[wolframhempel]

I started my career 2008 building real estate and stock news websites. Back then, sooooo much of my days were spent making things "IE compatible" using techniques like:

- creating sprite sheets of transparent png corners and sides that one could arrange in a table around an element to create drop-shadows and rounded corners

- putting single pixel, transparent gifs at the end of floated containers because clearfix used a "before" CSS selector that earlier IEs didn't know about.

- writing CSS rules like -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=75)"; to make something semi-transparent...

And so much more. Back then, we were certain we'd open a bottle of champagne once IE is not a requirement anymore.

Today, fortunately, I have a different Job and Microsoft makes different browsers. But looking back, I wouldn't have believed this day to arrive.

[xhrpost]

Imagine having a piece of software where you have 95% global market dominance, a near complete monopoly. And then decide not to update said software in the slightest (other than security fixes) for 6 straight years. Kind of mind blowing.

[deckard1]

that was the point. The entire point of IE was to embrace and extinguish the nascent web. With Netscape being cross-platform and the rise of Java, MS was feeling the threat to their Windows platform. Apple is doing a similar thing with Safari. Their App Store is their money maker. It's the whole reason they force Firefox and Chrome to use standards-lagging and neutered WebKit on iOS.

Google doesn't like the web, either. They control it at both ends. Search and the browser. Every web site today is built to conform to Google's blackbox SEO cargo cult. And Google performs an update regularly to their algorithm. At which point all websites have to do an SEO dance and hope it rains again. Google does this to prevent people from focusing on other search engines. If you always have to update for Google, then there is no time to focus on Bing or other avenues. Chrome also keeps people on Google search.

We don't have an open web today. We have three platforms. We have the Microsoft Windows platform, the Apple App Store platform, and the Google Web Platform.

And Facebook basically learned the lessons AOL failed to, on how to operate a walled garden on the internet.

[fauigerzigerk]

> And Google performs an update regularly to their algorithm. At which point all websites have to do an SEO dance and hope it rains again. Google does this to prevent people from focusing on other search engines

Now that sounds really far fetched. It's like claiming Apple's developer documentation is so terrible to make sure devs have no time left to develop for other platforms :)

What would you say if Google never changed its algorithm? Surely, that would be evidence of a stagnant monopolist no longer finding it necessary to invest in the product.

[lofatdairy]

>We don't have an open web today. We have three platforms. We have the Microsoft Windows platform, the Apple App Store platform, and the Google Web Platform.

Somewhat related: I had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Fernando Pérez (Jupyter) a while back. He made a very similar point, saying "there are only 3 computers today: Azure, AWS, and GCP". I'm not quite cynical enough believe that Google or MS would ever do something to lock down their cloud services to only their consumer products, I think the scale of this oligopoly can't really be understated, and it seems that we're moving away from personal computers and back to the time-sharing systems from before.

[_emacsomancer_]

On Google & the web, I am reminded of this tweet: https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1421141097418350594

"Google hasn't been a perfect ally to the Web, but Google's incentives do align far better than Apple's ongoing opposition.

Apple can be ruthless because the Web is a competing platform for them—versus Google's situation where the Web is critical to revenue. Both companies are just acting in their own business interests (even if Google's interests happen to align with what I view as "good").

That's why Safari spent a decade Grover Norquisting the Web. No one told them to—and I'd bet most of them even believe they're saving the Web. But Apple's incentives have long been against the Web, and that won't change unless the incentives change.

Of course, even if Google's incentives are more aligned, they're… messy… and certainly not perfect. So, it is smart to maintain informed suspicion of Google's influence over the Web. That stated, I do see Chromium itself as a very strong hedge."

[benoketamad]

And people flock to vsCode and other offerings from MS like IE never happened. People really need long term memory...

[yaseer]

Microsoft's leadership and strategy has evolved under Nadella, at least enough to produce quality products like VSCode, and 'good enough' products like WSL.

I say this as someone who has historically been very anti-Microsoft, that used to do all my work in Linux. Modern Windows with VSCode, running WSL, is something the Microsoft of the IE6 era would never have produced.

[krylon]

It's true.

I'm using Linux and/or BSD on all my private machines, but from an outsider's perspective Microsoft appears to have undergone some significant changes since Nadella took over. From what I know, if someone had suggested making the .Net runtime open source in, say, 2008, under Ballmer, they would have been treated like a heretic.

There's still plenty to complain about, it's gotten more nuanced.

Also, it's important to keep in mind that Microsoft - and surely many other companies of that size - are like a feudal system internally, with different teams/divisions doing things their own way, not necessarily playing nice with the others if it doesn't suit their own agenda.

