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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer dominated for years. Microsoft killed Netscape not the other way around.

Mozilla helped with the downfall of IE but it was really Google that put the final nail in the coffin.

As for backend, Microsoft had some systems running IIS and Apache can run on Windows Server too, but UNIX and Linux was always the dominant platform for web hosting. Java didn’t change anything there.

Javas impact on Windows can be felt more with .NET, which started life as a direct competitor to Java, after Microsoft was taken to court for their own proprietary implementation of Java (if I recall that part correctly). There was a time when you’d have to select which Java engine you wanted your browser to use and Microsoft Java (or whatever it was called) and Sun Java weren’t fully compatible with each other.

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> which Java engine you wanted your browser to use and Microsoft Java (or whatever it was called)

It was called JScript. It was released after JavaScript.

I am a peaceful man; never been in a fight with anybody, and oppose the death penalty. The exception is that I think all the people responsible for this clusterfuck of names should be shot.

jscript was JavaScript engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript

J++ was a 'clone' of Java https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B . Sun sued Microsoft, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/sun-microsoft-settle...

and that's how .Net was born ( with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J_Sharp to ensure transition)

Welp, it seems I misremembered how it all fitted together.

It was a stressful time to be a non-MS user back then, so I blame Post-Microsoft-Stress-Disorder.

Kowlting gonya gut

JScript / JavaScript is a different language entirely from Java but another good example of how Microsoft tried to control the market.

TBF, when JScript was born, JavaScript wasn't public nor free, it was Netscape's

Javascript came out in 1995, JScript in 1996, the ECMAScript standardization began in 1997 and the first release is from 1998

They reverse engineered the language and named it differently because they had no rights over JavaScript at the time

And good lord they did it, they could have adopted another language as the default one (they had VBScript too) and the story of the front end programming could have been very different.

Even MS is not evil all the time

> They reverse engineered the language and named it differently because they had no rights over JavaScript at the time

The story I heard was that it was the Java trademark that was a bigger problem for Microsft naming it JavaScript. But that's somewhat irrelevant as you're right about the more important point about how JScript was reverse engineered from JavaScript.

> Even MS is not evil all the time

There was a lot of differences Microsoft introduced in JScript and as you said, Netscape submitted Javascript to ECMA for standardisation only a year later yet MS still pushed ahead with IE-specific language features to lock people into IE.

This was a common stunt Microsoft pulled back in those days. Microsoft even had a term for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

> yet MS still pushed ahead with IE-specific language features

Yeah, they all did though.

I was doing frontend dev back then, if we can call it that, it was web development with some JS actually or DHTML for those who remember.

Scripting elements was very limited at the beginning, you couldn't access the entire DOM, only forms and images, if I remember correctly, and maybe the decoration of links, that's how the hover behaviour was born.

The story is quite more nuanced, there's also the fact that IE was actually a better browser than Netscape after the Netscape 4 fiasco (I was a paying customer of Netscape 3 gold and Netscape 4)

Netscape tried the non-standard layer element accessible through document.layers (all the layout was done with tables back then, so this looked like an improvement) but didn't catch up.

IE 4 had a lot more features, it introduced document.all to access the entire DOM by ID, documents.forms, document.images, document.all.tags() that allowed the access to all tags by tag name, it introduced innerHTML, outerHTML, innerText and outerText properties.

It's easy to understand why developers switched to IE, given also that Windows was the primary platform that users used to browse the web (do we still use the browse verb?) and IE4 was available on the Mac too. IE5 introduced the XMLHttpRequest object so AJAX was born (IE 5 on Mac was even more advanced than the one on Windows)

And yes, MS abused of their dominant position with IE6, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that they actually innovated in the field, before abusing of it.

EDIT: it wasn't called XmlHttpRequest on IE, you had to instantiate an Activex Object (COM component) the MSXML2.XMLHttp. Forefox came up with the XmlHttpRequest name later (XML was still going strong at the time). You could actually instantiate any Activex component available on the client machine from IE >= 5, even Word if you wanted to.

I remember developing intranets for Windows networks where we used Word automation from the browser using Activex.

To think about it now it was a terrible idea, but it looked like a miracle back then. You could instantiate the ADODB COM component and run queries from the browser to the SQL server.

Yeah MS was hot on COM back then. Even JScript was a COM object IIRC.

Agreed Netscape also introduced their own incompatibilities too, but Netscape didn’t have a desktop monopoly. Though I do agree that IE4 was actually a really good product. If I recall correctly even IE3 loaded pages quicker than Netscape Navigator 3.

I really wanted to like Netscape Communicator but it was hard to overlook just how sluggish it was compared to IE.

