Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

> yet MS still pushed ahead with IE-specific language features

Yeah, they all did though.

I was doing frontend dev back then, if we can call it that, it was web development with some JS actually or DHTML for those who remember.

Scripting elements was very limited at the beginning, you couldn't access the entire DOM, only forms and images, if I remember correctly, and maybe the decoration of links, that's how the hover behaviour was born.

The story is quite more nuanced, there's also the fact that IE was actually a better browser than Netscape after the Netscape 4 fiasco (I was a paying customer of Netscape 3 gold and Netscape 4)

Netscape tried the non-standard layer element accessible through document.layers (all the layout was done with tables back then, so this looked like an improvement) but didn't catch up.

IE 4 had a lot more features, it introduced document.all to access the entire DOM by ID, documents.forms, document.images, document.all.tags() that allowed the access to all tags by tag name, it introduced innerHTML, outerHTML, innerText and outerText properties.

It's easy to understand why developers switched to IE, given also that Windows was the primary platform that users used to browse the web (do we still use the browse verb?) and IE4 was available on the Mac too. IE5 introduced the XMLHttpRequest object so AJAX was born (IE 5 on Mac was even more advanced than the one on Windows)

And yes, MS abused of their dominant position with IE6, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that they actually innovated in the field, before abusing of it.

EDIT: it wasn't called XmlHttpRequest on IE, you had to instantiate an Activex Object (COM component) the MSXML2.XMLHttp. Forefox came up with the XmlHttpRequest name later (XML was still going strong at the time). You could actually instantiate any Activex component available on the client machine from IE >= 5, even Word if you wanted to.

I remember developing intranets for Windows networks where we used Word automation from the browser using Activex.

To think about it now it was a terrible idea, but it looked like a miracle back then. You could instantiate the ADODB COM component and run queries from the browser to the SQL server.

I remember applets being used for roll-over buttons on web pages and always knowing that an applet was being used because Internet Explorer 4 hung when loading the page, waiting for the JVM to fire up (with much disk churning).

Kind of nostalgic for it!

Yes, Netscape took them to court, proved monopoly by then it was too late. Microsoft had already took over. Bundled IE with Windows (it was first an add on) and added a deal with Apple to include it in their OS. It was Chrome that tore it down. Which was a good thing and a bad thing.

No, we've just realized that they're just less evil than all the other current behemoths.

Sun tried to be "cool" but was really just a money loss machine and now Java and MySQL is the property of we-will-audit-you-Oracle and Mr I-will-sue-people-when-I-need-another-yacht-Ellison.

G had a motto of "do no evil", that motto is long gone. I've always disliked their handling of the Android platform (the handset manufucaturer/carrier dominance over application stores back in the J2ME days was horrible, Google's quest for marketshare let that go on for a few more years and allowed for some bad fragmentation for developers).

And this was just the start, their "AI-handles-support-so-we-don't-need-to-talk-to-humans" combined with accounts being suspended willy-nilly just leaves people stranded (anybody remember how an indie guy making an Stadia exclusive game was shut out of his Google account?) and speaking of stadia, what's Googles cancelled product body-count up to now?

Apple has had some pros on the privacy side but they've stumbled even there, and apart from that they've been quite a heavy-handed player with a clear my-way-or-the-highway attitude (vs Epic,Spotify,etc).

Amazon busting unions, fleecing people on AWS and copying popular products on the marketplace needs no more mentions.

The Ubers, Spotifys,etc of the world might've made things cheaper and more streamlined but there's been at a cost of distinct monetary pressure on drivers,musicians,etc.

Facebook facilitating genocides (Rohynga), election fraud (US/UK) and general lax privacy (Cambridge Analytica).

MS might have gotten worse in terms of privacy and ads(start menu ads,wtf?), but in general they've mostly kept to making money and actually supporting developers and opensource. NPM/Github costs might be fractional for MS but would've probably landed the rest of us another SourceForge (remember the spyware they added to make money? That was probably what got GH off the ground more than anything) because we've not yet sorted a way for developers and distribution to get paid for our "free" contributions.

From my recollection, it was Firefox that broke the IE stranglehold and then later Google released Chrome.