[erez]

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 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. Also, most of the conception of IE as non-innovative and stagnant came from the 5 years gap between IE6 and IE7 (and the added 3 years between IE7 and the real "new IE", IE8), during which Opera and Firefox carried the innovation torch. Most of IE's innovations came when it was fighting the browser wars, pre IE5.

[nikcub]

IE5 was amazing in corporate environments. I was involved in many projects where we migrated old desktop software or mainframe software to new web based applications.

You could have client-side data sets and manipulate them all in the browser. When a standard HTML control didn't meet your usability requirement you would drop-in an ActiveX control (I did this for better drop-downs and selection boxes that would autocomplete). You had XML parsing (XML finally living up to the hype - a lot of server software supported XML API's). For security you had domain policies and groups as well as client certificates for those on the road.

This was an inflection point in the entire history of the web. For years you would read op-ed pieces about how the web would replace the old computing model, about ASP's (application service providers), about apps on the web, etc. but it simply wasn't possible until IE5.

Further, IE was the only browser where it was possible for a long time. It may be hard to imagine now but in the late 90s and early 2000's most web developers would lean towards 'IE only' and not have to deal with Netscape (which was considered 'broken' at the time - and was going through its own rough patch with the rewrite - Netscape 6/7)

It was a completely new paradigm. Lower development costs, easier rollouts, much lower administration costs. As a plus being a Microsoft developer was a great experience - boatloads of software, seminars, conferences, speaking to real developers from the company on the phone when you needed something.

[dpark]

> 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.

[emn13]

There's a big downside here too: by publishing lots of very big and crufty (and ill-thought out) API's, they make it very hard to come up with alternate implementations. And once devs are locked into those API's, it's very very hard to port things to a different engine.

So you might respect XmlHttpRequest, but it's also a fairly small API in comparison to some of the other things MS produced.

And it's _those_ things that are "possible" in IE that were precisely the problem. If your API consists of little more than exposing coincidental implementation details, of course lots of things are possible. They're just impossible to maintain afterwards in the face of any change.

[nikcub]

that is how things are developed though, people ship them and they become standards or die.

it wasn't just Microsoft, Andreessen invented the image tag by simply shipping it in Mosaic:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.hypertext/fMl2xRqL...

TBL was against it, as were others. If he went through the theoretical 'standards' process that you infer is the 'right way' it never would have got done

I am definitely of the view of software first, standards second - because it has been proven throughout history to work

[wsc981]

I believe this was the reason the WHAT-WG was started. The discontent of browser developers of the slow moving standardisation process of the W3C.

From the WHAT-WG FAQ:

"The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born."