Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

There's many company-intern intranet applications still in use out there, which rely on old IE features like ActiveX and whatnot. Afaik, older versions of .NET came with features that required IE.

Also Asia always was and to my knowledge still is using a lot of IE - not sure about the reason why.

A little history lesson:

* Netscape wanted to dominate the web, gain a monopoly and gain full control.

* IE came late to the party - long after Netscape was already established

* MS invested a *ton* of resources to catch up, rapid development pace, quick updates, constantly new features and improvements

* MS too wanted dominance and full control of the web

* MS gained marked share through "dirty tricks" leveraging their OS dominance

* MS got repeatedly sued for unfair competition, paid large sums, paid lip-service to the courts but never truly changed their strategy

* that hurt Netscape but didn't kill it

* what killed off Netscape was their own doing: a costly code rewrite, that took way to much time and delivered subpar results

* Microsoft won, they had what they wanted: full control of the web, and the power to shape it however they saw fit

* they did nothing. they just stuck with IE6, no new features or improvements for years, even bugfixes and security fixes became really slow. all momentum was lost.

* Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape - MS still did nothing.

* Firefox gained significant market share - that finally kicked MS into gear

* MS re-started updating and improving IE - but they were technologically behind and had to play catch-up again

* Chrome entered the ring and boosted the pace of development

* IE never fully caught up

* Chrome gained full dominance of the market - but unlike IE did not slow down development

* MS tried all their dirty tricks again - but they still continued to loose market share

* they rebranded IE to Edge (still using the same render engine, but dropping backwards compatibility)

* they dropped their own render engine, and switched to using webkit

* despite even more dirty tricks, no breakthrough success in terms of market share

I believe the fading of IE pretty much started with Microsoft resting on their (un-earned) laurels, after Netscape died. And yes, that's even before IE peaked - while they still had upwards momentum.

> Also Asia always was and to my knowledge still is using a lot of IE - not sure about the reason why.

ActiveX saw much heavier use in those markets than the US & Europe. Other parts to the east too. Partly this is because of language issues (terrible non-latin writing support and such in browser-native options), partly because of requirements set down in local government and/or bank policies (South Korea being the most significant example here, but not the only one) because of security concerns.

Early on trying to enforce the security requirements those governments/banks needed required running native code (remember that there was a US export ban on encryption supporting keys longer than 40 bits so relying on browser-only code communicating over HTTPS transport was dubious) and the options where ActiveX or Java. Largely because ActiveX was built-in to a browser, and partly because Java has a reputation for being heavier in terms of client system requirements, ActiveX often won over Java.

While most of those forces have ceased to be, or are at least greatly reduced, for a long time they created significant friction for moving away from IE in those areas. Once an option is as entrenched as IE became in some of those locations, it takes a long time for other options to be considered at all viable – there is a lot of momentum that they have to try arrest.

I think the reason why MS did nothing with IE6 dominance was that they didn’t want the web to be a viable alternative to Windows/win32/.NET. Or, perhaps, they didn’t believe it could be and as such it wasn’t worth further investment.

And now, two decades later, MS is shipping web apps as a part of Office.

That timeline all seems pretty accurate, but I'm unsure about EdgeHTML or Spartan or whatever it was called being "still the same render engine" - do you have more on that?

"still the *same* render engine" is poor wording on my part. Of course they overhauled/reworked things, dropped support for ActiveX and a lot of backwards compatibility stuff. So it probably would be more accurate to say it's a fork of the old engine.

That edgeHTML starts at version 12.0 is a hint for being a continuation of that lineage - but there's also a few bugs/idiosyncrasies edgeHTML has inherited from Trident.

I remember that edgeHTML did spoof the user agent so browsers would not detect it as IE, and would not apply IE specific hacks and polyfills. And that would cause problems with some web apps, that could be fixed by re-enabling a select few hacks/polyfills.

It's been a long time ago, so I don't remember what specifically it was... sorry.

All good, thanks for the follow-up! I've been curious about the (original) Edge rendering engine for some time.

This is a wonderful summary. The only thing I would add is that the fumbled rewrite was, IIRC, Netscape’s reaction to the rise of MS. So I would argue that IE really did kill off Netscape.

Also misses the Linux and Mac history - KHTML/Konquerer and WebKit/Safari, which of course was the basis for Chrome. Google didn’t need to start from scratch.

I know there's more history to webkit, but that didn't really seem relevant to the rise and decline of IE... I glossed over it for the sake of brevity. (And yes I know, I still failed to keep it brief, despite that).

As for the decision to do a rewrite - sure Microsoft put pressure on Netscape, and that did influence their decision, and sure Microsoft might have killed off Netscape anyway - but the rewrite still was Netscape's own decision, and it was also Netscape who failed to pull it off successfully.

Of course. I thought your summary was awesome - brought back a lot of memories - and was just trying to add colour.

I do remember reading Mozillazine to keep up to date with the rewrite… and at some point, it was a year at least, I just gave up.

Trivia: at some point (around IE8, I believe) Google released a plug-in to Internet Explorer called IEFrame that displayed supported pages inside IE window, but using Chrome underneath. It was fairy popular.

> Google released a plug-in to Internet Explorer called IEFrame

It was called ChromeFrame.

There was also an ActiveX plug-in that allowed hosting XULRunner in IE, which allowed embedding Firefox inside it.

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