6 ms·

The innovations of Internet Explorer

174 points by kalyanganjam 14y ago

Toshio 14y ago
I'm particularly offended by this statement: "we wouldn’t have the web as we know it today if not for its contributions". In a parallel universe where microsoft never existed, the people who came up with XMLHttpRequest did their innovative work at Netscape and the web today is light years ahead.
- ryandvm 14y ago
  Oh brother. Offended? While it's true that Microsoft has done it's part to hold up progress, the fact is that much of what you love about the web today can be directly traced back to innovation at Redmond. Let's give them credit where credit is due. Hell, they came up with AJAX so people could access Outlook from the web. Do you remember how obnoxious browsing was before XMLHttpRequest?
  - electrichead 14y ago
    To be fair, that was kind of an accident. Xmlhttprequest just kind of sat there until somebody else came up with a use for it.
    - emn13 14y ago
      It's an accident of history that's it's primarily used for Json and not Xml, but you can hardly argue that the API itself was an accident. Frankly, the importance of json in this matter is pretty minor anyhow: if it hadn't been around, you can bet some nice JS library would have come up with a different way to easily decode server data into JS objects. The scripted communication was key.
- kingsley_20 14y ago
  In a parallel universe, someone else posted this comment as well.
- codeka 14y ago
  Why discount Microsoft's contribution just because "if they didn't do it, someone else would have"? If that's how you think, then nobody's contribution to the world is significant, since "somebody else would have done it."
  - morsch 14y ago
    Not really. Not all contributions are equal. For every contribution A there is a likelihood L(A, X) that is the chance of someone else making the same contribution within time X. It seems completely reasonable to rank contributions with low values for L (for a given X) higher than others. People are claiming that Microsofts contributions have very high values for L, ie. if MS hadn't come up with it, someone else would have in short order. Furthermore, people are claiming the same is not true for other contributions, e.g. TBL "inventing" the web, or what have you.
    - pmelendez 14y ago
      I am agreed with you but still codeka point is valid. Granted for a given X there would be low values of L that make the contribution irrelevant. What I differ from you is saying that X is static. Einstein might helped to get the atomic bomb working faster, but there are good chances that eventually it would come out anyway. Anyway, discarding contributions in that way seems disingenuous in the best case. What would happen if Newton wouldn't invent Calculus? Well somebody else would invent it later but we should be thankful that that didn't take 100 years more.
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      How soon we forget. If TBL hadn't invented the web, we all would have had to wait six months for gopher to come out. Hell, SGML + FTP is practically the same as the web, and that was around for years.
      - morsch 14y ago
        Heh. I knew that whatever example I came up with, someone would come along and bash it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
wrath 14y ago
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.
- johnnymonster 14y ago
  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!
- FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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...
erez 14y ago
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.
- emn13 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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/fMl2xRqLvRk/58RdTW0v3n8J 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
emilis_info 14y ago
And Hitler built the Autobahns, shouldn't we say thanks to him for that? Also the rebels where never able to build something as marvelous as the Death Star :-) Success, efficiency and morality are three different things. Though many people mix them up all the time. If someone (or something) is efficient and successful that doesn't mean we should overlook the harm (or good) it is doing.
- huskyr 14y ago
  Actually.. Hitler didn't built any Autobahns :) http://german.about.com/library/blgermyth08.htm http://german.about.com/library/blgermyth08.htm
  - emn13 14y ago
    According to that link, he didn't invent them. They're not claiming he didn't play a role in building them. Titling the article as a "Myth" smacks of about.com linkbait.
- atirip 14y ago
  So exactly, what harm IE did to your delicate soul? Me personally is pretty happy it killed the buggiest and shittest browser ever lived - Netscape4
  - Drakim 14y ago
