Heh, exactly my thought when I saw the headline. As a webdeveloper since 1995, I can only say "phew, finally" - that browser probably cost me 2-3 years of my life, spent hacking various webprojects to make them work in IE.
March 1998, and it underwent a pretty well-publicized rewrite as well... Firefox is not built on top of what was released back then (Communicator 4.x); it's built on top of its rewrite.
I cannot believe that Seamonkey still lives! In fact they just had a release a week ago. And by looking at the features, I think you are right. Netscape lives on as Seamonkey in its most complete form.
Some of us remember times before Opera, Galeon et al. (and I am one of those people who actually paid for Internet Explorer when it only shipped with the Windows 95 Plus Pack).
I remember the day IE introduced Javascript (v.3 I think it was) & going round chatrooms that let you post HTML and griefing with inline images.
IE was very forgiving with its HTML engine. There was a time when missing a /td or /tr would leave you with a blank page in Netscape but IE rendered the page just fine. This led to hundreds of websites that only rendered in IE because that's what people checked them with.
So in this way it was the "best" browser because you needed it to browse half of the web!
IE 4 was far and away the best browser in its day. Nothing else was as fast and as reliable. Netscape had devolved into a steaming pile of garbage which had horrible resource usage problems aside from being massively unstable. Other competing browsers weren't much better than netscape either. It wasn't until years later that things changed.
But Netscape ran cross-platform, without which the WWW would have devolved into a Windows-only niche product. And that would have meant the only tablets today would be running Windows.
I don't think that follows. Also, it's not as though Netscape didn't have it's moments either. There was a time where it was better, a time where IE was better, a time where firefox was better, a time where chrome was better, and so on. Time marches on.
The original idea came from ActiveX, but it didn't take off until it was implemented across browsers via JavaScript as XMLHttpRequest over the next 6 years, and didn't become "Ajax" until the Adaptive Path blog post about Google's innovations with Maps and Gmail in 2005. Microsoft then added support for XMLHttpRequest a year and a half later in late 2006 with IE7, which of course had very little adoption, particular among businesses, because of IE6 (see IE6 @ 49.8% and IE7 @ 17.1% IE market share at beginning, March 2007, of this graph: http://www.w3counter.com/trends).
IE4 was the first browser with dynamic HTML (DHTML).
Microsoft evangelized the combination of DHTML, Javascript and ActiveX data controls to build applications similar to what we now call AJAX. Microsoft was ignored for various reasons.
Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest and evangelized DHTML, Javascript and XMLHttpRequest. They were ignored again.
It was not until the introduction of Gmail and Adaptive Path's coining of the term AJAX that people finally got it. By this time, Microsoft had already put IE on the back burner.
Isn't this just a marketing stunt? The article contains no engineering facts, just the branding thing. I mean: I expect the "new IE" to inherit code and practices from the "old IE". Unless I'm proven otherwise.
While this is true, there isn't really a common browser distribution that uses that setup for non-OS X platforms, though. Chrome/Chromium/Opera use Blink now.
For all practical purposes, Safari is an OS X-only browser.
"Safari" aka WebKit + JavaScriptCore is also on iOS with a separate UI from OS X "Safari," similar to how you'd have a separate UI if you use WebKit + JavaScriptCore on Windows.
Whether it's popular on Windows is also irrelevant with regard to the fact that it does, indeed, work on Windows.
I don't know what Modern IE is other than a testable version of IE. No version of IE is respectable since it can't hold a candle to any other major browser.
While it is mostly marketing (i.e. still using Chakra and Trident engines), the biggest change from a web developer's perspective is that the new Spartan browser will be evergreen[1].
EdgeHTML.dll is just a fork of mshtml.dll, which started somewhere after IE11 and stripped out all the compatibility modes (except quirks and limited-quirks, both of which are starting to get properly standardised) and then started refactoring the code to get rid of all the less nice design decisions caused by having to keep the IE7 code working through a bunch of ifs.
IE has been evergreen since version 10. The biggest change is that this is not Trident. It is a new rendering engine, called EdgeHTML, which started as a fork of Trident. That might sound odd, but Trident and the rest of IE had accumulated years of technical and backwards-compatibility debt: All the different document modes and obscure features from the ActiveX era that couldn't be removed because enterprise intranet sites relied on them.
So what Microsoft have done is create an entirely new browser, using the EdgeHTML fork, while keeping IE around only for enterprise installs. Then they went on a killing spree in the EdgeHTML source, ripping out all the crap that they were previously stuck with, then adding new features into their newly cleaned-up codebase. This will then form the basis for the new, consumer facing browser in Windows 10.
They should have done this EdgeHTML rewrite/legacy cruft split with IE9 rather than layering on more kludges.
They should eliminated native code apps in user mode in Vista and forced developers to ship only managed code with legacy native code apps running in a virtual machine sandbox.
They should have finished WinFS and transcended the files and folders thang. (No, SQL Server does not count as WinFS, it should have been THE file system in Vista.) They should have fixed the file locking thing on open files, geez I hate hate hate that DOS backwards compatibility.
They should have done something/ANYTHING amazing with WinCE beyond pocket office with the insane lead they had. I was running .exe's and playing DOOM at a decent clip on my Samsung phone in, when, 2004?
There's so many wouldda couldda shoulddas I have lined up in my mind wrt Microsoft. Makes me sad.
I truly hope Microsoft wants to win this new browser war. I truly hope there is some fire left in you M$. Show me what money combined with hardcore computer science can really achieve!