
The innovations of Internet Explorer - kalyanganjam
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/08/22/the-innovations-of-internet-explorer
======
wrath
Say what you want about Microsoft and IE (I'm expecting Microsoft to be bashed
as usual in this thread), but for those of us who were developing for the web
in the early 2000s IE was way richer in features that any other browser. The
event model and the styling capabilities were better and best of all MSDN
actually had documentation. There's a reason why IE6 was adopted so much. It
"was" good.

Others with better ideas came along and made the web development experience
better, but I agree that IE started it all. I have no idea if the web would be
better or worst without IE. I would expect that someone else (Netscape??)
would have played the role of IE if it didn't exist and we would be stuck in a
similar situation. Remember that in the early 2000s developers that called
themselves web developers had ZERO experience.

There weren't any standards back then and since many of us had to start
writing intranets and websites, and since you could do more with IE6 we used
it.

~~~
aboodman
IE6 was actually just an incremental improvement on IE5 and IE4 before it. IE4
was the really important leap.

Story time:

IE3 and NN3 both had small amounts of programmability via JavaScript - you
could change the src of an image, you could inspect and modify form values,
you could navigate the page, or completely clear its contents and rewrite it
as a string. Oh, and also alert(), confirm(), and prompt().

IE4 and NN4 came out at roughly the same time. But in IE4, they took this idea
of small amounts of programmability, and generalized it to the entire
document. IE4 introduced the idea that every HTML node should be programmable
and interactive in a generalized way. If you knew the HTML properties for an
element, you already knew its programmatic interface. It was a simple,
powerful idea that hasn't been improved dramatically since.

NN4, on the other hand, introduced this ridiculous hack called 'layers'. You
could create these floating layers, and write into them using
document.write(). That was the only dynamic mechanism in NN4 above what NN3
had.

So IE4 introduced a powerful and simple generalization of the platform, and
NN4 introduced an ugly hack. Surprisingly, developers preferred IE. On top of
that IE4, was rock solid and NN4 was crashy.

It's true that Microsoft abused their monolopy position, but the part of the
story everyone forgets is that they also more or less invented the modern web
in IE4.

Sorry.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Yup. You toss it off as a short comment, but the stability and performance
aspects of IE4 and Netscape 4 shouldn't be ignored. Netscape was super-crashy,
and bloated, and slow, and development pace had slowed to a crawl. This was
the age of Netscape Communicator suite version 4.2b preview release candidate
3 Gold (you think I'm kidding but this is hardly an embellishment of the
reality). IE4 was solid, less bloated, and faster. And better maintained.

Microsoft abused its monopolies in various ways, that's for sure, but it won
the browser war by hitting Netscape when stumbled right where it hurt the
most, with a higher quality competing product.

------
erez
I remember asking the web-devs at the company I used to work for several years
ago why do they support IE only, and their reaction was that they will not be
able to pull off all the neat tricks they can pull off in IE in any other
browser. Their reaction to any suggestion of standards was "I don't care about
standards, if that means I can't do whatever IE enables me to do".

Is that innovation? Some would say yes. I think that most of these only became
innovative once they began to be available to larger audiences, which
coincides with the rise of Firefox and later on Chrome. Also, most of the
conception of IE as non-innovative and stagnant came from the 5 years gap
between IE6 and IE7 (and the added 3 years between IE7 and the real "new IE",
IE8), during which Opera and Firefox carried the innovation torch. Most of
IE's innovations came when it was fighting the browser wars, pre IE5.

~~~
emn13
There's a big downside here too: by publishing lots of very big and crufty
(and ill-thought out) API's, they make it very hard to come up with alternate
implementations. And once devs are locked into those API's, it's very very
hard to port things to a different engine.

So you might respect XmlHttpRequest, but it's also a fairly small API in
comparison to some of the other things MS produced.

And it's _those_ things that are "possible" in IE that were precisely the
problem. If your API consists of little more than exposing coincidental
implementation details, of course lots of things are possible. They're just
impossible to maintain afterwards in the face of any change.

~~~
nikcub
that is how things are developed though, people ship them and they become
standards or die.

it wasn't just Microsoft, Andreessen invented the image tag by simply shipping
it in Mosaic:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.hypertext/fMl2xRqL...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.hypertext/fMl2xRqLvRk/58RdTW0v3n8J)

TBL was against it, as were others. If he went through the theoretical
'standards' process that you infer is the 'right way' it never would have got
done

I am definitely of the view of software first, standards second - because it
has been proven throughout history to work

~~~
wsc981
I believe this was the reason the WHAT-WG was started. The discontent of
browser developers of the slow moving standardisation process of the W3C.

