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Comment by rapind | Hacker News Reader

That sabbatical is precisely why I will never ever promote Internet Explorer. It was ridiculous. I don't even care if suddenly MS produces the best technical browser available (highly doubtful, but even so). I don't care if it's a new team because it's the same company, and yes much of the same leadership. They blew it and they don't get another chance.

They had the best browser back when IE4 launched. Given the amount of pain IE has caused over the years, it surprises me that any self respecting web developer could ever forgive them.

"IE you are dead to me."

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> That sabbatical is precisely why I will never ever promote Internet Explorer. It was ridiculous.

Some (including standardistas and other web luminaries) argue it was a good thing overall (though it got long in the tooth around 2005-2006) because it allowed the web to settle and developers to better understand what they were working with (because the target got static, it became possible to explore in depth, not just in breadth).

> They had the best browser back when IE4 launched.

They also had the best browser back when IE5 launched and back when IE6 launched.

IE6 the best browser available.

Now there's a frightening thought.

This is 2001, pre-firefox. If you want a frightening thought then try it's main competitor: Netscape Navigator 4!

I remember Opera was my browser of choice around that time, it was a seriously nippy browser back then, way ahead of it's time. Unfortunately the fact that there was no free version prevented them from getting a decent share of the browser market. Later on, they did eventually release a free version but with an ad banner in the navigation bar (of course Opera is now completely free and doesn't have any ad banner).

Netscape complicator, I mean communicator. The browser that was almost impossible to download by itself instead of the entire suite of useless crap.

I'm convinced the source code that became so unmanageable for the Netscape team started with frames.

I remember using Konqueror at the time. Plugins were in external processes and they introduced tabs and other insane ideas way ahead of the time.

We're talking 2001 here, when Firefox was still mozilla/browser (and had no own name), an experimental branch of Mozilla, back when Venkman was the one and only debugger for Mozilla. KDE 2.0 (first release including KHTML), Opera 6 (new feature: unicode support), OSX 10.0 (and 10.1) bundling IE5/Mac.

The alternative to MSIE was Netscape Communicator 4 (which had been stagnating since 1998), Mozilla 1.0 itself was still more than a year away.

That's a valid argument, however I'm sure you could argue that there would have been other benefits had they continued to innovate and release which may or may not have had a more positive net impact. Who knows? It doesn't lessen the pain any.

Regardless, I'm definitely not going to thank MS for this since I'm pretty sure your argument was not their intended effect (What was their intended affect anyways? Did they just not care? Concern over the threat the web posed to their OS?) and I will continue to promote IE's competitors until someday IE dies a horrible death and sinks into oblivion.

I'm also guessing you're of a similar view (albeit not as hardcore) and playing devil's advocate anyways ;)

That's definitely an interesting point. Had Microsoft continued to add features to IE during that time they likely would have created a bunch of new "standards" purely because of their market share.

There would not have been an incubation period where new ideas and standards could be worked out. Had Microsoft just pushed forward I suspect we would have a lot of "web standards" that wouldn't have much purpose beyond furthering Microsoft's monopoly. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft took this time off purposely to incubate new ideas, but it could be looked at as a beneficial side effect.

In a bizarre way, MS is continuing to create standards: when you're a developer, you have to have all the IE bug fixes in your back pocket and know which bugs are IE's bugs and which ones are yours. How much time do you think is spent circumventing IE's shortcomings? It's strange to think that there's a whole slew of sites that get tons of traffic based on IE's flaws.

Well, during the IE6 stagnation W3C was working on the incompatible XHTML2. WHATWG was created the year Firefox was released.

> Some ... luminaries ... argue

Mind pointing me to some specific examples of these arguments?

It was horrible. But let's keep some perspective on why that sabbatical existed. It wasn't merely because MS had decided they dominated the browser market and didn't need to innovate anymore.

More than anything it was because MS was afraid of continuing IE development. IE is what got MS into all the regulatory anti-trust trouble in the first place, MS was too afraid to make a new mis-step with IE which could land them in even more trouble.

They didn't get in trouble for making a browser. They got in trouble for making it impossible to completely switch to a different browser under Windows. There was absolutely no external influence stopping Microsoft from continuing to develop IE as a standalone product. So yes, it was for that first reason.

> So yes, it was for that first reason.

Has Microsoft stated this or is it speculation on your part?

This same argument is why I still have it in for Apple, despite their current success in consumer electronics.

The Apple I know is the one from the 1990s who had things locked down so tightly, hardware and software, bit loyal developers who put their best efforts into the platform, as if to destroy any ecosystem that built up around their successful products.

And I still feel that things haven't changed - if you can make money from iOS apps today, that is wonderful - but be prepared to get bitten one day.

This same argument is why I still have it in for Apple, despite their current success in consumer electronics.

I voted you up, but I'll note that one of the secondary reasons I wanted a PowerBook in 2004 was because Windows seemed so dominant and I didn't like the idea of Microsoft being able to completely control the Internet. OS X was the only OS at the time capable of competing with Windows for average users. Now, because of Firefox, Apple, and Google, it looks highly unlikely that Microsoft could in effect control the Internet even if they wanted to.

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