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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Incidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?

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> was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?

"Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Seriously, what a dumb question. The answer is "neither": at the time of its release, IE6 was great. It was way better than its only real competition, Netscape 6, which hadn't seen updates in years. Yes, it had bugs, but all software does. If Microsoft had just given it regular updates, it would've been fine. The issue with IE6 was not that it was bad ab initio, it was that Microsoft abandoned development when they felt they had no competition, so it slipped farther and farther behind web standards.

Please don't call questions dumb. It discourages thoughtful conversation. There's a guideline somewhat related to this:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Unfair questions should be called out. Perhaps "dumb" isn't the most appropriate term, but I do think its fair to challenge the premise of the question. To prevent this leaves a whole rhetorical category immune from challenge.

No, there are very dumb question/statements. And it is indeed correct to call them out.

Why is it dumb? Because it packs in an assertion that is implied true, without asking.

An appropriate answer is "Mu". Or 'unask the question'.

You can use a word or words that is not offensive to express the same point. Like how you explained the use of the word.

Stupidity is offensive. Your point?

Offence is taken not given. I can understand you can feel offended or frustrated when someone behaves in a way you call stupid. However, you could give them the benefit of a doubt and assume they made a mistake or they didn't know better.

Not sure why the snark. I think it's a fair question. Since you take issue with the phrasing, I'll enlarge it to "development & management of IE up to 2006."

They did give it regular updates throughout that period; those updates just never targeted web standards. I'm honestly wondering whether that was through explicit desire (it's a valid business strategy), willful misdirection (not prioritizing "the web"), or management incompetence (inability to deliver desired standards compliance). I've never read / heard anything definitive to explain which of those happened.

There was never any team tasked with working on Trident after IE6 shipped till IE7 work restarted; as far as I'm aware, it was always the case that the IE shell was developed relatively separately to Trident, so those who did do all the work (esp. for later XP SPs) probably scarcely had any knowledge of the Trident codebase to really start trying to fix bugs.

I don't think it was purposeful. When IE6 was released, it won. It was so much better than the alternatives that MS simply didn't have to do anything, so they didn't. The antitrust thing was also in full swing, so bundling/unbundling was in question.

The web version of Outlook was one of the, if not the first AJAX application. IIRC, IE added XMLHttpRequest to support web Outlook.

There's a question on Quora with some great answers from the original team members that shows what happened with IE:

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Internet-Explorer-up-until-ver...

As an observer I always assumed it was purposeful. MS was _not_ a company that conformed to other people's standards. After all, they're just now putting a POSIX compliant shell in their OS. They were playing a monopoly game not trying to offer an alternative.

Agreed. One of their first tag lines was, "We Set The Standrd." It's in their DNA to avoid conforming to standards they didn't define.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

IE was the centerpoint of a lot of turf wars between Jim Allchin and Brad Silverberg. Lots of tech was mishandled as nobody could agree what was personal, what was business and what was consumer. A browser had to reach all three, Microsoft tried to apply its existing technologies that talked to all three audiences in a haphazard fashion, and even the government decided it had to stick its thumb into the pie.

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