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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that one reason IE declined was because developers hated it. So we stopped using it, we stopped relying on IE-only features, we started implementing features IE didn't support, we threw our weight behind alternatives, and we labeled IE as uncool. Maybe I'm overestimating how big of an influence we were, but I don't think our influence was trivial, either.

That's why I'm kind of surprised that this preview of Spartan is not really developer centric.

You can talk to and write on web pages?

As an end user ... cool. Not really revolutionary, but cool.

As a developer, though, I don't really care, unless it is easy to build things in IE. For years, IE gave us headaches and heartaches. Give us something that makes up for that, please.

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IE lagged behind other browsers. It did not implement the open standards that the others did. That has nothing to do with developers not liking IE. It has everything to do with how Microsoft had a monopoly on the browser market.

To hear Brendan Eich tell it, Microsoft's mindset went beyond simply "We have a monopoly so we can do whatever we want." It was a conscious "The web isn't the future" attitude. From the JavaScript Jabber podcast:

"After IE6 they took the team down to a skeleton crew and they stopped fixing bugs. They had horrendous security bugs and page layout bugs and DOM bugs and networking bugs. And they just said, 'Ah, the web is over. We’re going to do Windows presentation foundation,' which became Silverlight. 'We're going to do .NET. The web, that was a passing fad, sort of like television.' So…"

Now whether or not Eich is the absolute authority or not on this, I can't say, but he certainly interacted with them enough to have a deeper perspective than the average, frustrated dev in 00's.

(Source: http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript...)

I interned at Microsoft when they were trying to ramp up from from the skeleton crew. The impression I got was that this was part of it, but also that Microsoft was averse to innovating on IE after the US antitrust case.

Microsoft didn't need to do any "innovating." They just needed to adhere to existing and emerging standards. Also, Microsoft needs to seriously stop using that word "innovation,"because the more they talked about it, the less they actually did. It got to the point that Microsoft fooled themselves into thinking that everything they did was innovation.

And, while I don't have a source at hand (I should be asleep!), it's also worthwhile to know that the IE team that shipped 6 didn't have any idea it was about to ramped down — had they known that, they'd have pushed much harder to fix more bugs before shipping.

It boggles my mind that this can be a post-1998 worldview. I understand that they were late to the game, but late, then invested, and then flippant?

Or will a mobile world prove them right, but too early?

  >  I understand that they were late to the game, but late, then invested, and then flippant?

Yeah. At the time when the IE team was disbanded, Internet usage was still exploding in the US and all over the world.

There's just literally no way they could have looked at that and concluded that it was some kind of fad that had run its course. If Brendan Eich honestly believes Microsoft thought that, I'm glad he wound up not being CEO of Mozilla.

Instead, I think it's incredibly clear that Microsoft understood the web's power very well. Once they achieved near-total market share with IE6, they clearly made a conscious, strategic decision to retard the growth of the web by ceasing to improve their browser because they knew that the growth of the web would render one's operating system mostly irrelevant someday.

And it actually worked for a few years in the early 2000's. Sort of. Dragging their heels on IE6 did buy Microsoft some time; they just didn't manage to use it very well (thankfully).

Things stagnated on the client-side web for a while in the early 2000s (because anything you built still had to work on IE6) and Microsoft continued to incrementally improve Windows, Office, they started Silverlight, and their server-side dev tools inched ahead as well.

Maybe true, but the bits he's picking out are kinda wrong IMHO. WPF hasn't changed much since it was first done in the mid 00s, Microsoft didn't put the same improvement into developer productivity for WPF as they have for ASP.NET (Webforms -> ASP.NET MVC, vNext etc). WPF workflow is still painful despite it being around for nearly 10 years and Xaml as a concept being around longer.

But Silverlight has been retired. The original plan was for WPF to be separated into the Windows part and the web part. The web part failed miserably. It was yet another attempt to make a Microsoft only solution for a common problem.

I think that Microsoft needs to put itself in a position to revolutionize. One of the historical problems of IE is it tried to do things "its way" ignorant of where it was positioned in the browser landscape. That caused a slow but massive loss in market share.

They talk a lot about working on the "modern web", that's marketing-speak for it uses established technologies that IE refused to use. I hope this means that I can develop for Spartan with zero handholding (unlike the IE headache/handholding)- I think this is the "just works" claim they keep repeating.

If I don't have to worry about my site working on Spartan, then Microsoft is in a position that it can start revolutionizing. And from that perspective, focusing on cool stuff for the end user is a pretty good strategy. Throw a bunch of interesting innovations that don't break the fundamental rules of "it just works" and no extra developer work, and they might catch lightning in the bottle.