As for front end development, I mostly an sysadmin back then but I did have a few websites live (my first being publish in 1994). I even won in the JavaScript category of Planet Source Code (remember that place?) one month for a recreation of the Windows desktop using JS. But I much preferred writing desktop software to web pages (and I still don’t really enjoy frontend dev all that much even now)

For those that have been living outside Windows, MS has been hot on COM since OLE 2.0 days.

Not only are many .NET bindings for Win32, largely based on top of COM, WinDev has doubled down on COM since they rebooted Longhorn ideas into Windows Vista, and WinRT is nothing more than COM with another set of additional interfaces (TL;DR version, it is a bit more actually).

JScript was their version of JavaScript

You could also use VBScript in the browser if you wanted to, it's been an option up to IE 11

IE had pluggable scripting engines, which wasn't a bad idea per se and anyone could write one, it was a simple COM component

ActiveState provided Tcl, Perl and Python versions actually.

ActiveState, that is a name I haven't heard in a long time!

They provided the best Perl distribution for Windows.

They also made some cool IDE/Editor based on Mozilla XUL.

ActiveState's IDE (Komodo) was recently open sourced!

> Microsoft was taken to court for their own proprietary implementation of Java

That's correct, they tried hard to fracture Java by making different implementation with their own classes and packages, runtime behaved a bit different too. While whole sales pitch for Java was to write and compile once, and run reliably anywhere (which was the case for every C/C++ app especially UI).

Embrace part done, extinguish attempted. Everybody was very glad seeing them get burn, courts did their job and MS rolled back any Java participation. The rest is history (and present)

(which was the case for every C/C++ app especially UI)

"wasn't" ?

My early career was blighted by having to write cross-platform C++ apps. At the time, Java was utter bliss in comparison.

> While whole sales pitch for Java was to write and compile once, and run reliably anywhere

which was never true, BTW

There are few things in the story that are simply corporations VS corporations and not good vs evil.

Sun wanted to completely control Java and they sued MS for not completely adhering to the standard they imposed. It wasn't simply a different implementation, it was a Windows only implementation, the fastest Java implementation on Windows plus some Windows only extension.

Which, honestly, wasn't that bad, considered that Java applications on Windows started to be a viable option almost 10 years later. Those who remember the first editions of Eclipse know what I mean. Many java programs were tied to specific OS implementations anyway, especially UI, Swing was always quite out of place on every platform.

Anyway, long story short, Sun sued MS for not respecting their standard, but then Sun almost killed Java because the development stagnated for a very long time, features were not coming, bugs weren't being resolved and they mostly made a big ball of corporate ready mud.

Their inability to handle the success made .Net a much more viable platform on Windows first and *nix much later, which otherwise would not exist.

Visual J++ was probably the best Java IDE at the time, probably second only to IBM Visual Age Java for OS/2, that was born for SmallTalk and had a lot of the SmallTalk vibes.

I believe, Javas impact on Windows can be felt most with Android. Android's development began in 2003 first as OS for digital cameras but they pivoted in 2004 to smart phones. At the same time, in 2003, Windows Mobile launched, which goes back to 2000 (Windows Pocket PC) and 1996 (Windows CE). Windows Smartphones were actually a thing used in practice before Android and iOS. Personally, I had a T-Mobile MDA II, for example. Impressive foresight by Bill Gates. "Only the paranoid survive" (Andy Grove) comes to mind.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say Android has had a bigger impact on Windows then .NET, but each to their own.

It is also worth noting that Android is Google’s own implementation of Java and has nothing to do with Microsoft’s code (J++) nor Sun/Oracles either. So regardless of opinions about “impact”, I’m not really convinced Android is even in the scope of this conversation.

In a way, Android is Google's J++, with the difference that they got away with it.

Internet Explorer dominated for years. Microsoft killed Netscape not the other way around.

Did they? I can remember switching from IE to netscape about 2 years before it died, and then going into whatever the precursor to FF was called.

Yes. I’m 100% sure about that :)

Is there a chance you’re thinking about Opera? That didn’t kill Internet Explorer either but it was around before FireFox gained traction.

No, I remember netscape navigator was my main browser up until 2005 or so. I switched in maybe 2003.

Maybe I was just a hipster.

The last release of Navigator was in the 90s. There were still Netscape branded browsers after that but it wasn’t called Navigator. However the market share Netscape had at that point was virtually nothing compared to Microsoft/IE and nearly all sites were written to support IE. For all intents and purposes Microsoft had won the browser wars.

I think parent is thinking about the Mozilla Suite.[1] The browser later became Firefox.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history

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