Man upgrades Internet Explorer 1.0 to 9.0 | Hacker News Reader

Man upgrades Internet Explorer 1.0 to 9.0

winrumors.com

104 pointscreamhackered51 comments

The fact that this guy makes something as boring as upgrading software over and over again actually enjoyable to watch is really astonishing.

He's got a good, non-emotional speaking voice, and his content:noise ratio is high. Also, the tempo of the overview is near perfect, and his choice of what video to show to go with his voiceover is flawless.

> He's got a good, non-emotional speaking voice

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by this?

What makes it good? What makes it non-emotional? What is an example of a bad voice? What is an example of an emotional voice?

He reports the facts in a way that doesn't give any clues to any biases; he gets neither excited nor upset at any point that I could detect. His voice is pleasing; not nasal, screechy, grating, nor anything else widely considered objectionable.

I suspect you knew all of this and were simply trying to jump on some point that sounded subjective to you and perhaps it is, but that's what I mean.

The choice of username has once again made me laugh :D

Also, his search in the Bing box in IE 9 caught me by surprise.

As did his machine name, "shitballs".

And the packet sniffer showing a request to "timecube.com". Gold.

It was a subtle joke alluding to his friend reluctantly lending him a Windows 7 machine (and him now screwing with his friend.)

horse pr0n! haha

Look, you're probably a good guy, but let's keep HN from turning into another cesspool like Neowin.

"If you’re an Internet Explorer fan..."

Wait what? I was under the impression that most people use IE either because its installed by default or they are forced by their corporate overloads. Do people actually use IE because they really liked it after comparing it with other options?

For one thing, IE 8 is arguably a more secure browser than Firefox due to its use of low-integrity process isolation on Windows Vista and 7. It's also more stable than Firefox in my experience, probably because of the way it isolates browser windows into separate processes.

And now IE 9 has a rendering engine that's at least equal to Firefox's. It lags behind Firefox's user interface in some respects (customization, built-in spell check), but it feels much faster, and it doesn't bog down over a long browsing session like Firefox does (again thanks to isolated browser processes – now one for each tab, just like Chrome).

For my part, I still think Chrome is superior to both IE and Firefox for general web browsing, but these days I certainly wouldn't look at someone funny for choosing IE. It may just take a little while for the folk knowledge that "IE suxors!" to catch up to the new reality.

My biggest issue with IE as a browser is that Microsoft's enterprise support priorities are not inline with my innovation priorities. I would rather support faster moving browsers such as Chrome or Firefox.

Supporting IE seems to me to be supporting a project that will be obsolete in many ways soon after launch, and will stay that way for quite some time.

Are you comparing IE 9 to Firefox 4.0, or Firefox 3.6?

I'm comparing to Firefox 3.6; Firefox 4.0 isn't released yet. But everything I've read indicates that Firefox 4.0 will still have a single-process, non-low-integrity process model, with all the security and reliability implications that go with it.

Hopefully Firefox 4 will catch up to the likes of Chrome and Safari (and IE 9) in terms of JavaScript performance, judging by benchmarks on the release candidate, but I haven't seen any indication that it addresses Firefox 3's fundamental design weaknesses. Of course, feel free to correct me if I've missed something in the release notes somewhere...

Understandable, but still, when it comes to comparing how IE 9 stacks up to "Firefox" on rendering engines and memory usage, it doesn't seem particularly meaningful to compare the brand new IE 9 to the old Firefox just because IE 9 released a single week before the next major revision of Firefox is slated to. Not that you were writing a New York Times article here or anything. :)

I certainly understand your other point about the single-process design.

Yes :( Perhaps it's more the comfort factor, but there are people who are tech savvy, but prefer IE over anything else. I have ran across countless endusers who have multiple browsers but use IE8 as their "goto" browser for normal web surfing.

As someone once told me, "Internet Explorer is the application I use to download Firefox"

For me, the rare times when I'm on Windows, this has become, "Internet Explorer is the application I use to download Ninite".

chuckle I suspect there are several people that do the same thing. I'm one. Then I use FF to download chrome... =)

I know some people that does. One time I installed Chrome in some friend's PC. He has used Firefox and despite he's not a technical person, he understands there is 'more' Internet than the blue E icon.

Next time I know, he uninstalled it "to save up space". It was one of the saddest days in my life.

I remember someone once arguing with me, telling me that IE 7 was going to be the best browser ever and kick Firefox's ass.

