>This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox.
After developing during the IE 5.5/6 years there's no way I'm giving you a pass in calling IE cutting edge.
After developing during the IE 5.5/6 years there's no way I'm giving you a pass in calling IE cutting edge.
Besides, nobody got promoted at Microsoft for staying the course and making incremental improvements. Once there were no more balls to be knocked out of the park, developers moved elsewhere to buff up reviews and get bullet points for major projects.
Apparently they got close enough to getting this working that a bunch of South Korean banks and such bought into it heavily, which meant you could only do online banking in that country, for a while, on either a windows phone or an actual windows machine.
However, they narrowly missed getting developer buy-in on that stateside, before the whole "XMLHttpRequest" thing went crazy, and we started building javascript apps for everything.
Yes, it was better but it didn’t really count, as Apple just emerged from its near-death experience and Steve Jobs cut the deal with MSFT to make IE 5 the default browser for the Mac.
Apple’s marketshare was tiny back then and many people in the industry didn’t think Apple would be relevant much longer.
Ironically, after the 5-year deal had expired, Apple shipped Safari 1.0, which was better than the vaunted IE 5 for Mac.
By it's death - IE6 was absolutely stagnant and fallen behind.
If thats not cutting edge, I dont know what is.
The first iPhone and “desktop class” Mobile Safari was a watershed moment and everybody started using WebKit for their mobile browsers after that point, including non-Apple devices.
Look at what the mobile web was like before the release of the iPhone. Then take a look at what it was like the year after, when people had started making their websites “iPhone compatible”.