From the WHAT-WG FAQ:

"The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and
Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were
becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of
interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors.
So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these
concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born."

------
kakuri
While praising IE, let us not forget that MS only innovated enough to displace
other web browsers, leveraging its Windows near-monopoly to saturate the
market with IE. Dominance achieved, competitors obliterated, MS was content to
let the world live with IE6 for eternity, and only with the rise of Firefox
and Webkit-based browsers did MS finally deign to do something (althought not
much) for the web with IE9.

~~~
est
IE had its own innovations like VRML, dHTML+TIME, behaviors, HTML Components.
Which could not be found else where.

Guess what, IE6 even supports DirectX called DirectAnimation. And MIDI, vector
graphics, etc. IE is far more feature rich than any other remote HTML
displayers.

------
pavs
Almost every major browsers had some kind of contributions that we take today
for granted.

Also: [http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/08/5-features-opera-
browser...](http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/08/5-features-opera-browser-did-
first/)

~~~
saint-loup
Opera didn't invent [modern] tabs
[http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-
not...](http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-not-invent-
tabbed-browsing/)

~~~
manojlds
Even you say Opera did not invent "modern" tabs, so that means they did come
up with the precursor. We owe atleast MDI tabs to Opera

------
lmm
About two years ago when trying to make a zoomable interface work in IE some
colleagues and I discovered it has a wonderful set of transforms you can apply
to any element, with a much easier syntax than CSS. I think they were based on
/ part of VRML? We were amazed that it was so easy to do any arbitrary 3D
rotation, stretch or skew, and even more amazed when we read up and found it
had been there since about 1996.

And then we found this functionality had been removed in IE8 :(

------
coopaq
MS stopped others (Netscape) from innovating. IE only ran on Windows* IE 5 on
Mac was crap and maybe antitrust avoiding effort. IE was created at all costs
to stop the web browser from becoming an application platform that competed
with Windows. MS did everything to keep users from using competing browsers.
MS tried to make it impossible to uninstall from Windows. MS tried to keep
developers from creating rich applications in the web browser and kept IE6 in
stagnant mode for almost a decade until competition arrived. Microsoft won.
This stuff should be fact entered in Wikipedia.

~~~
gecko
Having been there at the time, IE on Mac was the best browser on that system
at the time, by _far_. Netscape 4 looked like a bloated piece of crap that
emulated random bits of Appearance Manager, crashed constantly, and had a
nasty tendency of not yielding the event loop, which effectively locked the
system. IE, by contrast, was fast, stable, used Appearance Manager, looked
native _and_ matched the Macs coming out at the time, _and_ had better privacy
controls, and other stuff that I don't even remember. Getting IE on our Macs
was a _big_ deal when I was in school, and it was pretty much _the_ first
thing I downloaded on a new Mac--the second being Outlook Express.

Now, by the time OS X rolled around, IE was aging very quickly, and by the
time Safari 1.0 finally came out, anyone who cared about that sort of thing
had jumped to Camino. But that was _long_ after the initial IE port, and I
don't think you can possibly say that IE 5 on Mac was crap from the antitrust
effort.

~~~
stan_rogers
Not to mention that Netscape 4 never really implemented CSS. There was a CSS-
to-JSS (JavaScript Style Sheets) translation level that _almost_ worked most
of the time, but it couldn't manage markup that resulted in a deeply-nested
native object hierarchy (something that was altogether too easy to do in
straightforward HTML). Nor did DIV or IFRAME properly translate to LAYER and
ILAYER. Element addressing in NS was pretty much strictly hierarchical; one
needed to include a tree search for NS to get something similar to
getElementByXXX(). (And I had to support that horrid thing until 2005.)

------
esbwhat
This is the reason why I'm scared of google pushing chrome so hard

~~~
mda
Google does not have a conflict of interest with better browsers/internet and
its main revenue sources, Microsoft had this problem and resulted this mess.

~~~
esbwhat
Google does have a conflict of interest. The best case scenario is a better
internet, but only for google products for them.

People love google, but it's a for-profit company, not a foundation. Chrome
would not be the first abandoned project, either. Anything can happen.
Competition is good.

