Now, I confess I have grown to not like divs and spans. That said, I am very amenable to "border-box", which is kind of hilarious in historical context.
I also remember IE actually supported fieldset and legend in sane ways well before netscape. Which was very annoying.
Actually, my memory is essentially that the IE team was doing decent work. The Netscape team was faltering. Only reason folks didn't like the IE team is the rest of MS was acting in very bad faith with clear embrace and extinguish as a goal for the browser market. Which ultimately left Opera as the biggest loser who otherwise had an amazing product.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7192490
(edit:) I just remembered that many years later I gave a talk that contained a follow-up to some of the thoughts about Microsoft (it is a big part of the talk, but not the beginning or the end).
(edit again:) OMG people seem to be enjoying this comment, but I stupidly linked to the wrong old comment up there (and even that link is weird: the best part of that thread is a few parents up from that link)... and it is so sad as the actual comment was one I was so proud of... here it is:
Yes for a while there they were doing a great job of implementing Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy by intentionally avoiding web standards conformance and instead focusing on proprietary features (ActiveX plugins etc) in attempt to make IE "better" than the competition
Microsoft licensed the source code to NCSA Mosaic in order to prodcuce Internet Explorer. What were the "standards" at the time Mosaic was released.
What never seems to get mentioned in these threads about Chrome and Mozilla is that Google hired a couple of Mozilla Firefox developers to kickstart Chrome.
Perhaps I am wrong but I sometimes think there would be no Chrome without that help from former Mozilla employees.
> Microsoft licensed the source code to NCSA Mosaic
Not quite. They used Spyglass Mosaic, which shared only the name. Spyglass Mosaic was a from-scratch implementation.
https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html
> What never seems to get mentioned in these threads about Chrome and Mozilla is that Google hired a couple of Mozilla Firefox developers to kickstart Chrome.
Not quite. Early Firefox development resembled Linux: multiple industry actors collaborating on a single codebase—pretty unlike the way it works today, where a single (bumbling) corporation is almost totally responsible for marketing, product direction, and development. Google was one of the biggest contributors to Firefox development. The Firefox lead was a Google employee being paid to do just that.
When Google decided to do Chrome, they pulled their engineers off Firefox, with parallels to what later happened with the WebKit -> Blink fork: an initial cooperative effort, followed by their chafing at the overheads of collaboration and the lack of total control, followed by breaking away to do their own thing.
If there was any amount of poaching/brain drain that should be mentioned but no one really talks about, it's how many ex-Mozilla Corp folks left for Facebook and is partially responsible for the engineering culture there.
Sounds like Mozillians are not so concerned about user privacy if they went to work at Facebook.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. A reading of your previous comment would lead people to believe that there is some part of NCSA Mosaic lurking under the hood in IE. But IE is based on Spyglass Mosaic, not NCSA Mosaic, which are not the same thing.