I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem.
(And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)
(And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)
Except for the part where you get BSoD and infinite recursion or any of the other stated IE6 nightmares...
Really, the only thing Chrome and IE have in common are market share. Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way as far as being a web dev goes.
For web apps, IE6 and anything that came before was always terrible. It used to be hard to build a decent web app, even if most of your code ran on the server. There is a huge qualitative difference between building for an ad-hoc platform and one that is rigorously built and tested against some externally defined standard.
Sure, Chrome may be lagging in some areas, but--like all modern browsers--the platform it provides conforms rigorously to the standards it supports. And that makes all the difference.
My point is that in the IE6 era (and previously), doing so was categorically hard -- I didn't say impossible. Also, that changed with FF 3.5, IE8, Chrome, etc.
Admittedly, IE6 and FF 1.5 were the first browsers I had to develop apps for from scratch. (And FF was already far more robust.)
document.all, the way IE worked had a few advantages... Layers in NN didn't allow you to break apart a form into child components you could hide/show was a particular issue. So you had to mirror values in/out of the child layer portions of the form. That was about the most common and painful problem between the two imho.
Another was when IE 5.0.0 broke the older API for dealing with changing the children of a <select> node. Which was fixed in 5.0.1, but 5.0.0 was on every Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Disc, and what a LOT of people had. That was painful to deal with too.
Considering the context and era, IE being updated through Windows Updates was actually a huge improvement over the state of the art at the time.
As far as divergence from the standards, again, that was generally not the case when IE6 shipped - if anything, it was at the bleeding edge, and past it in some ways. The real problem with it was that it wasn't updated fast enough to keep up with the rapid pace of web standards after the initial release; and when IE7 finally came, it had very minor improvements (IIRC the biggest one was PNG transparency?). But that was a different era already.
MS IE 1 was developed for Windows 95 Plus!, MS IE 2 for Windows NT 4.0, MS IE 3 was for Windows 95 OSR2 (essentially new OS, it even included it's own brand-new filesystem!), MS IE 4 was for Windows98 (but was rushed with Windows 95 OSR 2.5), MS IE 5.0 was for Windows 2000 (but was included as part of Windows 98 SE), MS IE 5.5 for was Windows ME (which wasn't initially planned - that's why it got 5.5 number, not 6), MS IE 6 was for Windows XP, MS IE 7 was for Windows Vista (and since Vista was horribly delayed so was MS IE 7) and MS IE 8 was for Window 7!
The first version of MS IE which wasn't developed as part of Windows development was actually MS IE 9.
IE2 was the first version available for Windows 3.1, Mac OS, etc. Sure it was released at the same time as NT 4.0 but I don't think it was developed with it.
The big exception is IE4.0 which was deeply integrated with the Windows 98 shell (hello Active Desktop).
Easy to forget that now.
Also, did you know IE6 pioneered the browser web dev tools? IE6 was the first browser you could debug your JavaScript, css and html, which was copied by firebug about 12 months later. I can't even remember what it was called now, IE Dev toolbox? Something strange, you had to download it separately.
And Firebug and Chrome Dev tools copied it almost verbatim. I've never seen any sort of acknowledgement of just how much the community owes to that early tool. The announcement blogs about it were still accessible a few years ago.
The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, I was reminded of rendering errors that I had long forgotten, but all in all it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It helps that I'm just building a website in the classic sense, not a blob of JavaScript that happens to puke out HTML, and when I run into something that's awkward to implement I can just adjust the design to work with what I have.
I realise that's not something a lot of people in a commercial job would have had the luxury of doing.
I don't know if I'd ever want to target IE at all (I'd prefer to pretend it doesn't exist), but I do like to test stuff on niche browsers (NetSurf, Dillo, lynx/links/w3m) and see how usable the site is.
It was actually blazing quick, far, far faster than the JS implementation I tried (like instant vs 20 seconds). While XSLT was hard to develop in and perhaps deserves to die its death, it really was a quite amazing bit of tech.
http://www.rdwarf.com/users/wwonko/jscript/jsd.pdf
Although the Developer Toolbar had dom explorer and all that jazz, way more than a console, it really was amazing when I first used it.
Here's the release blogs:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2005/09/16/developer-too...
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2007/05/10/internet-expl...
I'm sure we'll find that a Pareto Distribution is an unavoidable market phenomenon, but I still believe its healthy for technologists to remain skeptical when one client massively outperforms others.
Not quite the case. Chrome + Extensions create a very OS-like environment, hence not even needing Chrome OS.
The longer Chrome stays popular, the more websites will optimize for Chrome, bringing back the days of "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". And as more and more sites become accessible only in Chrome, user share tilts further in Chrome's favor, and so on in the vicious cycle we experienced in the browser dark ages.
That's the fear, at least. I don't think anyone is concerned that Chrome is going to start BSoDing Windows anytime soon.
The omens of monopoly are certainly here, though. All of Google's websites, which constitute a large percentage of web traffic, have been a "best viewed in Chrome" affair for a few years now. Microsoft recently dropped support for Firefox on the Skype web client. And I've seen my fair share of niche/corporate/etc websites that are Chrome-only.
(FYI, I'm not personally worried that we'll see the same browser dark ages as before, but it's something we should be vigilant against.)
Soo like - you mean: built in proprietary app stores, random DRM-enforcing blobs with camera/microphone access, phone-home tracking behavior, and gobs of memory use?
side note: Firefox not IE user.
Google Meet does block me though..