Chrome Won • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome Won

#581

Post by AnimalMuppet » Tue, May 30, 2017, 4:35 PM UTC

scholia wrote: post #575

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, a quick search doesn't turn it up. This is from memory. Microsoft's strategy - from their own memos (maybe the Halloween memos?) - was to "try to make using Netscape a jarring experience". They were paying (maybe in equipment or some kind of freebies) websites that included at least three IE-only elements in their pages. This was not just competition. This was a deliberate campaign to break the web in a way wh…

My memory is different, obviously. The IE team took great pains to implement Netscape additions even when they were not standards so that the IE rendering was as good. I never heard of any attempt to make Netscape look worse. That doesn't mean it never happened, but I followed the story very closely at the time. Microsoft was much more co-operative than Netscape in the early days. It was one of Microsoft's advantages…

I think Microsoft tried to make everything that worked on Netscape work on IE. This was going the other direction - making stuff that worked on IE but didn't work on Netscape, and trying very very hard to get people to write pages that used those things. By having a strict superset, and getting people to use parts that were in the superset but not in the base set, they could effectively make the web IE-only.

Re: Chrome Won

#582

Post by thewhitetulip » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 3:08 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #448

thewhitetulip wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"best viewed with IE" got updated to "best viewed in Chrome"

Yes, except that "best viewed with IE" was there (at least initially) as part of a campaign where Microsoft was paying web sites to put in stuff that was incompatible with Netscape/Mozilla, and "best viewed in Chrome" is there because web developers are lazy.

A monopoly is a monopoly, either it can be driven by greed or by laziness of web devs.

Re: Chrome Won

#583

Post by scholia » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 12:38 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #581

scholia wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory is different, obviously. The IE team took great pains to implement Netscape additions even when they were not standards so that the IE rendering was as good. I never heard of any attempt to make Netscape look worse. That doesn't mean it never happened, but I followed the story very closely at the time. Microsoft was much more co-operative than Netscape in the early days. It was one of Microsoft's advantages…

I think Microsoft tried to make everything that worked on Netscape work on IE. This was going the other direction - making stuff that worked on IE but didn't work on Netscape, and trying very very hard to get people to write pages that used those things. By having a strict superset, and getting people to use parts that were in the superset but not in the base set, they could effectively make the web IE-only.

I was following it very closely and didn't see that. It seems to me that if Microsoft was implementing Netscape's additions, Netscape could have implemented Microsoft's.

One of the facts of the case is that Microsoft got as close to the standards bodies as it could, and part of its marketing was that it was making IE more standards compliant than Netscape. This is actually very common in computer history (the market leader does whatever it wants to innovate, while the losers band together around standards).

In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Microsoft out-programmed Netscape and then Netscape made several disastrous decisions that amounted to browsercide.

As I said, if you've got any evidence, I'm interested. Specifically, what did Microsoft add that was non-standard and that Netscape couldn't have added?

As far as I know, not even ActiveX qualifies. I discussed this with Mitchell Baker, and she clearly said that Mozilla could have implemented ActiveX if they had wanted to.