~~~
evilduck
Google may be motivated to attempt things like Dart and NaCl which help drive
forward their own products first and foremost, but they have a consistent
reputation of making their web-advancing client-side technologies open source
too (Dart, NaCl, WebM, SPDY, Chromium, Webkit, etc are all open source). They
also have Mozilla, Opera and Apple pushing forwards as well (though I'd argue
that IE9/10 isn't putting much competitive pressure on anyone).

If Chrome is abandoned by Google you're free to fork Chromium, acquire
licenses for it's restricted plugins and it'll only slow the web's march
forward, not actively hinder it. It's entirely possible for another group to
carry the Chromium torch, and Google/Chrome has never yet intentionally
damaged the quality of standards-compliant competing web products (though they
don't offer quirks-mode fixes for crap tailored only to IE).

~~~
pcwalton
IE9 and IE10 certainly are putting competitive pressure on others (including
Mozilla, my employer). For example, at the time of release IE9's vector
graphics performance was far ahead (we're talking on the order of 5x) of any
other browser, including Chrome and Firefox, and IE also led the way with
background compilation of JavaScript (a very important feature, arguably more
important to users than raw JS performance).

------
bpatrianakos
This is all true and Microsoft deserves credit where credit is due but here's
the thing: just because they spurred innovation long ago doesn't mean they
deserve a pass now. That's how this article kind of comes off. Like we should
lay off and be thankful for what we have. And we should. But the web is all
about innovation and finding better, faster, smarter ways to do things. Your
girlfriend doesn't forgive you instantly now when you cheat because you were
incredibly loyal in the past. Your boss shouldn't pay you when you don't show
up and don't call for work because you had a perfect attendance record in the
past. The fact is, IE went to hell and they deserve our scorn. If and when
IE10 really does deliver on its promises them we can call be happy with them
and start the process of forgiving and forgetting. Though I doubt version 10
will live up to the hype I'll be happy to give them all the praise in the
world if they at least catch up to where Firefox and Safari are now. I wish
they'd get on Chrome's level but that's a lot to ask right now. What the
article says about IE is true but now it's 2012 and what they did in 1999-2001
just isn't enough to give them a pass.

I'd also add that though IE did innovate like crazy in their heyday, if they
didn't someone else would have.

------
christopherscot
This reminds me of a coworker who, although generally horrible at his job,
despised by his colleagues, and only really concerned about his next pay raise
would - on occasion - remind us that HE was the one who wrote a small piece of
critical software we still used to this day.

------
veneratio
That was refreshing. It's good to remember the good points of anything,
especially something we may not like. This lesson applies very well to the
computing industry's rapid advancement and tendency to outdate technology.

------
js4all
When I hear IE, I think about it's own way to render pages. Over all websites
ever created, IE has cost a huge amount of wasted development hours.

------
gliese1337
Earlier submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418132>

------
Toshio
I'm particularly offended by this statement: "we wouldn’t have the web as we
know it today if not for its contributions".

In a parallel universe where microsoft never existed, the people who came up
with XMLHttpRequest did their innovative work at Netscape and the web today is
light years ahead.

~~~
ryandvm
Oh brother. Offended?

While it's true that Microsoft has done it's part to hold up progress, the
fact is that much of what you love about the web today can be directly traced
back to innovation at Redmond. Let's give them credit where credit is due.
Hell, they came up with AJAX so people could access Outlook from the web. Do
you remember how obnoxious browsing was before XMLHttpRequest?

~~~
electrichead
To be fair, that was kind of an accident. Xmlhttprequest just kind of sat
there until somebody else came up with a use for it.

~~~
emn13
It's an accident of history that's it's primarily used for Json and not Xml,
but you can hardly argue that the API itself was an accident.

Frankly, the importance of json in this matter is pretty minor anyhow: if it
hadn't been around, you can bet some nice JS library would have come up with a
different way to easily decode server data into JS objects. The scripted
communication was key.

------
emilis_info
And Hitler built the Autobahns, shouldn't we say thanks to him for that?

Also the rebels where never able to build something as marvelous as the Death
Star :-)

Success, efficiency and morality are three different things. Though many
people mix them up all the time. If someone (or something) is efficient and
successful that doesn't mean we should overlook the harm (or good) it is
doing.

~~~
untog
Oops, you've gone and invoked Godwin's law:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law>

A cold shower and a drive in a Volkswagen before you can post again.

~~~
wickedchicken
> A cold shower and a drive in a Volkswagen before you can post again.

What an excellent retort.