    After it killed it's rival, development practically stopped for several years, and the progress of the web stopped with it. You know how everybody hates AT&T and Verizon for not bothering to make a better service because they essentially have no competition? That's the same reason I dislike IE.
- jaimzob 14y ago
  Hitler? That's where you want to go in a thread about web browsers? Maybe it's time to switch to decaff.
- untog 14y ago
coopaq 14y ago
MS stopped others (Netscape) from innovating. IE only ran on Windows* IE 5 on Mac was crap and maybe antitrust avoiding effort. IE was created at all costs to stop the web browser from becoming an application platform that competed with Windows. MS did everything to keep users from using competing browsers. MS tried to make it impossible to uninstall from Windows. MS tried to keep developers from creating rich applications in the web browser and kept IE6 in stagnant mode for almost a decade until competition arrived. Microsoft won. This stuff should be fact entered in Wikipedia.
- gecko 14y ago
  Having been there at the time, IE on Mac was the best browser on that system at the time, by far. Netscape 4 looked like a bloated piece of crap that emulated random bits of Appearance Manager, crashed constantly, and had a nasty tendency of not yielding the event loop, which effectively locked the system. IE, by contrast, was fast, stable, used Appearance Manager, looked native and matched the Macs coming out at the time, and had better privacy controls, and other stuff that I don't even remember. Getting IE on our Macs was a big deal when I was in school, and it was pretty much the first thing I downloaded on a new Mac--the second being Outlook Express. Now, by the time OS X rolled around, IE was aging very quickly, and by the time Safari 1.0 finally came out, anyone who cared about that sort of thing had jumped to Camino. But that was long after the initial IE port, and I don't think you can possibly say that IE 5 on Mac was crap from the antitrust effort.
  - JD557 14y ago
    I can also confirm this. I had one of the first iMacs and I remember Netscape crashing constantly and being way slower than IE (Hell, I think the first time I was really surprised by a browser's speed was when I installed IE on a mac). Netscape 7 (IIRC) seemed a little better than IE, but it came too late and my machine could barely run it, so I just kept using Internet Explorer.
  - stan_rogers 14y ago
    Not to mention that Netscape 4 never really implemented CSS. There was a CSS-to-JSS (JavaScript Style Sheets) translation level that almost worked most of the time, but it couldn't manage markup that resulted in a deeply-nested native object hierarchy (something that was altogether too easy to do in straightforward HTML). Nor did DIV or IFRAME properly translate to LAYER and ILAYER. Element addressing in NS was pretty much strictly hierarchical; one needed to include a tree search for NS to get something similar to getElementByXXX(). (And I had to support that horrid thing until 2005.)
esbwhat 14y ago
This is the reason why I'm scared of google pushing chrome so hard
- mda 14y ago
  Google does not have a conflict of interest with better browsers/internet and its main revenue sources, Microsoft had this problem and resulted this mess.
  - esbwhat 14y ago
    Google does have a conflict of interest. The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them. People love google, but it's a for-profit company, not a foundation. Chrome would not be the first abandoned project, either. Anything can happen. Competition is good.
    - wickedchicken 14y ago
      > The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them. Google operates a search engine, meaning most of the time it points people to other websites. Many of these sites are not under Google's control, but many of them run AdSense. The more pages you visit, the more ads you see. If the internet gets generally faster, Google sites or not, that works in their favor.
    - evilduck 14y ago
      Google may be motivated to attempt things like Dart and NaCl which help drive forward their own products first and foremost, but they have a consistent reputation of making their web-advancing client-side technologies open source too (Dart, NaCl, WebM, SPDY, Chromium, Webkit, etc are all open source). They also have Mozilla, Opera and Apple pushing forwards as well (though I'd argue that IE9/10 isn't putting much competitive pressure on anyone). If Chrome is abandoned by Google you're free to fork Chromium, acquire licenses for it's restricted plugins and it'll only slow the web's march forward, not actively hinder it. It's entirely possible for another group to carry the Chromium torch, and Google/Chrome has never yet intentionally damaged the quality of standards-compliant competing web products (though they don't offer quirks-mode fixes for crap tailored only to IE).
pavs 14y ago