I eventually decided that this person was a meatspace troll, though I could never quite be sure if he was honestly such a big fan of IE or just trying to get a rise out of people.

I hate to admit it, but I played around with IE9 in the last couple of days and I like it. Obviously, it can't sync with Chrome, but if it did, I might just ditch Chrome when working on Windows. It is very minimal and fast--just the way I like my browser.

Seriously firefox should use multi threading per tab!

I mean common most if not all the browsers are already doing it arent they?.

I heard it as wry dead-pan sarcasm.

I would probably watch a video about Tax Code law if this guy did it. Subtle humor is always best. Great video.

The best result of all of this is clearly that IE2 gets 93/100 in ACID3. Take that, Google Chrome!

I'm running Chrome 10.0.648.134 and it got 100/100 with a fast, smooth animation and pixel-perfect comparison to the reference encoding.

But they took about 15 years longer to get there! (Also, I'm running 10.0.648.151: was there a 'regression' or are you running something custom on top of Chrome?)

Or was that the first Acid?

His choice of breakbeat hardcore classic 'We Are I.E.' by Lenny De Ice deserves great praise.

My favourite part was IE2 getting 93/100 on the Acid3 test.

Yeah that's weird. I don't understand how that happened. If anyone happens to have IE2 around I'd love to be able to study this.

The install's floating around in a lot of places; for example: http://www.oldversion.com/Internet_Explorer.html; or as part of this multiple-version package: http://utilu.com/IECollection/.

When I tried loading the Acid Tests websites in IE2 (from the utilu collection on XP SP2) it gave me the error "Site Temporarily Unavailable (error id: 'bad_httpd_conf')". Not sure what's up.

As he said in the video, IE1/2 don't send a hosts header with their request and thus can't access most sites, ACID included. You'll have to download the test and all necessary files to a local disk in order to run it.

He should do this for each of the MS Office Apps too.

This video takes me all the way back to 1995, when I actually got Internet Explorer 1.0 with the Windows95 Plus! Pack.

Internet Explorer 1.0 through Internet Explorer 4 were during the Browser Wars. Internet Explorer 4 came with Windows 98, so after that the war was over since most people just started using Internet Explorer because it came with Windows and was the default browser.

To be fair, IE3 and, more specifically, Microsoft News and Mail, had one intriguing idea - that mail (and NNTP) messages were things to be managed like files and folders by a shell extension.

I would love to have Nautilus turn into a mail or calendar client when opening specific folders (somewhat extending magic into discovering what a folder is about)

Really?

I’m quite happy that the world has been moving into another direction. You no longer have to browse your music or photos in the filesystem, you have a dedicated music or photos program. That seems ideal to me, I wouldn’t want my file browser to be a swiss army knife.

There's no need for it to be a completely separated interface, though - in theory, at the top level you could have "Files", "Music", "Photos", "Mail" and so on. When you descend into "Files", you see the root of a traditional filesystem, when you descend into "Music" you see a music-specific interface.

Would you really want your file browser to become such a monster?

It's really more of a question of "Why does my shell currently privilege file browsing above music or email browsing?" I would contend that it's for historical reasons more than anything else.

But that's the point of what I was saying - when you are browsing your music, your filesystem browser becomes a music program. If you want to see files, switch back to files view and you are done.

I am not saying this is how every file browsing should happen and how every program should behave, but, for some data types - like mail, videos, music - it makes a lot of sense

I would have been interested to see the Unix and Mac versions of IE 5 included. And wasn't IE 5.5 a significant upgrade to 5.0, which was not included?

Most people use IE because they dont know other browsers exist. This applies to MS Windows only.

It doesn't look like he used 1.0 in the video. Did I miss something?

Are you sure? What's that at the 1:30 mark?

Serious question, I thought it was IE 1, but now I feel like I missed something.

Edit: I'm sure he does, he explicitly mentions various performance issues with IE 1.0 several times, starting with a screenshot at about 1:30

My memory is that IE v1 was never widely released to the public.

The only place I ever saw it was on a MS documentation CD, and then only because a coworker was pointing at it and laughing about how terrible it was.

I notice it's up on oldversion.com though. I suspect he skipped it because setting up a IP-enabled Windows 3.11 system was more trouble than it would be worth.

1.0 came built into windows 3.01.

He could have simply downloaded Chrome instead :-P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com