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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

That's not it at all. You're talking about the IE tax in a post-IE world. Look at US v Microsoft in 2001 and the early Browser Wars. IE had crushed Netscape (via shady business practices) and had market domination. For a long time, all projects were IE-first, then you would worry about niche upstarts like Firefox. It wasn't until the launch of Chrome and Safari and the resurgence of Apple and OSX that there was any plausible alternative. It was at that point that standards and compatibility really became paramount. IE wasn't "extra work", it was the primary objective.

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As others have said here. This history has been retconned quite a bit. TBH people talk about the lawsuit back in 2001, my memory is hazy but outside of the internet it was barely spoken of.

IE was a much better browser than Netscape and until Firefox, Mozilla wasn't really used outside of Linux distros.

> For a long time, all projects were IE-first, then you would worry about niche upstarts like Firefox.

This isn't quite true. Many of the early adopters of Firefox was web devs and enthusiasts and typically I developed on there first (mainly because of firebug) and as I went along I checked that IE worked. However I started my career just after IE7 was released.

> It wasn't until the launch of Chrome and Safari and the resurgence of Apple and OSX that there was any plausible alternative.

No not really (at least not in the UK). I noticed things shifting after the prevalence of smart phones. Chrome came out much later than Firefox and things were already starting to shift in Firefox's favour (non-IE browsers were getting upto 30% of traffic).

> IE wasn't "extra work", it was the primary objective.

That really wasn't my experience at all. But as I said I started my career near the end of IE's dominance.

"> IE had crushed Netscape (via shady business practices)"

No, IE was actually a much better browser in 1999-2000.

It crushed Netscape 4 even on web standards support. For example much of CSS was terribly broken in Netscape.

Hear Hear. I look back at supporting Netscape 4 in late 90's as equally painful as supporting IE6 in late 2000's. It's difficult to imagine, but Internet Explorer was superbly superior during that time. For example, the Netscape4 window couldn't even be resized without needing to reload and redraw the page from scratch.

Not to mention Netscape was incredibly unstable. I remember Netscape 4 crashing roughly every half hour. IE was rock solid in comparison.

This was actually one of the things I was going to reply with-- it also crashed significantly less on Windows than Netscape 4 and ran faster up until Active Desktop started to clog the whole thing up.

Certainly it was the primary objective initially. IE was ultimately killed by the strategic decision to stop putting much resource into developing it after they'd already killed Netscape Navigator (whether that was due to complacency or fear of more antitrust action if they looked like they were trying to build on their browser monopoly). But for a long time, that just meant everybody using an outdated browser.

The bigger problem was that MS weren't all that bothered about migrating old IE users to new IE. When IE7 came out five years after IE6 it didn't work on legacy Windows and wasn't pushed in an XP update or service pack, so unlike its predecessor it peaked at less than 50% market share[1]. At that stage Firefox was far from the dominant browser but the delay had created a reason for it to exist and its market share to be non-trivial and ultimately overtake the second most popular MS browser. Overall a combination of Microsoft 6/7 and 8 still had a majority market share for a very long time, but since they were each very different browsers with large shares designers had to go to the effort of supporting multiple platforms anyway rather than just lazily optimising for latest IE. Which meant they also bothered to support Firefox etc, which meant W3C standards compliant browsers were viable alternatives for late adopters when web designers started serving 'outdated browser' warnings to IE6 users and the EU slapped MS with the Browser Choice ruling. Especially since often it was easier for end users to get a non-IE browser to work. First time I installed Firefox at work was when tech support wouldn't let me upgrade to IE7...

[1]it also wasn't the best browser of its time, unlike its predecessor was in 2001. But that didn't matter to the many people who just carried on using IE6

Having been developing for the web back then IE also was at that time a simply better browser than Netscape. Once it started to stagnate that ended up not being the truth but many of the things we take for granted today (xmlhttprequest for example) were invented in IE 6.

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