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Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

That IE was usurped was pure serendipity. Microsoft had a monopoly on the browser market and their strategy was--wait for it--do NOTHING. Leave a critical piece of software to rot and die.

Their monopoly let IE6, a total PoS, maintain a lead in the browser market for years and years and years despite the complete inferiority of the offering. The web would have been a different place if Microsoft actually developed IE6. It could have been the gold standard, the Microsoft Office, to our Google LibreOffices and Mozilla AbiWords.

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I think there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to suggest the US vs Microsoft settlement played a significant part in the stagnation of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 6 was released on August 27, 2001 [1]. The anti-trust case was settled on November 2, 2001 [2]. After IE 6, Internet Explorer effectively went into hibernation for five years.

Was there correlation? I don't know for certain--I wasn't there. But it seems likely that work stopped on IE in large part because of the settlement. For this reason, I would remind any web developer who complains about IE 6 to reserve a bit of their vitriol for the United States government for meddling in this marketplace.

After a while, Microsoft started testing the browser water again, slowly at first. I now think IE 10 is as good a browser as Firefox or Chrome, perhaps in some different ways. I remain a Firefox fan, but I am glad that Microsoft is back in the browser game because I was already starting to feel nervous about Webkit domination in the past 1-2 years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp...

I was there as an employee. It absolutely had a chilling effect. Up until then Microsoft was aggressively finding ways to tie the browser closer to the OS and make it more integrated. In IE4, they went so far as to rewire the OS shell to use IE in all its rendering. After IE6 it was clear the government was only going to punish the company for pursuing this.

As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track, doing what was in the best interest of consumers. No one would buy an OS today that cannot browse the web out of the box. Furthermore, MS was lambasted for "forcing" OEMs to not bundle bloatware. Once they were prevented from doing this, PCs were packaged with all kinds of crap and you pretty much had to format them to get a decent experience.

I left the company 5 years ago, partly out of frustration with the EU regulation. Our team was forced to spend hours documenting internal DB stored procedures so that some competitor could reverse engineer our product. Every year Microsoft donates thousands of man years of effort doing this crap that serves no purpose for Microsoft's customers.

> As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track

Every OS today ships with a browser--yes. But are the browsers tightly integrated, crucial components for the OS itself? I don't believe so. The trend I see is that browsers are separate apps that are carefully segregated from the rest of the OS.

Wasn't the tight IE integration one of the things MS ended up having to rip apart to meet the desired level of security for Vista and onwards?

Yea, they created IEFRAME and backported the required changes to XP too as part of IE7. I wrote about a bug in this logic: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2011/07/hotfix-kb972582-and-how...

On crapware: http://hal2020.com/2013/01/15/crapware-and-how-we-got-here/#...

My favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, which means most programmers were still stuck with programming for Win3.x long after the 286 became obsolete, while MS was attacking OS/2 using unethical tactics. And don't forget DR-DOS too, as OS/2 never depended on DOS.

I watched that all at the time and it sure seemed to me that it was primarily IBM's fault, with Microsoft benefiting from it being so wedged.

A lot of Microsoft's success in that era was due to its competitors simply dropping the ball while it executed at least minimally well. Now it's frequently executing poorly and in new markets its got some much more competent competitors ... and ones you can trust more.

Yes, MS does have a very big problem here, I just don't see OS/2 as being a good example of it.

Look up "OS/2 Microsoft Munchkins" for one example of the unethical tactics I mentioned. And yes MS worked with IBM on OS/2 2.0 early on.

Fun fact: I did an internship at IBM on OS/2 device drivers ('95, so Warp was out, Win 95 wasn't yet) in Boca Raton in offices that Microsoft had vacated just a few years earlier. Incidentally, That part of Boca was shutdown while I was there and moved to Austin; also I now work for Microsoft.

Warp was really a nice system for its time. Switching to Win95 later was a huge step back for me.

As I mentioned in my blog article, my favorite is how Caldera was able to sue MS based on Win95's continued dependence on DOS, which OS/2 never did.

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