That might just start crawling marketshare back into Microsoft hands.

> They talk a lot about working on the "modern web", that's marketing-speak for it uses established technologies that IE refused to use.

IE pioneered much of the modern web (AJAX...)! The problem with IE is that it got entranched in the enterprise and couldn't change very easily! Ya, sure, we get to go off and use Firefox and Chrome, but there are literally tons of internal web apps that only work in IE, making IE difficult to change and evolve.

> If I don't have to worry about my site working on Spartan, then Microsoft is in a position that it can start revolutionizing.

It is not actually about you, but about the corporates. Anyways, the same effect: now IE legacy has been tossed away with Spartan (the corporates can still use IE as a legacy app), MS can move forward without worrying so much about the past.

The approach taken previously, IE 10+ with a compat mode for legacy IE 6 web sites, didn't work well. Many just saw "IE" in the user agent string for IE 10+ and immediately thought "IE 6"! So Spartan lacks a compat mode, getting rid of that problem completely.

Honestly, it would have even been an improvement to take IE 11, throw away compat mode, and just call it something other than IE. I'm sure Spartan does much more than that since it would be a wasted opportunity otherwise.

(disclosure: MS employee, but far away from web browser development and speaking for self with only anecdotal knowledge about the history; also an avid Chrome user)

> IE pioneered much of the modern web (AJAX...)! The problem with IE is that it got entranched in the enterprise and couldn't change very easily! Ya, sure, we get to go off and use Firefox and Chrome, but there are literally tons of internal web apps that only work in IE, making IE difficult to change and evolve.

This is...overstating things. I really like the belated recognition that the early IE team got for the work they did for the web, but that was 15 years ago. At some point you have to address the intervening years.

Meanwhile, maintaining backwards compatibility was a problem IE has had, but is not at all the reason for the pain of almost a decade of IE dominance during that time. "established technologies that IE refused to use" is a fair assessment of at least some of that, although for almost five of those years there wasn't even an IE team to refuse to use standards as it had been disbanded.

In any case, as a web developer, I'm for the most part thrilled with Spartan's plan of attack and look forward to seeing it succeed.

I agree that the long gap between IE6 and IE7 was really bad (when the IE team was in China, btw, but does that count?), and I'm not saying these problems aren't self inflicted. But once more modern IEs started coming out with standard compliant features, they were ignored (supporting IE still meant IE 6). But once those web standard features were there (along with lots of effort on compliance), they were still not being used! Spartan seems to fix that current problem.

The big change to make Spartan developer friendly is by having fast update cycles that are not bound to a specific OS version. That's the only change I'd care about. Has Microsoft announced anything about that?

Yes, this has been confirmed with the giant caveat that it's not bound to a specific OS version as long as your Windows version is 10+.

Yes, but the caveat to the caveat is that Windows 10 will both be free and is intentionally being made to run on very dated hardware. As far as has been released that I can see, 10 will run on anything that will run Vista (which was released eight years ago and ran on Pentium IIIs and Celerons.) While this won't necessarily make the army of XP machines that still live out there go away, Microsoft is pushing really hard to get everyone up to date on the OS.

Source: I attended the Microsoft Spartan preview event last week.

Th 10+ requirement makes me doubt that MS is on the right path. OS version independence only really works if the dependencies are rolled out together with the browser instead of the OS. So what in Spartan makes it dependent on Win10? It's not like Win10 will be a huge departure in terms of its kernel, correct?

It may be the other way around. The older OS'es integrated too much of IE, and they reduced that coupling in Win 10.

Backed by the un-caveat that you get a free upgrade to Windows 10 from 7 & 8

The number one reason IE fell out of favor was extensions. Firefox introducing extensions revolutionized the browser experience, and MS sat with the head in the sand for FARRRR too long. That combined with the repeated spyware targeted at IE, and it quickly got a reputation as being slow (as a result of the spyware, I personally never had an issue with IE speed out of the box), insecure, and with fewer features to boot.

I seem to recall at least early on, IE also refused to implement tabs, which were vital to a power user. I can't even imagine going back to having a window per website... ugh, the bad old days.

Maybe one reason, but not the number one reason... I mean it took Microsoft ~5 years just to update from IE6 to 7. That alone can explain their downfall. They waited until developers had almost 6+ years to use and evangelize a non-IE browser, and by then they just kept falling behind. Lack of extensions was more like the nail in the coffin than the ultimate cause of death for IE.

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