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Comment by OccamsMirror | Hacker News Reader

It makes you wonder if Microsoft had given developers what they wanted, i.e. modern CSS and Javascript support, more browser features, etc., would they have actually moved off of Internet Explorer?

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No, we wouldn’t have moved. The two main reasons back during IE6 times were tabs, and as a web developer: debugging. Firebug was something which was way ahead of everything else.

They did?

AJAX of jQuery fame, is extremely similar to ActiveX XmlHttpRequest.

The problem isn't XmlHttpRequest, but everything else they added/removed. Same with Google. The problem isn't they made request more secure, they made ad blocking impossible.

My custom user scripts from Tampermonkey that I used to make my life as a developer easier are just gone. I can’t even access the extension to grab them, some of them are complicated workflow stuff that made my life easier in some pages that are poorly designed. Like I’m often looking at the contents of JWTs so I added a global function into my global scope to parse JWTs. There wasn’t even a “hey we’re getting rid of this extension back stuff up”, it’s just disabled.

What do you mean? I have the new version of Tampermonkey installed and after turning on developer mode in the extensions section all my scripts work perfectly. https://www.tampermonkey.net/faq.php?locale=en#Q209

What do you mean? I've ported JS code from ActiveX to modern (circa 2017) browsers. It mostly works with some renames.

I'm not sure what your message is referring to.

> AJAX of jQuery fame, is extremely similar to ActiveX XmlHttpRequest.

I think you have two names mixed up: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1600419/xmlhttprequest-v...

This stuck out because I remember jQuery's ajax being a wrapper around XMLHttpRequest (and maybe still is?).

I don't see how that affects my argument. The point is, Active X had an XML HTTP Request way before it was standardized. Same with iframe, and other features.

Microsoft is known for treating developers pretty good. Much unlike Apple.

It wasn't supposed to be a rebuttal, I could just see the statement being really confusing for anyone not around back then who didn't realize terms had been mixed up.

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