31–40 of 77 posts
This is the reason why I'm scared of google pushing chrome so hard
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point. You can look back at a number of features added to the HTML spec, and note that they were first implemented off-the-cuff in IE6. XHR, contentEditable, to name two I can think of straight away. We can give them as much shit as we like for letting the ecosystem stagnate while they had control, which Firefox thankfully set out to fix, but would we have had AJAX if there wasn't an existing XHR implementation,…
It's so hard to say: maybe it'd have taken a while longer. On the other hand, maybe the alternative solution would have been simpler, allowing later developments to progress more quickly. It certainly took years to clean up IE-specific html mess. Who can know if it's a net positive...
Or are you suggesting a standards body would have come up with something elegant and widely adopted? I... doubt that.
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 th…
Netscape 7 (IIRC) seemed a little better than IE, but it came too late and my machine could barely run it, so I just kept using Internet Explorer.
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…
But there's been a lot of rough-and-tumble and a lot of assaults on standards-as-process from all directions (Apple, Google, take a bow). That's why the WHAT-WG was formed, right? The browser makers who want to push the web forward as a platform. The big names like M..ozilla, Mi..Opera, Mmmi. Apple, Mgoo.. hey, has anyone seen Microsoft? Try their mobile, maybe they took a wrong turn.
BTW, the standards process is faltering again[1] (and I don't just mean the W3C's petrify-ray). If they're serious about the web, there's never been a better time for Microsoft to join the WHATWG.
[1] http://the-pastry-box-project.net/bruce-lawson/2012-august-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…
Things had been improving at a decent if not exceptional pace back in the late 1990s. IE6 was important but only as the latest of a series of browsers (from several vendors) that added better and better standards-support, it was that Microsoft kept IE6 in stasis for years was the problem not that IE6 wasn't an improvement over IE 5.
Think about it, WaSP (the Web Standards Group) was founded in 1998, back when IE4 was around (and was one of the pioneering browsers support CSS1 with Opera 3 being the other big one I remember). Zeldman started A List Apart in 1998 which was the same year Acid1 was created to test for CSS1 support in browsers.
Eric Meyer covered support for CSS in browsers in a 1999 article:
CSS: If Not Now, When? http://meyerweb.com/eric/articles/webrev/199906.html
Here's one from him in April 2000 on O'Reilly asking "For literally years now, authors have been faced with a difficult dilemma: should we write pages to conform to the W3C standards, or write them to account for browser bugs?"
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/i...
By the time IE6 came out, some web standards supporters pretty much thought the battle was won in terms of convincing browser makers about the importance of the standards-based web. We were looking forward to vastly better browser support every couple of years. And then IE6 froze a huge part of the market for a long long time.
It took Microsoft 5 years to update IE6 to IE 7. 5 years previous to IE6, IE3 was so primitive that it had just added support for HTML tables and barebones CSS1 features.
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.
Yes it is. Microsoft disbanded the ie team after the release of ie6. This coupled with Longhorn/Vista's delays entrenched Windows XP and by extension ie6 stronger than it otherwise would have.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>and arguably that isn't even Microsoft's fault. Yes it is. Microsoft disbanded the ie team after the release of ie6. This coupled with Longhorn/Vista's delays entrenched Windows XP and by extension ie6 stronger than it otherwise would have.
Why? Because of the huge amount of legacy code that relied on IE6, and would not run on IE7. Microsoft could have kept in ActiveX support and all the insecure bits that these applications relied on, but instead they did the right thing, deprecated their proprietary interfaces, and released a more secure and all-round better browser. And people didn't switch to it.
Almost every major browsers had some kind of contributions that we take today for granted. Also: http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/08/5-features-opera-browser...
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…
I'd been developing for the web for almost 6 years and making my living on the web for almost 4 years when IE6 came out (August 27, 2001) and I certainly wasn't a pioneer. It was very primitive compared to now, but standards-based development was important to a lot of us waaaaaaaay before IE6 came out. Things had been improving at a decent if not exceptional pace back in the late 1990s. IE6 was important but only as…
From way back in Feb 16, 2001:
From Table Hacks to CSS Layout: A Web Designer’s Journey http://www.alistapart.com/articles/journey/
And from that same day, long before the "Internet Explorer 6 Countdown" WaSP had the "Browser Upgrade Initiative":
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…