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The innovations of Internet Explorer

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Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#41

Post by untog »

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.

Oops, you've gone and invoked Godwin's law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law

A cold shower and a drive in a Volkswagen before you can post again.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#42

Post by dpark »

erez wrote: post #7

I remember asking the web-devs at the company I used to work for several years ago why do they support IE only, and their reaction was that they will not be able to pull off all the neat tricks they can pull off in IE in any other browser. Their reaction to any suggestion of standards was "I don't care about standards, if that means I can't do whatever IE enables me to do". Is that innovation? Some would say yes. I t…

> Is that innovation? Some would say yes. I think that most of these only became innovative once they began to be available to larger audiences, which coincides with the rise of Firefox and later on Chrome.

This seems like a definition designed specifically to avoid giving IE any credit for innovation. How can a feature be innovative after it's copied but not when it's created?

If something is so valuable that competitors are compelled to copy it, that seems almost the very definition of innovation.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#43

Post by macspoofing »

ZoFreX wrote: post #37
macspoofing wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Vista's delays didn't do much to entrench IE6. IE7 was available on XP, and companies just flat out didn't want to upgrade from XP or IE6, even though there were more superior options available. 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 r…

>Vista's delays didn't do much to entrench IE6.

It did in that Microsoft did not originally plan to release an update to ie for Windows XP. The idea was that next gen OS would come with next gen browser.

>IE7 was available on XP, and companies just flat out didn't want to upgrade from XP or IE6 ...

Do you not think that that has something to do with the fact that there was a 5 year window, in a pivotal time for the internet (2001-2006), that allowed ie6 to build up massive mindshare and massive web-app dependency?

Worse, when ie6 came out it was the best browser out there, and the default choice on an operating system that dominated the industry. There was no Firefox, or Chrome or Safari or open source WebKit. So it easily became entrenched quickly. After that, inertia carried ie6.

The right thing for Microsoft to do was to NOT disband the ie team and release ie7, ie8, ie9, ie10 at reasonable release cycles (annually for example).

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#44

Post by kakuri »

While praising IE, let us not forget that MS only innovated enough to displace other web browsers, leveraging its Windows near-monopoly to saturate the market with IE. Dominance achieved, competitors obliterated, MS was content to let the world live with IE6 for eternity, and only with the rise of Firefox and Webkit-based browsers did MS finally deign to do something (althought not much) for the web with IE9.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#45

Post by pmelendez »

morsch wrote: post #28
codeka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

I am agreed with you but still codeka point is valid. Granted for a given X there would be low values of L that make the contribution irrelevant. What I differ from you is saying that X is static. Einstein might helped to get the atomic bomb working faster, but there are good chances that eventually it would come out anyway.

Anyway, discarding contributions in that way seems disingenuous in the best case. What would happen if Newton wouldn't invent Calculus? Well somebody else would invent it later but we should be thankful that that didn't take 100 years more.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#46

Post by stan_rogers »

gecko wrote: post #29
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 th…

Not to mention that Netscape 4 never really implemented CSS. There was a CSS-to-JSS (JavaScript Style Sheets) translation level that almost worked most of the time, but it couldn't manage markup that resulted in a deeply-nested native object hierarchy (something that was altogether too easy to do in straightforward HTML). Nor did DIV or IFRAME properly translate to LAYER and ILAYER. Element addressing in NS was pretty much strictly hierarchical; one needed to include a tree search for NS to get something similar to getElementByXXX(). (And I had to support that horrid thing until 2005.)

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#47

Post by johnnymonster »

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…

Just like steel tools revolutionized hunting and gathering, i'm glad I don't have to go hunt for my steak and salad! Nor do i reminisce about the days working with IE!

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#48

Post by wickedchicken »

untog wrote: post #41
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.

Oops, you've gone and invoked Godwin's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law A cold shower and a drive in a Volkswagen before you can post again.

> A cold shower and a drive in a Volkswagen before you can post again.

What an excellent retort.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#49

Post by wickedchicken »

esbwhat wrote: post #27
mda wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them.

Google operates a search engine, meaning most of the time it points people to other websites. Many of these sites are not under Google's control, but many of them run AdSense. The more pages you visit, the more ads you see. If the internet gets generally faster, Google sites or not, that works in their favor.

Re: The innovations of Internet Explorer

#50

Post by evilduck »

esbwhat wrote: post #27
mda wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google may be motivated to attempt things like Dart and NaCl which help drive forward their own products first and foremost, but they have a consistent reputation of making their web-advancing client-side technologies open source too (Dart, NaCl, WebM, SPDY, Chromium, Webkit, etc are all open source). They also have Mozilla, Opera and Apple pushing forwards as well (though I'd argue that IE9/10 isn't putting much competitive pressure on anyone).

If Chrome is abandoned by Google you're free to fork Chromium, acquire licenses for it's restricted plugins and it'll only slow the web's march forward, not actively hinder it. It's entirely possible for another group to carry the Chromium torch, and Google/Chrome has never yet intentionally damaged the quality of standards-compliant competing web products (though they don't offer quirks-mode fixes for crap tailored only to IE).

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