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Comment by detolly | Hacker News Reader

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detolly·

> Why it was useful: Because Internet Explorer was trash

Great insight

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Specifically: IE6 was trash.

Microsoft had won the browser war, but at the same time the dotcom crash and antitrust action over the tight integration between IE and Windows caused Microsoft to stop investing in it.

Did they ever invest much into it? As far as I understand they got the core components from Spyglass Inc. and avoided paying licensing fees by giving it away for free.

Sounds like they avoided paying licensing fees by not paying licensing fees and then acting surprised when called on it.

https://archive.ph/20120919002551/http://www.windowsitpro.co...

Wasn't it that the Spyglass deal was MS paying a percentage of revenue, and MS releasing IE for free, so that Spyglass got to keep a percentage of $0?

> Feels like when Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass to become Internet Explorer, and a chunk of the compensation was tied to a fraction of revenue from Internet Explorer. Of course Microsoft gave IE away as part of Windows so IE never had any revenue associated directly with it. Eventually MS did settle a lawsuit brought by Spyglass for $8 million to make the issue go away

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27999293

I don't agree IE6 was trash at that time. It was much better than the competition. IE was much faster and less resource intensive than Netscape, which was a big deal when RAM was measured in megabytes. It's not fair to compare it to browsers which came out years later.

I really hated IE with a passion.

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