Edge and Windows 11 – the return of Microsoft's IE fiasco? | Hacker News Reader

Edge and Windows 11 – the return of Microsoft's IE fiasco?

computerworld.com

26 pointsCrankyBear8 comments

This details the situation well, have noticed lots of posts on the topic but this one hit it home to me.

The other day I had another pleasant experience with Microsoft browsers. I still have a few legacy applications at work that work best in IE. We set the home page to our corporate intranet site. Seems standard enough right?

Upon opening it, IE immediately opens and focuses a new tab which I will paraphrase: "I see you're not using bing.com as your home page. Would you like me to change that now"?

It confused me because a few months ago I opened IE on this same machine and it directed me to a different page (again paraphrased): "You really should start using edge."

Integrating IE with the OS and componentizing it was not a business blunder -- it was an enormous business success for Microsoft. It made the Web available from any application -- something all browsers do in one form or another today -- and IE was -- by far -- the best of all the browsers available on the market at the time except for maybe Opera. That's why it succeeded, not because of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The alternatives were shit.

This is only half right. IE was not a decent browser before IE 4 or 5. At that point it became superior to Netscape.

The application integration with IE was a mixed bag. Yes it made some cool apps but like the alternative (Java plug-in) it was ridden with bugs/security holes. Maybe even more so because of how tightly it was integrated into the OS.

Let’s also remember how Microsoft wanted you to buy their web server that had certain features that would only work with IE.

I had hoped that MS was past this kind of thing but it looks like history is repeating itself.

Please talk to any frontend developer active in the days when Internet Explorer was king of the hill because they will debunk your entire argument.

Internet Explorer was the one being shit. And Microsoft could get away with it because they literally destroyed Netscape by including this shit browser with the OS.

The only event improving things was that out of the Netscape wreckage Mozilla emerged which gained so much market share with Seamonkey and Firefox Microsoft just had to pay attention to W3C specs again.

So Mozilla basically was the only reason Internet Explorer 9 and 10 were less shit than their predecessors.

I was a web developer at the time and Netscape was much worse to develop for than IE. It was poorly documented and I could make it crash just by loading an HTML file. Change a few chars and it wouldn’t crash.

IE had great documentation on MSDN and worked as documented. In 1999 I thought IE was the best browser to develop for.

Things changed after that of course.

The muscle memory of Microsoft is part of their DNA. So long as IT managers continue to buy lousy Microsoft products and don’t get fired for not buying best-of-breed alternatives (and there are so so many like Zoom and Slack etc..) then this abusive relationship will continue. When and if the market penalizes Microsoft (unlikely) then it will stop.

It'd be one thing if it was used like the System WebView in Android, for speed and security (which Edge does offer!),

but the implementation is just dark patterns.

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