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From Hadi Partovi's thread: "The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working! "Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that…
for me means writing code that doesn't work.
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What does “flat” mean here? I tried looking up screenshots of this but they just look… normal.
From a modern perspective they might. But that is because these days everyone designs flat toolbars. However in the early days of OS design each button on the toolbar looked like a distinct button. Microsoft then flattened the buttons while keeping a bevel on the toolbar itself (latter even that would disappear) — which is the effect being discussed here. Back in the 90s there used to be a great discussion over the f…
Flat design came in much later than the 90s .. Web 2.0 was all about curved corners and gradients .. flat design was introduced in 2010s.
> Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it thought “we won.” (...) Years later, Internet Explorer would plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web developers. Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget how good earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a punchline, but there really was something to it; IE…
> IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support. Faster may be, but certainly not more extensive CSS support. I vividly remember that I desperately wanted to use plenty of CSS features that worked in Mozilla/Netscape and were part of the standard, but there was no hope at ever using them, because IE was the market leader and after IE 6 Micro…
I acknowledge that Netscape did eventually fix this particular bug, although if my memory serves it took them in the order of years to fix. It was stuff like this which held back CSS adoption since CSS was a moving goal-post--browsers were fixing bugs and breaking layouts in the process! IE's incorrect box model big mistake for instance.
I would also point out what may be a surprising fact to young people today: IE for Mac was the first browser to have full support for CSS Level 1 [1]. Opera (which had their own engine back in the day) was also pretty good from what I read.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption
From Hadi Partovi's thread: "The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working! "Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that…
> Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it. Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few millions today, but that's some price.
In some industries, people crunch, and everyone knows. It is very much considered to be a part of the job, and people that don't have their heads in sand are aware during hiring. Apple compensates very well but certainly knows how to push their engineers. The reward is to remain on a very rich boat during a fast-rising tide. Highly compensated software developers that have never had to crunch in their careers are luc…
Never. And it's told like something to be proud of. The american work memes are insane.
The IE effort was gargantuan - it was not NT in terms of sheer difficulty, but 1) we had built operating systems before NT, but never a web browser, and 2) Microsoft wanted to keep it under wraps as much as they could. The IE team had a carte blanche to succeed by any means necessary. If they wanted a system call to work differently, you had to get it done or risk getting a meeting with your boss’ angry boss.
Also, IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator but it was shipped free with Windows OS.
Many people might not know, but early version of IE was built on top of Mosaic, the first web browser, created by same people who built Netscape Navigator. Also, IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator but it was shipped free with Windows OS.
But it surely did help.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a modern perspective they might. But that is because these days everyone designs flat toolbars. However in the early days of OS design each button on the toolbar looked like a distinct button. Microsoft then flattened the buttons while keeping a bevel on the toolbar itself (latter even that would disappear) — which is the effect being discussed here. Back in the 90s there used to be a great discussion over the f…
A nice overview, but it feels like the dates are out. Flat design came in much later than the 90s .. Web 2.0 was all about curved corners and gradients .. flat design was introduced in 2010s.
To illustrate the timeline: Windows MSIs were often compared to Install Shield with regards to the difference between the newer flat design elements of Microsoft vs the older 3D objects of the previous iterations of Windows. By Windows 2000 Microsoft had already cemented that flat design was their way forward. Sure buttons were still 3D but a lot of other design elements had been flattened or removed entirely (panels, toolbars, image boarders, editable text areas in some cases too).
While you are right that Metro / Modern was another massive leap forward in terms of flat design, by that point Apple had already dropped much of their skeuomorphic design elements. So the discussions by that point were less about skeuomorphism vs flat design and more about accessibility concerns with regards to removing all hints of 3D in flat design. Basically by 2010 flat design had already largely won over skeuomorphic design. So while designers were still endlessly debating these things, it certainly wasn’t the start of the conversation.
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That was several years later than what the GP was referring to. His point was accurate for IE3 and 4. While I would go on to loathe Internet Explorer, the early releases were actually pretty good. But this was Microsoft back when they had their “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy down as a finely honed art.
I wonder how many websites were using CSS those days.