All of these practices feel fairly benign compared to what microsoft is doing now.
At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. I don't think this would even raise an eyebrow now. They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers. /s of course this is a problem developers do not need to deal with anymore!
The Microsoft we are dealing with now gives you warnings if you are trying to install another browser and makes it difficult to change your default browser. And in that space Apple has done way worse: breaking internet standards by deprecating flash (and other unsupported features), banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely. And using their dominant position to force the deprecation of internet standards is another thing google is not shy about either.
> At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS.
> They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers
I do not think this is an accurate representation of history.
First, Microsoft was fighting against the whole concept of a browser as separate from its OS. The fact that one can 'change your default browser', as you so casually say, without changing your OS was a major victory in itself that people worked very hard to ensure.
Second, it was not just 'features' that Microsoft added to IE. They were actively ignoring standards and with Frontpage people could easily generate web pages that looked fine in IE but were a complete mess of impenetrable HTML for other browsers. And when you complained about this the owner would simply add a 'best viewed in IE' icon on their website and start blaming you instead...
In short, at the time it was not at all obvious that a large majority of the web would remain accessible using any other browser than IE. (And similarly for email clients, by the way.) I agree with you that there is still plenty of shady behavior going on, but I am not sure that I would classify the old practices as 'fairly benign'.
It feels like your comment is about 10 years too late, most people here are now very sour towards Google. They no longer have their sterling "good guy" reputation.
Yes, it was a little sarcastic and under an article about Internet Explorer, which isn't exactly the number one public enemy anymore either. A few thoughts:
At some point, the ideas of a browser, and an OS, seemed to converge a lot - expose more of the machine to the browser (webapps), provide task and memory management for the sites and webapps... More and more functionality overlapped. From that point of view, maybe the argument to see them as connected made a lot of sense - the deeper the integration, the less double work might be happening, maybe. The cost, however, is always portability, or at least interoperability.
But as much as "having common code everywhere is good", I think switching all browsers to Chromium is not the way to go either.
> breaking internet standards by deprecating flash
Flash was never an "internet standard"; it was a proprietary product of Adobe.
OK, it depends on what you mean by "internet standard"; in general, I take "X standard" to mean a specification for X issued by some standards body, such that a third-party can implement X by following the spec.
How quickly people forget the security nightmare that was Flash at the time. Every other week it was some new exploit that allowed rootkits to be installed straight from flash ads.
Adobe couldn’t keep up and was actively encouraging folks to move to HTML5 based web animations or Air/Flex runtimes for local app development and animation.
IOS never supported flash. That is not the same as “depreciating” it.
Maybe I'm nuts, but the start menu's web search results seem to ignore default browser settings and only open in Edge.
Event better: I had a period of time where Edge would freeze before showing any content. So clicking a web result from start menu would just open an empty, unresponsive window. Windows would then tell me the window is unresponsive and ask if I want to kill it. Classic Microsoft quality. It's like that old org chart meme where Microsoft's departments are pointing guns at each other, played out directly in the OS, Conway's Law style. Very amusing.
> Maybe I'm nuts, but the start menu's web search results seem to ignore default browser settings and only open in Edge
You’re correct on that, Microsoft created a new link type ‘microsoft-edge:’, so that no matter what browser you use. Query’s from the search bar always get sent to Edge. They pulled a very similar move with Outlook where it now opens all links in edge, instead of in the users default browser. But for now, you can still toggle that setting back.
Helping accelerate the death of Flash was probably Steve Jobs' most important contribution to computing. That said, it's appalling that Apple is getting away with banning 3rd party browser engines on iOS.
Because there are also advantages. iOS gets away with forbidding JIT execution in third party programs, so they get away with exposing no APIs that allow memory segments to be executable unless they are signed, which is a great thing from a security point of view.
Also as there is only one browser engine, the system only contains the bugs that are in one browser engine. Most operating systems have bugs in the browser engine that comes with the OS, and bugs in the engine users actually use which is more bugs.
