Comment by bl4k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bl4k | Hacker News Reader

Standards plays are political and market based, nothing to do with IE being slow or them being stupid. Innovations we can thank IE for that were never 'standard':

* innerHTML

* css applied to chrome

* XMLHttpRequest

* i18n DNS

* double-byte char support (since 96)

* embed (or was it object? one of the two - the first one)

* first video embed (IE2 on Mac)

* hasLayout

* iframe

* marquee (for the lolz)

* contenteditable

* opacity/filter

* favicons

* first implementations of CSS, tables, 128-bit ssl, xml (5) and xstl (5)

It works better when coders who build browsers decide new features, not some guys sitting around a table trying to agree on what an image display should look like.

Exactly what Andreessen did, he just added stuff to Netscape and let the loonies complain about it not being 'proper'. We criticize Microsoft for the same thing.

People don't complain about Intel and AMD with instruction set standards, but they complain about web standards because it is easy to.

Are you saying that IE invented tables, embed, css etc? That is not true. Embed were invented by Netscape. Tables were a IETF proposal that were implemented by Netscape first. Css were a W3C proposal, although IE were the first mainstream browser to implement it.

hasLayout is a workaround for a bug in IE's rendering engine.

I thought IE were the last browser to support i18n domain names.

You may be correct about the rest though, and contentEditable and XMLHttpRequest are great features we can thank IE for.

Sorry I rattled these off, going back and clarifying and adding some references in a moment so that the entire argument doesn't get simply shot down by pointing out a single feature :). Thanks.

Do you have any references for Microsoft's invention of HTML tables, CSS* , SSL2 and 'i18n DNS'?

* Sure, IE may have had CSS support before Netscape but that hardly makes it their innovation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Css#History

hasLayout? (I know what it is, but, seriously?)

CSS applied to chrome: do you mean styling scrollbars?

XMLHttpRequest is a great thing, as is contentEditable. And IE5 was a really good browser for its time. The criticisms at that point were not generally technical but to do with motivation. IE gained market share in the upper 90% range and that, not criticism, is why the following decade of web development was marked by technological stagnation.

I am clarifying the list now, point applies either way - lots of innovation that we appreciate today came out of IE

I was a web dev at the time of 3, and I remember a lot of CSS properties that IE supported and added, I will dig up a list. Thanks.

(btw agree on IE5 being a great browser, I had a lot of work replacing internal intranet desktop apps with IE5 intranets - the enterprise loves ie5)

Do you seriously consider hasLayout or filter to be innovations? hasLayout is at the very best a hack, and at the worst a terrible, opaque feature to let the developer peek into the Trident rendering engine to deal with bugs. 'filter:' is platform specific so I don't think I need to elaborate.

You're quite wrong.

HTML5 is innovating. IE is way behind when it comes to innovative features.

And please don't hold up 'innerHTML' as an example of a good thing.

That is my entire point. They are far behind now because we criticized the for so long and they threw in the towel after IE6.

Microsoft did almost zero browser innovation after 6 and until now, whereas previously they innovated. And now they can't win either way.

It just shows that the sentiment the entire time was anti-msft

I disagree. They stopped innovating after they killed all of the competition. They didn't need to any more.

MS certainly don't have a vested interest in the internet - it goes against their core business.

I think its fair to say that Microsoft don't do complacency

esp. in competitive markets

IE team was torn apart as part of internal politics

That's not fair to say at all. IE6 is a perfect example of complacency in a competitive market from years ago. Their mobile efforts to date are a perfect example of complacency in a competitive market today. They were years late in shipping Vista, years late in trying to meaningfully compete with Google, they've been long complacent with their Mac Office products, and some of their developer tools are atrocious.

You don't get a pass because your internal bureaucracy and politics prevent your engineers from doing their jobs.

Actually you are correct. I think if they had the option to, they would not have been complacent, but all the internal muddling stalled them on Vista (worst project ever) and IE. They only got their teams cleared out in the past 18 months and restructured and there is a lot more to do (Dean Hatchamovitch leads the IE team now, great guy who came in via sysinternals)

So you are right that internal turmoil shouldn't be used as an excuse. I think they know that they can't be complacent though, the Vista slip must have cost a lot of market share to Apple.

Adding to this, I remember reading an interview with one of the IE6 devs a couple weeks back where he talked about how Microsoft considered browsers finished after IE6, and basically just disbanded the team. Browsers and web innovation wasn't a goal for Microsoft once they had majority marketshare. They just wanted to make sure their product was the standard for the web, as good or as bad as it was.

At the time of IE6's release it was a fantastic browser. That was Microsoft's problem; it was so much better than Netscape at the time (and had such a bundling advantage) that they totally dominated the market. So Microsoft stopped improving it... and were very slow to realize that they needed to start again after Firefox shook the browser market back up.

There were still people criticizing MS back at the time of IE6's launch, of course. But it was more ideological than practical... the open source zealots, rather than every web developer.

innerHTML is still the fastest way to inject content into a page.

You're correct (In IE), and also the worst.

Security issues, encoding issues, scripting attack issues, inability to work with tables event handlers etc etc. Never use innerHTML for anything serious.

Are there faster ways of getting HTML into a page on other browsers? As far as I know, innerHTML is always the fastest in any browser. I agree its not as safe though.

Wrong, SSL was developed by Netscape, including v2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_ve...

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/ssl/draft02...

at that moment it was referred to as 0.2 though.

Ye this is what I was talking about - pointing out one of the points not being correct (even though IE implemented 128 bit ssl first) means you call my entire reply wrong. I just rattled these off the top of my head, the point still applies.

I can't say for other entries, I see you have still some open claims, and that you edited the first version of your post where "SSLv2" was presented as a MSFT invention!

Still, SSL as the technology really doesn't deserve to be at the list where MSFT is to be credited. It was fully designed by Netscape and the "less bits" (weaker) crypto was enforced by U.S. Do you know any more details about when and how MS was able to use 128-bits before Netscape? Or was it at the time when Netscape was already "mostly dead"? Can't that be the case with some other entries you give? I happened to know about SSL, that's why I mentioned that -- "wrong" was about your SSL claim, not about others.

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