were not obvious in 1996 to engineers at either browser company.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#84

Post by hulitu »

ilovwindows wrote: post #77

Many people might not know, but early version of IE was built on top of Mosaic, the first web browser, created by same people who built Netscape Navigator. Also, IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator but it was shipped free with Windows OS.

IE was not better than navigator. Everybody i know would use netscape instead of IE. IE won because it was shipped with the OS and some people will not bother to download something else.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#85

Post by hulitu »

WalterBright wrote: post #71
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…

"90 hours a week" for me means writing code that doesn't work.

And they lived in a septic tank. You can work 90 hours a week for a couple of weeks. Than the ambulance comes.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#86

Post by laumars »

lwhi wrote: post #81
laumars wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noooo. I was a desktop software developer in the 90s and the conversation definitely started then. Remember we are talking about desktop software not web development (and by the late 90s bevels were seen as archaic as “under maintenance” GIFs). To illustrate the timeline: Windows MSIs were often compared to Install Shield with regards to the difference between the newer flat design elements of Microsoft vs the older…

The Wikipedia 'flat design' article might need updating with this information. I see your point re. desktop UI elements, but I think 'flat design' became a zeitgeist term in the 2010s for the majority of creatives / graphic designers.

Wikipedia already does hint at that information:

> In 2002, Microsoft released Windows Media Center

> Microsoft continued this style of design with the 2010 release of Windows Phone 7

(emphasis mine)

But you have to bare in mind that article is about more than just desktop application development. Maybe what’s needed is a separate article to talk about the history of software interfaces (maybe there already is an article?)

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#88

Post by hannob »

kiwijamo wrote: post #73
hannob wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support. Faster may be, but certainly not more extensive CSS support. I vividly remember that I desperately wanted to use plenty of CSS features that worked in Mozilla/Netscape and were part of the standard, but there was no hope at ever using them, because IE was the market leader and after IE 6 Micro…

That was easily not true for the early days of CSS. I still have memories of writing CSS for Netscape Navigator and finding it didn't follow the CSS standards in certain areas IE did. One example that I recall was the text-align property. Even early versions of IE correctly only applied that to text only and not certain other elements. Whereas for quite some time Netscape Navigator would align everything (including t…

Netscape changed massively between 4 and 6 (which was the first version based on the Mozilla codebase). AFAIR in 4 CSS support was very preliminary, while in 6 it was best what you could get at the time.

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#89

Post by lsllc »

lwhi wrote: post #72
laumars wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a modern perspective they might. But that is because these days everyone designs flat toolbars. However in the early days of OS design each button on the toolbar looked like a distinct button. Microsoft then flattened the buttons while keeping a bevel on the toolbar itself (latter even that would disappear) — which is the effect being discussed here. Back in the 90s there used to be a great discussion over the f…

A nice overview, but it feels like the dates are out. Flat design came in much later than the 90s .. Web 2.0 was all about curved corners and gradients .. flat design was introduced in 2010s.

It was definitely the late '90s, everyone was trying to copy the IE3 flat toolbar look. There was even an article in the August 1997 issue of Microsoft Systems Journal about it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060910223400/http://www.micros...

Re: 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0

#90

Post by rasz »

hannob wrote: post #62
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…

> IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support. Faster may be, but certainly not more extensive CSS support. I vividly remember that I desperately wanted to use plenty of CSS features that worked in Mozilla/Netscape and were part of the standard, but there was no hope at ever using them, because IE was the market leader and after IE 6 Micro…

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/look-back-history-css/

"While CSS was still just a draft, Netscape had pressed on with presentational HTML elements like multicol, layer, and the dreaded blink tag. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, had taken to incorporating some of CSS piecemeal. But their support was spotty and, at times, incorrect. Which means that by the early aughts, after five years of CSS as an official recommendation, there were still no browsers with full CSS support.

That came from kind of a strange place.

When Tantek Çelik joined Internet Explorer for Macintosh in 1997, his team was pretty small. A year later, he was made the lead developer of the rendering engine at the same as his team was cut in half. Most of the focus for Microsoft (for obvious reasons) was on the Windows version of Internet Explorer, and the Macintosh team was mostly left to their own devices. So Starting with the development of version 5 in 2000, Çelik and his team decided to put their focus where no one else was, CSS support.

It would take the team two years to finish version 5. During this time, Çelik spoke frequently with members of the W3C and web designers using their browser. As each piece slid into place, the IE-for-Mac team verified on all fronts that they were getting things just right. Finally, in March of 2002, they shipped Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. The first browser with full CSS Level 1 support."

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