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The innovations of Internet Explorer

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Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#21

Post by [deleted] »

Toshio wrote: post #2

I'm particularly offended by this statement: "we wouldn’t have the web as we know it today if not for its contributions". In a parallel universe where microsoft never existed, the people who came up with XMLHttpRequest did their innovative work at Netscape and the web today is light years ahead.

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Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#24

Post by christopherscot »

This reminds me of a coworker who, although generally horrible at his job, despised by his colleagues, and only really concerned about his next pay raise would - on occasion - remind us that HE was the one who wrote a small piece of critical software we still used to this day.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#26

Post by ZoFreX »

wrath wrote: post #4

Say what you want about Microsoft and IE (I'm expecting Microsoft to be bashed as usual in this thread), but for those of us who were developing for the web in the early 2000s IE was way richer in features that any other browser. The event model and the styling capabilities were better and best of all MSDN actually had documentation. There's a reason why IE6 was adopted so much. It "was" good. Others with better idea…

Yes, I think it's important to point out to people that perhaps weren't active in web development back then that IE6 was a huge leap forward, and at the time was a great browser.

The only reason we hate it now is because it stuck around too long, and arguably that isn't even Microsoft's fault.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#27

Post by esbwhat »

mda wrote: post #25
esbwhat wrote: post #22

This is the reason why I'm scared of google pushing chrome so hard

Google does not have a conflict of interest with better browsers/internet and its main revenue sources, Microsoft had this problem and resulted this mess.

Google does have a conflict of interest. The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them.

People love google, but it's a for-profit company, not a foundation. Chrome would not be the first abandoned project, either. Anything can happen. Competition is good.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#28

Post by morsch »

codeka wrote: post #17
Toshio wrote: post #2

I'm particularly offended by this statement: "we wouldn’t have the web as we know it today if not for its contributions". In a parallel universe where microsoft never existed, the people who came up with XMLHttpRequest did their innovative work at Netscape and the web today is light years ahead.

Why discount Microsoft's contribution just because "if they didn't do it, someone else would have"? If that's how you think, then nobody's contribution to the world is significant, since "somebody else would have done it."

Not really. Not all contributions are equal. For every contribution A there is a likelihood L(A, X) that is the chance of someone else making the same contribution within time X.

It seems completely reasonable to rank contributions with low values for L (for a given X) higher than others. People are claiming that Microsofts contributions have very high values for L, ie. if MS hadn't come up with it, someone else would have in short order. Furthermore, people are claiming the same is not true for other contributions, e.g. TBL "inventing" the web, or what have you.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#29

Post by gecko »

coopaq wrote: post #18

MS stopped others (Netscape) from innovating. IE only ran on Windows* IE 5 on Mac was crap and maybe antitrust avoiding effort. IE was created at all costs to stop the web browser from becoming an application platform that competed with Windows. MS did everything to keep users from using competing browsers. MS tried to make it impossible to uninstall from Windows. MS tried to keep developers from creating rich applic…

Having been there at the time, IE on Mac was the best browser on that system at the time, by far. Netscape 4 looked like a bloated piece of crap that emulated random bits of Appearance Manager, crashed constantly, and had a nasty tendency of not yielding the event loop, which effectively locked the system. IE, by contrast, was fast, stable, used Appearance Manager, looked native and matched the Macs coming out at the time, and had better privacy controls, and other stuff that I don't even remember. Getting IE on our Macs was a big deal when I was in school, and it was pretty much the first thing I downloaded on a new Mac--the second being Outlook Express.

Now, by the time OS X rolled around, IE was aging very quickly, and by the time Safari 1.0 finally came out, anyone who cared about that sort of thing had jumped to Camino. But that was long after the initial IE port, and I don't think you can possibly say that IE 5 on Mac was crap from the antitrust effort.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#30

Post by jaimzob »

emilis_info wrote: post #9

And Hitler built the Autobahns, shouldn't we say thanks to him for that? Also the rebels where never able to build something as marvelous as the Death Star :-) Success, efficiency and morality are three different things. Though many people mix them up all the time. If someone (or something) is efficient and successful that doesn't mean we should overlook the harm (or good) it is doing.

Hitler? That's where you want to go in a thread about web browsers? Maybe it's time to switch to decaff.
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