Almost every major browsers had some kind of contributions that we take today for granted. Also: http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/08/5-features-opera-browser-did-first/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/08/5-features-opera-browser...
- saint-loup 14y ago
  Opera didn't invent [modern] tabs http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-not-invent-tabbed-browsing/ http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-not...
  - manojlds 14y ago
    Even you say Opera did not invent "modern" tabs, so that means they did come up with the precursor. We owe atleast MDI tabs to Opera
    - fellowniusmonk 14y ago
      Seriously, Opera was customizable enough that the way I used it back then was completely indistinguishable from modern tabs. And quite frankly, the ability to occasionally use grid view made it far superior for my common edge cases. Opera's omnibar style implementation is still better than Chrome's (though I stopped using Opera when I switched to OSX, and also webkit still has the best console), and is more useful when trying to re-access history (w/ full text search) and bookmarked sites because they don't gimp the user in an attempt to shunt them to running a search. Also, while buggy, their text only E-mail client M2 was gmail before gmail existed, in fact the ad-hoc search filters were arguably better. Back when people were jumping on the file/pile train for the first time M2 had already been running it for years.
christopherscot 14y ago
This reminds me of a coworker who, although generally horrible at his job, despised by his colleagues, and only really concerned about his next pay raise would - on occasion - remind us that HE was the one who wrote a small piece of critical software we still used to this day.
kakuri 14y ago
While praising IE, let us not forget that MS only innovated enough to displace other web browsers, leveraging its Windows near-monopoly to saturate the market with IE. Dominance achieved, competitors obliterated, MS was content to let the world live with IE6 for eternity, and only with the rise of Firefox and Webkit-based browsers did MS finally deign to do something (althought not much) for the web with IE9.
- est 14y ago
  IE had its own innovations like VRML, dHTML+TIME, behaviors, HTML Components. Which could not be found else where. Guess what, IE6 even supports DirectX called DirectAnimation. And MIDI, vector graphics, etc. IE is far more feature rich than any other remote HTML displayers.
lmm 14y ago
About two years ago when trying to make a zoomable interface work in IE some colleagues and I discovered it has a wonderful set of transforms you can apply to any element, with a much easier syntax than CSS. I think they were based on / part of VRML? We were amazed that it was so easy to do any arbitrary 3D rotation, stretch or skew, and even more amazed when we read up and found it had been there since about 1996. And then we found this functionality had been removed in IE8 :(
js4all 14y ago
When I hear IE, I think about it's own way to render pages. Over all websites ever created, IE has cost a huge amount of wasted development hours.
gliese1337 14y ago
Earlier submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418132 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418132
veneratio 14y ago
That was refreshing. It's good to remember the good points of anything, especially something we may not like. This lesson applies very well to the computing industry's rapid advancement and tendency to outdate technology.
bpatrianakos 14y ago
This is all true and Microsoft deserves credit where credit is due but here's the thing: just because they spurred innovation long ago doesn't mean they deserve a pass now. That's how this article kind of comes off. Like we should lay off and be thankful for what we have. And we should. But the web is all about innovation and finding better, faster, smarter ways to do things. Your girlfriend doesn't forgive you instantly now when you cheat because you were incredibly loyal in the past. Your boss shouldn't pay you when you don't show up and don't call for work because you had a perfect attendance record in the past. The fact is, IE went to hell and they deserve our scorn. If and when IE10 really does deliver on its promises them we can call be happy with them and start the process of forgiving and forgetting. Though I doubt version 10 will live up to the hype I'll be happy to give them all the praise in the world if they at least catch up to where Firefox and Safari are now. I wish they'd get on Chrome's level but that's a lot to ask right now. What the article says about IE is true but now it's 2012 and what they did in 1999-2001 just isn't enough to give them a pass. I'd also add that though IE did innovate like crazy in their heyday, if they didn't someone else would have.

