Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by subhobroto 24 days ago
> A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:

Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.

Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.

No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.

OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.

And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!

3 comments

"No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product"

As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general.

The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.

I still have no clue what you're implying that I was implying? Reading too much into someone's words is definitely a thing.

There used to be 4+ major browser engines. Now there's only two, and Google owns almost complete share & following standards? Google prefers their monoculture.

More diversity in browser engines was a good thing & standards were lovely.

Not everything has to be a slug-fest between #1 & #2.

& personally I'm glad there's Grok & Gemini to keep Anthropic & OpenAI on their toes even more than the competitive band of open weights models already do.

The corporate models tend to be defensive and sound like HR has approved every word of the script. Not a fan.

Why does Microsoft feel so gross