[wrath]

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 ideas came along and made the web development experience better, but I agree that IE started it all. I have no idea if the web would be better or worst without IE. I would expect that someone else (Netscape??) would have played the role of IE if it didn't exist and we would be stuck in a similar situation. Remember that in the early 2000s developers that called themselves web developers had ZERO experience.

There weren't any standards back then and since many of us had to start writing intranets and websites, and since you could do more with IE6 we used it.

[aboodman]

IE6 was actually just an incremental improvement on IE5 and IE4 before it. IE4 was the really important leap.

Story time:

IE3 and NN3 both had small amounts of programmability via JavaScript - you could change the src of an image, you could inspect and modify form values, you could navigate the page, or completely clear its contents and rewrite it as a string. Oh, and also alert(), confirm(), and prompt().

IE4 and NN4 came out at roughly the same time. But in IE4, they took this idea of small amounts of programmability, and generalized it to the entire document. IE4 introduced the idea that every HTML node should be programmable and interactive in a generalized way. If you knew the HTML properties for an element, you already knew its programmatic interface. It was a simple, powerful idea that hasn't been improved dramatically since.

NN4, on the other hand, introduced this ridiculous hack called 'layers'. You could create these floating layers, and write into them using document.write(). That was the only dynamic mechanism in NN4 above what NN3 had.

So IE4 introduced a powerful and simple generalization of the platform, and NN4 introduced an ugly hack. Surprisingly, developers preferred IE. On top of that IE4, was rock solid and NN4 was crashy.

It's true that Microsoft abused their monolopy position, but the part of the story everyone forgets is that they also more or less invented the modern web in IE4.

Sorry.

[InclinedPlane]

Yup. You toss it off as a short comment, but the stability and performance aspects of IE4 and Netscape 4 shouldn't be ignored. Netscape was super-crashy, and bloated, and slow, and development pace had slowed to a crawl. This was the age of Netscape Communicator suite version 4.2b preview release candidate 3 Gold (you think I'm kidding but this is hardly an embellishment of the reality). IE4 was solid, less bloated, and faster. And better maintained.

Microsoft abused its monopolies in various ways, that's for sure, but it won the browser war by hitting Netscape when stumbled right where it hurt the most, with a higher quality competing product.

[yuhong]

Yea, with IE6, MS finally began focusing on complying with standards instead of adding vendor-specific features.

[huxley]

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 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.

[huxley]

Two additional bits of data in my quest to prove IE6 (released August 2001) wasn't what started it all and disprove the idea that there weren't any standards back then.

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":

http://archive.webstandards.org/upgrade/pr.html

[yuhong]

This reminds me that the use of the word "standard-compliance" as a synonym for boat anchor has irritated me for a while now.

[yuhong]

The WaSP was the one who was responsible for petitioning Netscape to cancel Mariner, leaving Netscape with nothing to compete with IE5.

[noibl]

Richer in features, poorer in vision. It was already apparent as the first browser wars were drawing to a close that Microsoft would not play ball on standards (the new 'fad') and interop and had no interest whatsoever in cross-platform web development. Even developing for IE5 across Windows and Mac was a hair-raising experience. Mozilla (the avenger) had to reverse engineer XMLHttpRequest to get it into Fire*/Phoenix.

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...

[FuzzyDunlop]

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, or anything else implemented outside of the standard?

[emn13]

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...

[eli]

If IE hadn't gone out and done something, we'd be stuck with cleaning up a Netscape-specific html mess.

Or are you suggesting a standards body would have come up with something elegant and widely adopted? I... doubt that.

[ZoFreX]

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.

[macspoofing]

>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.

[ZoFreX]

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 right thing, deprecated their proprietary interfaces, and released a more secure and all-round better browser. And people didn't switch to it.

[macspoofing]

>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).

[chris_wot]

People also forget that Microsoft decided to tightly couple their browser to their operating system, not for any technical reason but so that they could fight the antitrust charges levelled by the U.S. DOJ due to their bundling practices and misuse of market power.

Consequently, I'm of the opinion that they made a rod for their own back and it became very costly to maintain and enhance their browser. Truly, they were hoist on their own petar!

[huxley]

Just in case people get confused (because there were multiple antitrust actions against Microsoft), the antitrust charges you mentioned were from 1991 (when Microsoft was investigated by both the FTC and DoJ), see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Hist...

[fellowniusmonk]

I used Opera exclusively during that period. It was a far superior browser both in standards support and speed, but the entrenchment of IE6 meant that I had to switch browsers when I accessed my insurance and bank account.

The truly frustrating thing was that for most sites (though certainly not all) browser spoofing was all you needed to make them work with Opera... So much rage.

[InclinedPlane]

MS disbanded the IE dev team for one reason: fear. The mostly unwarranted legal harassment that MS faced for defeating Netscape fare and square with a superior product (which largely served as a proxy for punishing MS for other, admittedly bad, behavior) caused them a lot of grief. So they gave up, and as a result we were saddled with a lack of innovation in web browsers for about a decade.

[yew-right]

Yes. IE was "small" (being closely tied to the OS) and fast.

But the only reason MS gave it to us was to destroy Netscape.

Over the years there's no doubt been countless conveniences and innovations that MS could have introduced but didn't. They do just fine without having to share the products of their extensive research. That's the beauty of a monopoly. You do not need to innovate. You only need to keep delivering (just change the version number and some UI stuff) and you need to stifle any competition, early and often.

But those days are slowly coming to an end...

[mrpsbrk]

Having been involved in something like web development around 99-2001, then living under a rock for some years, then coming back around the time mozilla "phoenix" thing started rolling, i remember how odd it sounded that people would hate IE and love the others, it was exactly the opposite of my expectations...

[zaphar]

I can remember when IE was the best browser around as well. Sadly they capitalized on it's success in the worst possible way for the open web and it eventually cost them in certain courts of opinion. But they definitely pushed the web farther than any other browser at the time.

[johnnymonster]

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!