174 points by kalyanganjam 14y ago

I'm particularly offended by this statement: "we wouldn’t have the web as we know it today if not for its contributions". In a parallel universe where microsoft never existed, the people who came up with XMLHttpRequest did their innovative work at Netscape and the web today is light years ahead.

ryandvm 14y ago
Oh brother. Offended? While it's true that Microsoft has done it's part to hold up progress, the fact is that much of what you love about the web today can be directly traced back to innovation at Redmond. Let's give them credit where credit is due. Hell, they came up with AJAX so people could access Outlook from the web. Do you remember how obnoxious browsing was before XMLHttpRequest?
- electrichead 14y ago
  To be fair, that was kind of an accident. Xmlhttprequest just kind of sat there until somebody else came up with a use for it.
  - emn13 14y ago
    It's an accident of history that's it's primarily used for Json and not Xml, but you can hardly argue that the API itself was an accident. Frankly, the importance of json in this matter is pretty minor anyhow: if it hadn't been around, you can bet some nice JS library would have come up with a different way to easily decode server data into JS objects. The scripted communication was key.
kingsley_20 14y ago
In a parallel universe, someone else posted this comment as well.
codeka 14y ago
Why discount Microsoft's contribution just because "if they didn't do it, someone else would have"? If that's how you think, then nobody's contribution to the world is significant, since "somebody else would have done it."
- morsch 14y ago
  Not really. Not all contributions are equal. For every contribution A there is a likelihood L(A, X) that is the chance of someone else making the same contribution within time X. It seems completely reasonable to rank contributions with low values for L (for a given X) higher than others. People are claiming that Microsofts contributions have very high values for L, ie. if MS hadn't come up with it, someone else would have in short order. Furthermore, people are claiming the same is not true for other contributions, e.g. TBL "inventing" the web, or what have you.
  - pmelendez 14y ago
    I am agreed with you but still codeka point is valid. Granted for a given X there would be low values of L that make the contribution irrelevant. What I differ from you is saying that X is static. Einstein might helped to get the atomic bomb working faster, but there are good chances that eventually it would come out anyway. Anyway, discarding contributions in that way seems disingenuous in the best case. What would happen if Newton wouldn't invent Calculus? Well somebody else would invent it later but we should be thankful that that didn't take 100 years more.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    How soon we forget. If TBL hadn't invented the web, we all would have had to wait six months for gopher to come out. Hell, SGML + FTP is practically the same as the web, and that was around for years.
    - morsch 14y ago
      Heh. I knew that whatever example I came up with, someone would come along and bash it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

wrath 14y ago

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.

johnnymonster 14y ago
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!
FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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...

erez 14y ago

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.

emn13 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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/fMl2xRqLvRk/58RdTW0v3n8J 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

emilis_info 14y ago

And Hitler built the Autobahns, shouldn't we say thanks to him for that? Also the rebels where never able to build something as marvelous as the Death Star :-) Success, efficiency and morality are three different things. Though many people mix them up all the time. If someone (or something) is efficient and successful that doesn't mean we should overlook the harm (or good) it is doing.

huskyr 14y ago
Actually.. Hitler didn't built any Autobahns :) http://german.about.com/library/blgermyth08.htm http://german.about.com/library/blgermyth08.htm
- emn13 14y ago
  According to that link, he didn't invent them. They're not claiming he didn't play a role in building them. Titling the article as a "Myth" smacks of about.com linkbait.
atirip 14y ago
So exactly, what harm IE did to your delicate soul? Me personally is pretty happy it killed the buggiest and shittest browser ever lived - Netscape4
- Drakim 14y ago
  After it killed it's rival, development practically stopped for several years, and the progress of the web stopped with it. You know how everybody hates AT&T and Verizon for not bothering to make a better service because they essentially have no competition? That's the same reason I dislike IE.
jaimzob 14y ago
Hitler? That's where you want to go in a thread about web browsers? Maybe it's time to switch to decaff.
untog 14y ago

