Hacker News Reader

Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

The main problem with IE wasn't that it was an exclusive product incompatible with other browsers. The problem was that it was bad. I'm not a fan of people only supporting WebKit, but at least WebKit browsers are good.

View on HN

Actually, for a while, IE was the best browser available. It was lighter weight, faster than Netscape, and had better web standards support. Mozilla, with its new Gecko engine, took a long time to mature, and was still fairly slow and bloated until Firefox (née Phoenix) came around. Remember, IE was where several features that now form the basis of the modern web came from. Heard of something called XMLHttpRequest? That came from IE.

I used IE briefly in 2000 and 2001, before Mozilla (0.9) became usable enough and Phoenix came out; back then (IE 5.5 to IE 6.0) it definitely was the best browser, by far.

It was the most forgiving browser, with a quirks mode that handled broken code like a champ. But Opera was the best browser, and if your code rendered correctly in it, it would probably render correctly everywhere else (except maybe Netscape 4, an abomination that took too long to die).

Opera was also commercial. At some point there was a free adware version, but I think that was later than 2001. After IE, most people stopped paying for web browsers.

The problem was that it was bad, in the ethics sense of the word.

IE was an attempt to aggressively eject the competition and kill the open web. When the web stubbornly refused to buy into IE-only technologies, it became Microsoft's dog in the manger, holding back the day that web apps made the OS irrelevant. It was good, technically, and then it was bad, technically, but it was always always evil.

IE isn't bad. It's bad because it is like 10 years old. IE actually innovated a ton of what we consider javascript and CSS/HTML now and days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com