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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

> what actually happened is that IE was very innovative

We remember things very differently, then.

IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, and the ActiveX which their blatant attempt to tie the web to Windows.

The other thing IE was known for was missing, incomplete, or out-right broken support for extremely basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality that other browsers had no issues with. Leaving web developers to scatter their code/markup with IE-specific workarounds. Compounding this problem was lack of regular releases and updates. Except for security fixes, Microsoft considered IE to be part of the OS and refused to issue updates for it between OS releases, for the most part, which is why IE stuck around so long.

Nobody _wanted_ IE. It was just there as part of the OS at the same point in history that Internet access became a mainstream thing.

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IE 4 and 5 were innovative (IMO as someone who used both at the time - 1998-2000 - and actively converted family members to IE) compared to Netscape: it had a cache which worked consistently (important in 28.8 modem times) - Netscape would ignore the cache in some situations, i.e. resize the browser window and it would re-download images, even though it had them in its cache, and also IE had things like smooth scrolling which helped make things "nicer" to scroll and feel better from a UI perspective, and things like "make favourites available offline" feature, where it would download a bunch of full pages (whilst you were dialed up), and you could browse them after you disconnected.

After IE 6, things when downhill fast with the stagnation, but before that point, IE was a good browser.

The biggest issue with IE is it was HEAVILY integrated into windows. That in turn made it really slow to move. To get IE 6, you needed windows 2000, to get IE 7/8, you needed XP, to get 9+ you needed Vista.

That particularly became a problem because the time gap between XP and Vista was huge (and a lot of people skipped it and went to 7/8/10). In the meantime firefox and chrome came up and started innovating rapidly. Chrome started it with the evergreen model and FF quickly adopted that model.

IE6 worked in w98 too.

You used AJAX-based websites, right? That was first available in IE. Initially, IE unto version 6 was extremely innovative. Then Microsoft won, and they stopped trying.

They innovated on the side of the user. Not the rendering engine. I loved the IE interface.

But if one window crashed, the whole IE crashed. Then Firefox tabbed browsing took over hungry for system resource. But at least it didn’t crash, right?

I remember IE research pane. Innovation in the browser became from a toolbar thing. Remember google toolbar? It was the number one bar in many countries.

But then Firefox extensions took over hungry for system resource, but not like Chrome hungry.

IE had addons. Some of them slowed the browser. And it had plug-ins.

It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”. No one understood what that was then anyways.

And where ie could not innovate on the web, they used active X plug-ins. This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves.

Agreed that IE did innovate at its time.

"It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”."

But it didn't had an open source core and was windows only. The vision was microsoft only (forever).

"This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves. "

So the argument is, "yeah, Microsoft is a big monopolist who do everything they can, to lock people on their system, you cannot blame them for it, this is just the way they are"?

Either way, in this case luckily their monopol strategy failed and IE died because of it.

> But it didn't had an open source core and was windows only. The vision was microsoft only (forever).

Right. I never would have understood the love for open source if Microsoft hadnt left so much thirst for deeper complex innovation in my mouth.

No, the innovation was things like XMLHttpRequest which allowed for the early "single pages web apps"

Yes, and contenteditable which allowed for rich text editing.

Also `box-sizing: border-box` was how IE designed CSS box sizing (to be simpler to math for the CSS writer rather than simpler math for the Renderer programmer). The fact that it is now just about "required" boilerplate in most CSS reset/normalization steps to throw in a `* { box-sizing: border-box; }` rule to opt in to "do it the IE way" is a massive, vestigial, lasting testament to IE's innovation in CSS in the early CSS standards.

You're just talking about different time periods. IE was innovative back when it supplanted Netscape. Then it stagnated.

They created AJAX so they could do office email client in the browser. That was pretty game changer for web.

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