coopaq 14y ago

MS stopped others (Netscape) from innovating. IE only ran on Windows* IE 5 on Mac was crap and maybe antitrust avoiding effort. IE was created at all costs to stop the web browser from becoming an application platform that competed with Windows. MS did everything to keep users from using competing browsers. MS tried to make it impossible to uninstall from Windows. MS tried to keep developers from creating rich applications in the web browser and kept IE6 in stagnant mode for almost a decade until competition arrived. Microsoft won. This stuff should be fact entered in Wikipedia.

gecko 14y ago
Having been there at the time, IE on Mac was the best browser on that system at the time, by far. Netscape 4 looked like a bloated piece of crap that emulated random bits of Appearance Manager, crashed constantly, and had a nasty tendency of not yielding the event loop, which effectively locked the system. IE, by contrast, was fast, stable, used Appearance Manager, looked native and matched the Macs coming out at the time, and had better privacy controls, and other stuff that I don't even remember. Getting IE on our Macs was a big deal when I was in school, and it was pretty much the first thing I downloaded on a new Mac--the second being Outlook Express. Now, by the time OS X rolled around, IE was aging very quickly, and by the time Safari 1.0 finally came out, anyone who cared about that sort of thing had jumped to Camino. But that was long after the initial IE port, and I don't think you can possibly say that IE 5 on Mac was crap from the antitrust effort.
- JD557 14y ago
  I can also confirm this. I had one of the first iMacs and I remember Netscape crashing constantly and being way slower than IE (Hell, I think the first time I was really surprised by a browser's speed was when I installed IE on a mac). Netscape 7 (IIRC) seemed a little better than IE, but it came too late and my machine could barely run it, so I just kept using Internet Explorer.
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  Not to mention that Netscape 4 never really implemented CSS. There was a CSS-to-JSS (JavaScript Style Sheets) translation level that almost worked most of the time, but it couldn't manage markup that resulted in a deeply-nested native object hierarchy (something that was altogether too easy to do in straightforward HTML). Nor did DIV or IFRAME properly translate to LAYER and ILAYER. Element addressing in NS was pretty much strictly hierarchical; one needed to include a tree search for NS to get something similar to getElementByXXX(). (And I had to support that horrid thing until 2005.)

esbwhat 14y ago

This is the reason why I'm scared of google pushing chrome so hard

mda 14y ago
Google does not have a conflict of interest with better browsers/internet and its main revenue sources, Microsoft had this problem and resulted this mess.
- esbwhat 14y ago
  Google does have a conflict of interest. The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them. People love google, but it's a for-profit company, not a foundation. Chrome would not be the first abandoned project, either. Anything can happen. Competition is good.
  - wickedchicken 14y ago
    > The best case scenario is a better internet, but only for google products for them. Google operates a search engine, meaning most of the time it points people to other websites. Many of these sites are not under Google's control, but many of them run AdSense. The more pages you visit, the more ads you see. If the internet gets generally faster, Google sites or not, that works in their favor.
  - evilduck 14y ago
    Google may be motivated to attempt things like Dart and NaCl which help drive forward their own products first and foremost, but they have a consistent reputation of making their web-advancing client-side technologies open source too (Dart, NaCl, WebM, SPDY, Chromium, Webkit, etc are all open source). They also have Mozilla, Opera and Apple pushing forwards as well (though I'd argue that IE9/10 isn't putting much competitive pressure on anyone). If Chrome is abandoned by Google you're free to fork Chromium, acquire licenses for it's restricted plugins and it'll only slow the web's march forward, not actively hinder it. It's entirely possible for another group to carry the Chromium torch, and Google/Chrome has never yet intentionally damaged the quality of standards-compliant competing web products (though they don't offer quirks-mode fixes for crap tailored only to IE).

