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Comment by epc | Hacker News Reader

The initial iteration of MSIE was based on the existing Spyglass Browser (see https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/02/business/spyglass-a-pione... ). Spyglass made a deal with MS to get a % of the sales of MSIE. Unfortunately for Spyglass, MS gave IE away for free.

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Wow, I never heard of this story so far. Back then, I was naive and young and believed Internet Explorer to be the better browser ;-)

It was a better browser. There was a story in one of the major PC magazines about how badly Netscape crashed on every platform. It use to be a point of nerd pride how well your operating system could handle a Netscape crash. It would crash the entire MacOS.

By the time its descendant Firefox came out, it was a much safer, stable, standards-conformant browser. Still have memories of just how complacent MS got when IE6 was released.

Ahh, classic MacOS. Those were the days. I once locked the entire system so hard neither mouse nor keyboard responded.

(14 year old me had opened the System file with ResEdit. Turns out opening a System menu resource for editing while it was in use was a really bad idea).

First proper computer. Learned a lot with it.

> I once locked the entire system so hard neither mouse nor keyboard responded.

I did that just the other month on a modern PC using WSL on Win10. Turns out McAfee leaks memory like a sieve when faced with WSL, and it leaks it in a way that the memory is never even returned to the OS. Worse, yet, the process using the memory doesn't even show under Task Manager! The memory just appears to disappear.

Never noticed at home as I don't run McAfee, but at work had to. It is very quick & easy to fully exhaust memory building even a moderately sized C++ project under WSL. I had hard-lockups several times before I was able to determine the cause, with help from the MS team working on WSL. I had to do a hard restart; there was no way to restart cleanly. Especially problematic when I first ran into it working remotely and RDP'd into my work desktop.

Disabling McAfee on my work PC resolved it.

(edit: add quote to what I was referring)

It was a better browser. It’s fashionable to hate on IE6 these days but it was the first browser fast, stable and feature-rich (XmlHttpRequest) for serious use. That’s why it became so ubiquitous and hard to unseat.

Also IE could print. Netscape crashed hard talking to a HP laserjet running on a Netware network running on either 95 or NT4.

When I first started running www.ibm.com in 1994 the only realistic browser options were Viola and Mosaic. IBM WebExplorer (OS/2 only at first) showed up and was fairly good but quickly lost out to the Netscape betas. While I was aware of Spyglass I can't remember ever using it.

When MSIE first came out I was explicitly prohibited from using it (typical of IBM at the time). Netscape gets slagged for becoming bloatware but the initial versions were fairly decent and cross–platform. IBM WebExplorer was genuinely not too bad, but it became a victim of IBM internal politics and died a slow death of neglect.

True tidbit which I have no public sources to cite: IBM WebExplorer was the first browser to support scripting, albeit in Rexx, IIRC a couple of months before LiveScript came to Netscape. IBM, in its wisdom, decided not to release that browser, I believe out of concern it might undercut the market for Lotus Notes.

Note: I could be wrong, but I believe LiveScript was what JavaScript was initially called. I realize there's something now called LiveScript which is completely unrelated.

I was first online during the summer of 1993. I remember using a browser called Cello, which was developed at Cornell Law School. I suppose it's name must somehow be inspired by the name of the Viola browser that you mention. I did not know about Viola at the time.

I also remember using a shareware winsock implementation to get online, Trumpet Winsock.

I remember Cello, I think I even tried the beta port of it to OS/2. IIRC it died fairly quickly after Mosaic appeared.

TCP/IP on OS/2 2.x and Windows 3.x was provided through shims or DLLs. I think out-of-the-box OS/2 came with no networking at all (you could add SNA/APPC) and Windows had a couple of TCP/IP packages you could add. Neither operating system was prepared for the explosion in TCP/IP networking in 1994-1995.

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