A deeper evil... for all the hate IE got, at least it didn't try to track and monetise its users nor treated them like idiots (compare the options dialog of IE to Chrome for a stark contrast, and then with Edge for even more sadness.)
Initially, IE was only ever evil for Netscape investors. It was great for users, a free browser! And it was great for developers, it spearheaded DHTML and browser based application development with powerful for the time ActiveX controls. If you didn't mind that stuff being non-standard, and as a dev I just liked doing cool stuff with tech.
It wasn't until 2005 when they stopped caring about making browsers better and it started lagging behind Firefox in all the new design fads at the time - transparent PNGs, rounded corners - and the dev tools couldn't keep up with Firebug. That is when IE started to be annoying, in my opinion anyway.
> Initially, IE was only ever evil for Netscape investors.
Not true. IE was part of the embrace-extend-extinguish campaign when Microsoft wanted to win computing and the nascent World Wide Web. Thankfully, the antitrust case threw them for a loop and they never realized their dream.
I'm convinced that if they'd have won that case they'd have squashed Google, Apple wouldn't have had its chance to thrive, and the web would look like a Microsoft version of AOL.
We'd be using MSN messenger, Hotmail, and Windows Mobile.
Balmer lacked the tenacity and the vision of Gates (you can see it in the historical stock price), and the government forced them from building an unstoppable empire.
We need the DOJ to revisit antitrust and direct it at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. They're using their power and platform to disenfranchise and steal, just like Microsoft wanted and historically enjoyed:
- App stores need to stop being an exclusive gate and required tax.
- You can't lie to your customers about ad impressions or views, nor can you disregard robot and fake account activity when it benefits your bottom line.
- You can't control the world's most popular browser and be the default search engine, most widespread ad platform, and most popular mobile operating system.
It's all bad behavior that hurts small and independent business as well as the web.
Microsoft has played surprisingly nice recently, and Nadella is absolutely killing it. There's no reason the other giants can't be more open. Google doesn't need Chrome as a moat.
We'd be using MSN messenger, Hotmail, and Windows Mobile.
With Messenger, the official client wasn't that bad, and MSNP was a surprisingly nice and simple protocol --- plenty of third-party clients were available, and I wrote one too.
Perhaps if Microsoft got Windows Mobile out first, it would be more like WinCE and not the locked-down iOS/Android clone that it tried to chase after.
Microsoft has played surprisingly nice recently
I wouldn't call their user-hostile spyware/adware OS "nice", nor let all the stuff they're open-sourcing[1] distract from the fact that MS is tryng to head towards being a Google too.
[1] The fact that people have been modding DOS/Windows and applications for literally decades without source suggests the value of it is not as high as the FSF and so forth would believe.
Modding DOS/Windows and other closed-source applications is really not comparable to having the fully commented and documented code along with the full VCS history. It's also almost always treading the line of copyright infringement and it's practically guaranteed that you are going to be dealing with a hostile upstream that will try to sabotage your modding attempts.
Microsoft’s PR department is seriously doing the best job, it‘s insane.
Anecdotal evidence suggests they are now almost beloved. In the tech community as well as enterprise (where they have always been). They are almost never mentioned in Antitrust discussions. Many seem to hate/distrust Google, Facebook and to some extent Amazon.
All the while MS has the highest market cap and is integrating and consolidating right, left and center.
I can only imagine it is because they have fewer touch points with consumers. They rake in insane amounts of cash with Azure, almost automatically. They don‘t have to deal with republicans accusing them of “liberal bias” or end user privacy in general. Even though WIN10 has telemetry just as deep as Android.
Life sure is nice when your main source of revenue is enterprise.
I like all of these products as well. Well not Bing, but yeah.
That’s just it though. Microsoft kind of has the luxury to solely focus on their paying clients. They only have to consider their needs.
Google (and Facebook) have to juggle the needs of advertisers and users. That’s why cloud is so important for them. They really need to lower their reliance on ad revenue.
>Google (and Facebook) have to juggle the needs of advertisers and users. That’s why cloud is so important for them. They really need to lower their reliance on ad revenue.
>I'm convinced that if they'd have won that case they'd have squashed Google, Apple wouldn't have had its chance to thrive
I am not convinced that would happen and even if that would happen, I am not convinced it would be a bad thing.
Google spying on people and selling their data is worse from my point of view than anything MS did. Also, Apple has a far greater lock down on their products than MS ever dreamed of.
> Google spying on people and selling their data is worse from my point of view than anything MS did. Also, Apple has a far greater lock down on their products than MS ever dreamed of.
But it is no (so much) worse than what MS does with telemetry.
> browser based application development with powerful for the time ActiveX controls
These were Windows-only. They had all the security of Flash, but at least you could run Flash on Mac and Linux. If ActiveX had won out as the default web authoring platform, non-MS smartphones would have been crippled from launch; they wouldn't be able to run "real web pages" containing ActiveX, and relegated to a WAP-like second class citizen status.
The lack of transparent PNG support was awful for a while. I believe IE8, maybe even IE7 supported it, but IE6 was still everywhere in the wild at the time, and your site could look strange without transparent PNG support.
I’m honestly grateful for where we are at right now with major browsers and web standards.
More like browser --- or two, if you count Firefox...
and web standards
...are being wielded as a weapon to maintain a monopoly. The fact that it's a standard means nothing more than... the fact that it's a standard. The ones in control are still those at Google, and they can change the standards however they want.
At least the stagnation of the IE6 times meant that most pages were designed specifically to a more lowest-common-denominator, which also helped greatly with accessibility and letting the even smaller minorities of browsers be useful. These days far too many sites are being turned into JS-heavy SPAs when they absolutely don't need to be, because a lot of web developers are assuming everyone has/wants(?) to use a monster-browser like Chrome.