pavs 14y ago

Almost every major browsers had some kind of contributions that we take today for granted. Also: http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/08/5-features-opera-browser-did-first/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/08/5-features-opera-browser...

saint-loup 14y ago
Opera didn't invent [modern] tabs http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-not-invent-tabbed-browsing/ http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-not...
- manojlds 14y ago
  Even you say Opera did not invent "modern" tabs, so that means they did come up with the precursor. We owe atleast MDI tabs to Opera
  - fellowniusmonk 14y ago
    Seriously, Opera was customizable enough that the way I used it back then was completely indistinguishable from modern tabs. And quite frankly, the ability to occasionally use grid view made it far superior for my common edge cases. Opera's omnibar style implementation is still better than Chrome's (though I stopped using Opera when I switched to OSX, and also webkit still has the best console), and is more useful when trying to re-access history (w/ full text search) and bookmarked sites because they don't gimp the user in an attempt to shunt them to running a search. Also, while buggy, their text only E-mail client M2 was gmail before gmail existed, in fact the ad-hoc search filters were arguably better. Back when people were jumping on the file/pile train for the first time M2 had already been running it for years.

christopherscot 14y ago

This reminds me of a coworker who, although generally horrible at his job, despised by his colleagues, and only really concerned about his next pay raise would - on occasion - remind us that HE was the one who wrote a small piece of critical software we still used to this day.

kakuri 14y ago

While praising IE, let us not forget that MS only innovated enough to displace other web browsers, leveraging its Windows near-monopoly to saturate the market with IE. Dominance achieved, competitors obliterated, MS was content to let the world live with IE6 for eternity, and only with the rise of Firefox and Webkit-based browsers did MS finally deign to do something (althought not much) for the web with IE9.

est 14y ago
IE had its own innovations like VRML, dHTML+TIME, behaviors, HTML Components. Which could not be found else where. Guess what, IE6 even supports DirectX called DirectAnimation. And MIDI, vector graphics, etc. IE is far more feature rich than any other remote HTML displayers.

lmm 14y ago

About two years ago when trying to make a zoomable interface work in IE some colleagues and I discovered it has a wonderful set of transforms you can apply to any element, with a much easier syntax than CSS. I think they were based on / part of VRML? We were amazed that it was so easy to do any arbitrary 3D rotation, stretch or skew, and even more amazed when we read up and found it had been there since about 1996. And then we found this functionality had been removed in IE8 :(

js4all 14y ago

When I hear IE, I think about it's own way to render pages. Over all websites ever created, IE has cost a huge amount of wasted development hours.

gliese1337 14y ago

Earlier submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418132 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418132

veneratio 14y ago

That was refreshing. It's good to remember the good points of anything, especially something we may not like. This lesson applies very well to the computing industry's rapid advancement and tendency to outdate technology.

bpatrianakos 14y ago

This is all true and Microsoft deserves credit where credit is due but here's the thing: just because they spurred innovation long ago doesn't mean they deserve a pass now. That's how this article kind of comes off. Like we should lay off and be thankful for what we have. And we should. But the web is all about innovation and finding better, faster, smarter ways to do things. Your girlfriend doesn't forgive you instantly now when you cheat because you were incredibly loyal in the past. Your boss shouldn't pay you when you don't show up and don't call for work because you had a perfect attendance record in the past. The fact is, IE went to hell and they deserve our scorn. If and when IE10 really does deliver on its promises them we can call be happy with them and start the process of forgiving and forgetting. Though I doubt version 10 will live up to the hype I'll be happy to give them all the praise in the world if they at least catch up to where Firefox and Safari are now. I wish they'd get on Chrome's level but that's a lot to ask right now. What the article says about IE is true but now it's 2012 and what they did in 1999-2001 just isn't enough to give them a pass. I'd also add that though IE did innovate like crazy in their heyday, if they didn't someone else would have.