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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

Besides the highly questionable business ethics discussed in this article, IE just plain sucked. On one medium-sized project I worked on back then, I calculated that around 30% of the code was there just to work around various IE bullshittery.

I have to smile when I see young people complaining about Safari incompatibilities now. You have no idea, young padawans. :-)

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IE had the right box model years ahead of everything else, a better way of doing embeds, an element transformation language that's still ahead of anything you can do with CSS, .... Sure it wasn't "standards compliant" but I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't.

Not only that, but IE4 was the first browser you could do, what we would now call "web apps". It had a stable javascript implementation and css, which let you create and edit elements dynamically. It really paved the way of how we do things today.

and IE5 introduced dynamic web requests (originally ActiveXObject, then as the familiar XHR) which was way better than holding open a long page response

There was also a way of doing it with the DOM that Mozilla implemented. I don’t recall the specifics, it was something like you would instantiate a new Document object and then call open() on it with a URL. It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think.

XMLHttpRequest long predates the foundation of WHATWG. XMLHttpRequest was introduced with IE5 in 2001. WHATWG wasn't founded until 2004, when its first mailing list started.

If you check my comment again, I’m saying it was abandoned after WHATWG formalised XHR. It existed a long time before that. I think XHR was a little earlier, but they were roughly contemporaneous. And of course, people were doing XHR stuff before XHR existed with things like invisible iframes, but those were just hacks.

> It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think.

"It" was using the Document object to load a URL. WHATWG was not responsible for standardizing XMLHTTPRequest.

https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#specification-history

It was also possible in earlier browsers by using hidden frames. User interaction or a timer would trigger, then you load the frame (which contained dynamically generated js) and then call the javascript you'd just loaded.

> I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard

Hm? Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox changed tons of behavior in order to match Internet Explorer specifically, which was the de facto standard at the time.

> I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't.

This is not even remotely true. There’s thousands upon thousands of bugs publicly available in Bugzilla showing fixes to standards conformance, not to mention the Acid Test and things like that.

As far as “got their behaviour declared as the standard”, in several important cases the opposite is true. The reason why Netscape 4 was so terrible with CSS is because there were two competing approaches for styling – CSS, which Microsoft had already started implementing; and JSSS which Netscape had already started implementing. The W3C picked CSS, and Netscape scrambled to catch up by transcoding CSS into JSSS as a stopgap measure. Which is also why Netscape 4 lost CSS support when JavaScript was disabled.

Is Safari incompatible with the standards or with Chrome?

Kind of both, it's lagging behind Firefox and Chrome for sure but the most annoying for me isn't really that but the bugs on basic web features. It definitely feels less stable, you never know what the next version will break.

30% of the code but 80% of the time I touched UI.

I used to think it was spelled padouin. Like French style. Anyone think like me?

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