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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, that domain name arouses my suspicion... if I saw that in the search results I'd probably think "SEO spam site" and skip over it.

One of the obvious things you can see between the versions is the gradual trend of dumbing-down and flattening the UI, most apparent between 8 and 9. The older versions' UI give the impression that they are very customisable and powerful, while the newer ones seem to be implicitly saying "you have no control (anymore)." I'd love to use a browser with a newer rendering engine, but retain the old UI.

I also noticed the sizes are a little weird:

    IE1: 2.88MB
    IE2: 17.9MB
    IE3: 232MB(!?)
    IE4: 357MB
    IE5: 640MB
    IE6: 105MB
    IE7: 78MB
    IE8: 147MB
    IE9: 207MB
    IE10: 218MB
    IE11: 166MB

I remember using those older versions of IE on systems with hard drives smaller than that.

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IE4 -- 11MB IE5 -- 56MB IE6 -- 13MB

Their sizes seem to be off (or including something extra). But there definitely is a huge change in IE5 requirements. I'm guessing that's related to the US v Microsoft antitrust bundling lawsuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_4#System_req...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5#System_and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#System_req...

I wonder if IE 6 could lean more on existing libraries (renderers etc) in the OS itself; maybe the IE 6 version for older systems than Windows XP were comparable in size to IE 5?

That seems likely. What's funny is how Edge (and eventually IE) became even more entrenched in the system than before, yet nobody cares anymore. Almost like the whole thing was a bunch of arm-waving by nerds and regulators that wanted to pretend they knew what was going on.

IE is not the dominant browser anymore and Windows is not the dominant OS anymore (if you consider mobile).

Instead Google got a huge fine in Europe now for being the default search engine on Android.

> One of the obvious things you can see between the versions is the gradual trend of dumbing-down and flattening the UI,

This has been my experience for the majority of software, from native to web and mobile to desktop. Less options, less tools, less customization.

I think it's partly because software has become more mainstream over time, and instead of trying to teach people to use more complex things, developers have chosen or been forced into appealing to the lowest common denominator. Make it as simple as possible so people who aren't interested in learning how to use the tools can still get by.

I don't necessarily think this is a problem on its own, but combined with the business needs enforced by people looking to maximize profits it becomes less palatable. If we've built something that works for everyone, it's a hard sell to create more powerful options for the 10% (pulled that number out of my ass, I have no idea what the actual amount would be). Then we're all stuck with worse tools.

I disagree -- the difference between IE8 and IE9 is that IE8 expects the user to interact with the browser's interface, while IE9 attempts to get the browser out of the way of the user and instead puts the browser's content front-and-center.

Personally, I like this thought-line a little better. Users ultimately want to interact with the application only with regards to their content, not the applications that house that content.

One of the attractions of Chrome when it first came out was that it had less chrome, that most of the precious screen real estate could be devoted to showing the content of the web page, or at least to ads. I'd guess IE9 was a reaction to that.

When we only had 640 vertical pixels, it was a huge change not to have 150 of them taken up with rows of icons and bookmarks by default. Now we have the space to get those controls back, but we're used to not having them.

I had roughly the same amount of rows of pixels on my desktop computer in 2008 as I have now (1280x1024 to 1920x1080). I had even more for a few years prior to that, when I had a CRT monitor that I'd gotten for free (1600x1200).

It's AFAIK pretty much only with 4k monitors that we have caught up with CRTs resolution-wise, and not a lot of people have either of those. w3schools lists a bunch of resoltion statistics. In 2008, the most common resolution was 1024x768. 1366x768 in 2018. Same vertical resolution. Since I thought those statistics may account for phone users as well, I looked further. Globalstats lists 1366x768 as the most common desktop resolution in 2019. Desktop in this case probably accounts for laptops as well, as I believe there is no way to tell the two apart with User-Agent.

https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/wo...

I also remember Firefox 2 being configurable enough that you could easily get less chrome than Chrome. The big win for me was process-per-tab.

1366x768 has been the default resolution for cheap laptops for over a decade now. It's only very slowly being replaced with 1920x1080, but even when this transition is complete, effective information density is unlikely to change much. There are only so many pixels you can squeeze onto a 13" screen before most users need to scale up the UI.

For someone with bad eyesight like me, the sweet spot for a 13" laptop would be 4K at somewhere between 250% and 300% scaling. That would give me just about the same effective information density as good ol' 1366x768. I guess there's a reason why this awkward resolution still refuses to die.

Seeing the size of the chrome on the old IE versions, particularly version 3 where they upgraded to the large buttons with help text, made me think about how nice it was to have the relatively plain content on the web at that time. The information density was high enough that the small space for the actual document was still enough for a decent experience. Even with those low screen resolutions, the amount of content on the screen was probably similar to that of many websites today with all their bloat.

> the newer ones seem to be implicitly saying "you have no control (anymore)."

Since all those toolbars can still be made visible in newer versions, I think MS's choice to hide them is more about a minimalist aesthetic than actually removing control.

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