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Comment by raimondious | Hacker News Reader

"IE has had as its main mission for a decade the prevention of HTML/DHTML/AJAX applications that run with Web standards just as well as Desktop apps"

I don't think that's accurate since IE introduced XMLHttpRequest, vital to AJAX.

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True, and they did it for OWA. When they realized the consequences of what they had done, they stopped IE development for several years.

1) I wrote AJAX apps before XMLHttpRequest. It was simple enough. You opened an invisible frame and downloaded 'HTML' pages that consisted of a couple opening tags and whatever JSON you wanted (we didn't call it JSON back then, but that's what it looked like). Then you read the objects and updated your main page.

2) Sure XMLHttpRequest is nice. IE implements good things like that to maintain market share but then ensures that it is never up to standards in order to cripple the possibility of a capable open standard platform emerging. Witness the slow response times, lack of support for Canvas, PNG (still), broken box models (still, through at least IE7), broken message model, and more. That would all be easy to fix if MS wanted to. They make more money without a widespread good, fast standards-based browser in the market.

er sorta. it has more to do with the fact that most of the IE team (along with the GDI and USER teams) was moved into the WPF team after the release of IE6.

by that time they weren't really trying to tie the web to Windows anymore, they thought the web was obsolete and were trying to replace it entirely.

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