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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Oh god, the horror.

Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No, FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side.

https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/th...

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> because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE

Just like nowadays with chrome!

Can you give some examples?

Google facets/dive

the whole fucking internet except hn and wikipedia XD

Chrome Google-login integration is one.

Since an update to vector-based mapping, Google Maps performance and stability is pretty bad on anything except Chrome.

This article from The Verge[0] cites some support Tweets:

- AirBnb[1]: "We'd always recommend that you use Google Chrome to browse the site: we've optimised things for this browser. Thanks."

- Seamless[2]: "Safari is not a good browser to use with our website. Google Chrome work better with our website or you can download the app."

- DirecTV Now[3]

- IDAT solutions[4] (some random thing I found while searching)

- Countfire[5] (ditto)

Groupon said something similar as well but walked it back. Whatsapp's web app didn't support Firefox initially but does now.

Could browse through Web Compat[6] as well, though I'm not sure if this site is more about sites that should work in FF but don't, or Firefox bugs.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl...

[1]: https://twitter.com/AirbnbHelp/status/752829250198245376

[2]: https://twitter.com/Seamless_Care/status/942798540396474368

[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-googl...

[4]: https://www.idatsolutions.com/faq/

[5]: https://www.countfire.com/

[6]: https://webcompat.com/issues

Even my university’s enrollment system (HISinOne) complains on Firefox Mobile that it only supports Chrome.

First of all: I agree that this is bad and that these developers should choose portable tech when building these sites.

But as of now, Chrome is and has for a long time been the only browser to support:

Shadow DOM: https://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdomv1

Custom elements: https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom-elementsv1

CSS Paint API: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-paint-api

> CSS Paint API

That's been in Chrome for, like, less than a year - hardly a "long time". And the implementation leaked history spectacularly [0]. Rushing features out the door isn't necessarily something to be proud of.

[0] https://www.spinda.net/papers/smith-2018-revisited.pdf (see section 3.1)

Google Earth's web client (which is really the only client Google seem to care about) only works in Chrome. It's not a web client, it's a Chrome client.

https://earth.google.com/web

I love how they laid it on the line. “If you want to do web development, you need to actually learn web technology”

Now if someone would tell web developers that if you want to write desktop/mobile apps, you need to learn native frameworks.....

What are newer FrontPage alternatives?

The Internet and the web have changed drastically since the days when FrontPage was a very common website editor. Almost every modern website editor these days will require you to have some basic understanding of the concepts of HTML, and CSS coding, instead of the drag and drop design that FrontPage used.

Many, many "drag and drop" web based alternatives. Webflow,ukit, even Adobe edge on the desktop.

NetObjects Fusion! In 1996-7, I worked on AT&T's small business web hosting service, and it supported FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion.

NetObjects was brilliant, and sometimes miss it when I'm deep in CSS insanity.

I still have sites live that were built with NetObjects fusion. Still the best design / editor I've ever used, and I've tried so many.

I recently found this thing called 'pinegrove editor' (I think that's' what it's called. looks the closest to something like it and modern.

maybe blue griffon.

Sadly drop and drop widgets with wordpress themes is probably the most widely used that is similar.

Pinegrow: https://pinegrow.com

Yes, that's the one I was thinking about / been looking at tonyedgecombe, thanks!

Don't forget the first program in this space: Adobe Pagemill.

Wasn't HoTMetaL (Pro) the first actually released (in 1994)? Pagemill was in beta until 1995...

Claris Home Page looks like it also came out in 1994.

The server interaction features also worked on Linux!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-insta...

And BSD. Early on, we ran the first and largest MS FrontPage 'certified' web hosting provider, we enabled it on BSD with content in the same Unix home directories we gave our dialup clients.

Folks who made web sites in those days and paid $20/month to host them provided a pretty compelling library of content compared to today's pay-per-click 'blogosphere'.

I liked the "put up or shut up" pay-to-host model, driven by your beliefs, not your readers.

And despite the pretty garish things that happened in that web design era that FrontPage memorialized (rollover buttons!), kudos to Vermeer for democratizing web site creation.

Good point. Not a lot of people remembered that Microsoft acquired FrontPage from Vermeer in 1996 for millions. There's a pretty good old book about it "High St@kes, No Prisoners"

At my current job I am rewriting a 25 year-old VB application into a web-based application, and the majority* of our documentation is written in FrontPage. The horror, indeed.

*: Well, sort of.. there are bits scattered everywhere, I had to dig into email archives to find some specifications.

Medical sector ?

No, industrial sector

Not too hard to cut and paste into another editor, the convert html with pandoc, or filter it with Python or other script.

Didn't require IIS, you could run it on a Linux box with Apache. It would remind you at every step that you were a second class citizen and that you really should be running IIS, but you could do it.

Those Cobalt RaQ and Qube boxes came with that support baked in, which was a nice feature until Cobalt died and we had to replicate the functionality on straight Linux boxes.

It wasn't hard, it's just that a little part of me died in side every time I had to do it.

Did you know you can still run RaQ today, on a VM. Its called BlueOnyx now, its been slightly modernized, and we have a few sites running on it to this day. Its as rock solid as ever. Have some sites that are 20 years old and were migrated from original RaQs

Oh man frontpage HTML was ugggly!

I remember I'd use "View Source" and look for Frontpage tags as a cue for whether a site's designers deserved a good mocking

I remember I'd use "View Source"

Rather than look at the actual design?

IIRC FrontPage written-pages and hand-written (by people actually good at it) pages looked pretty similar in-browser, but the HTML that FrontPage produced was an atrocity

> and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side.

So much time spent, as a small kid, looking for a free webhost that supported FrontPage extensions...

It wasn’t that hard to upload the whole thing with Cute ftp (I figured it out when I was 10...)

Sure, but then how would you then process form data?

Well, they works best in IE because at that time there was IE only. Netscape navigator the other browser charge user, Firefox was just a beginning, as they want to take down IE because of their Navigator failure. It was great because it support some dynamic content. It was the first step to software like Dreamweaver as it bring concept in place. Having said that it was ugly design and I never like them even back then..

Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera.

The reasons IE won over Netscape are many, but bundling with dominant OS and embracing/extending standards such that sites only worked in IE was a big part of it. Heck, there was a whole antitrust case about just that.

> Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera.

No Netscape would officially cost you US$49 until 1998.

Wow, I had no recollection of that. My mistake.

"Officially", Netscape had a "free trial" for 90 days. In reality, I personally don't know one person who actually paid. Some companies did buy corporate licenses.

https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape

Here's an article stating that Netscape charged $49. It was in PC Magazine October 22, 1996

https://books.google.com/books?id=sjA_WJ82CSsC&lpg=PA102&dq=...

@dang can you edit/delete the parent comment? No need to spread lies here!

Ugly html is a very kind way of putting it. To be fair that was the era of 20 nested tables for layout. Microsoft just managed to double down.

It actually found new ways to write HTML that ‘accidentally’ crashed the current version of Netscape Navigator.

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