[sph]

MS under Nadella's leadership has grown on two fronts: more friendly to the open source world, while pushing for more advertisement and spyware on their most popular product.

At least Ballmer didn't try to milk me for my data.

[mm007emko]

Well, VSCode is a bad example. It's open source so if Microsoft decides to ditch it, it can be community maintained until people move to something else. Or another foundation can take over or another company can fork it. Come on, VSCode is a "lightweight" IDE ("lightweight" in terms of features, not in terms of resource demands) and it's one of the better ones.

I remember its first version and my first impression was "WTF". Nowadays it's pretty usable. IE of its era really wasn't. You can switch to anything else if you don't want to use VSCode. IE ... you either couldn't (on a company-issued computer) or you didn't know how (at home). Nadella's Microsoft is a far cry from Ballmer's.

[hiq]

> It's open source so if Microsoft decides to ditch it, it can be community maintained until people move to something else.

Some would suggest that it's closer to open-core: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605975

[Someone1234]

I think IE's monopoly is an important component that cannot be ignored when doing comparisons. If Microsoft stopped updating VSCode, 90% is Open Source, and there are multiple good competitors already on the market. So there's minimal captive-ness with VSCode, whereas IE held the browser market captive in outmoded web tech for years, with no real escape for web developers and competitive browsers struggling to make headway.

[xxpor]

And of course, remember that the base of VSCode is Chromium. Pretty hilarious in the scheme of things.

[wongarsu]

Exactly what happened to Netscape, just that Netscape wasn't nearly as entrenched (their market share fell from 70-90% in 1996 to about 0 in 2002).

[CWuestefeld]

Isn't this what happened to products like PKZip and Lotus 1-2-3? Seems like there's ample precedent.

[space_ghost]

I strongly remember using Firebug in Firefox (mind-blowing tools, for the time) in ~2008 and having to debug issues in IE, which had the equivalent of a Check Engine Light for debugging.

[amichal]

Firebug and firebug lite were amazing but to keep the record clear it was possible to debug client-side JavaScript (and other script types) using Visual Studio since very early on in IE. It was granted a major pain to setup properly for breakpoints and code highlighting but it was a full fledged debugger and IDE. I remember doing it often. I don’t remember if there was a debugger for IE for mac and early Safari. For me those where where “alert” and “document.write” were my only options.

[zeven7]

I had forgotten about those days. The VS debugger slowed down my computer so much though that I often just used alert anyway. Firebug was a huge improvement.

[microSnowball]

Lol I remember that little yellow triangle. The source of so much pain.

[z3t4]

undefined is not a function

[samwillis]

So true, debugging with alert()…

There was Firebug Light, which from memory was a bookmarklet that injected a cut down firebug into the page, but even that didn’t help much.

[DrSiemer]

Not owning any Apple products myself, my only option was a free online emulator to try and fix a bug on older iOS systems. It did not support console logs, so I was trying to debug using alert() as far back as yesterday. It didn't help, I only managed to find the issue through xCode on a random Mac.

[dheerajvs]

I won't be able to celebrate for a long time to come. I have to support running an Outlook add-in in Outlook 2016 on Windows, which uses the IE11 rendering engine.

[ratww]

Just in case you haven’t heard: Microsoft recently announced that they won’t hold it against you if you drop support for IE11 in add-ins. Your customers might still complain, though.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/office/dev/add-ins/develop/...

[Bilal_io]

I am sure Microsoft wouldn't have held it against you to drop support for IE back in 2010. It's always been about the customer.

[ratww]

Incorrect. For those add-ins, IE11 support was required until recently, and there was a real review process, and it was actually pretty good. They even reported very subtle IE11 visual bugs to us.

[skittleson]

I remembered these days as well. There wasn't a lot of resources out their either. Getting everything pixel perfect was the goal. HTML emails were extra tricky since they displayed differently in each client.

[z3t4]

Pixel perfect existed in an era where almost everyone had 800x600 screens. Today it's about adapting to many different screen sizes and devices. So when people say pixel perfect today they're 20+ years too late. :P

[vermaden]

> (...) Microsoft makes different browsers.

They are not.

They just took Chrome and added their logo and theme around.

[hackerman123469]

They didn't take Chrome, they took the engine that powers Chrome, Chromium.

Just like Apple's Safari is built on WebKit. You wouldn't say that other vendors like Sony just took Safari and put their logo on the browser for the browser on PlayStation.

It's the same engine, not the same browser.