This really grinds my gears. Recently I was able to install Firefox addons and chrome addons on Orion browser on iPad when both chrome and firefox themselves arent able to. Why?
So let's say you're running a Linux distro and you install a browser. That browser then overwrites files elsewhere on the system making it nearly impossible to eradicate.
That's benign? Sounds more like a cancer to me.
Though, I do agree that Microsoft has steadily returned to being somehow even more gross post Windows 7. I've refused to upgrade to Windows 11 on my gaming PC. Never thought I'd be one of those people, but Microsoft's overall trend of gathering data and peddling their own sub-part solutions with blatant disregard for users is just not something I can support.
If it gets to a point where Windows 10 no longer supports the games I want to run, I'll revisit then whether they've come to their senses, but all of the recent news seems to indicate that won't be the case, so chances are I'll just give up on PC gaming entirely.
That is not true, there are over 100 web browsers on iOS, you can find them all through App store. You probably meant they all need to use the same web rendering engine optimized for iOS - WebKit. But that does not prevent them from achieving their purpose for their makers, if anything, arguably helps them as WebKit is much more performant, integrated and optimised to run on Apple devices (including macOS) than other rendering engines. Plus this is the only thing that is keeping us from a world where we have only one web rendering engine, and it would be one created by the world's largest advertising company. That would be, let's say, suboptimal outcome for the web.
Adobe claimed that it could have gotten Flash working on the original iPhone in 2007 if Apple had allowed it.
When Flash did finally come to mobile in 2010, it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz CPU on Android and then it barely worked and wrecked hell on the battery.
The original iPhone came with 128MB of RAM and a 400 MHz CPU. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
It's so much worse now. Ever tried installing a different browser on Win11 now? Edge tries to dark pattern all your info with 10 sneaky popups when you first open it. Then on Chrome's website Edge will show a popup indicating that Edge is better, and you should use Edge instead. Then setting Chrome to be default is also a pain, as you have to do that manually for each file type and protocol now.
I was coming here to comment on exactly this experience. The banner ad for Edge that was inserted onto the chrome download page tried selling me on Edges privacy and/or security while doing something that essentially violated both.
How is some easy-to-ignore popup or even a few file types/protocols (aren't there still no automatic workarounds?) worse than breaking your system ?
> 4, when installed on Windows 95 or NT 4, would replace or update many system files with its own special versions, which sometimes broke functionality of other applications, and made it almost impossible to re-install these OSes once IE 4 was installed.
Thats as if a facism broke out and people would be like "why you say its worse than before, ever seen system of goverment of egyptians that built the pyramids?"
Wtf I just install Firefox and literally don't even register that Edge exists. Have used 11 since the beta. People make this into some very big issue while ignoring that the only real monopoly in this space is Google.
Haven't you run into the ""bug"" where certain Microsoft programs open links in Edge, completely disregarding default browser settings?
Assuming you haven't turned off web results in Win11 start menu, try searching for something and click on one of the Bing results. Those used to open Edge, and it certainly wasn't the only program that ignored user preferences.
I'm not going to argue about who the real monopoly is, but I'll try to make the distinction between choice and market share explicit. I don't have an issue with a product having a big market share, I have an issue with my choice being restricted.
How do you install Firefox without using Edge? By default there is no other browser on Windows, and presumably you need a browser to visit firefox.com, no? Or you carry Firefox installer around on a USB with you?
Don't think they still have an FTP site, but I used the trick of opening ftp.mozilla.org in explorer to get an installer at least twice during the XP era. That said, I also used the MSN browser for fun sometimes, as well as web browsing in explorer.exe.
Well, Safari doesn't have 10 dark-pattern popups it greets you with when you first use it, before you can even type an address into the address bar. Edge does.
>Ever tried installing a different browser on Win11 now?
Yes.
Running Windows 11, I use Chromium for my daily usage and Pale Moon for specific tasks, along with Edge for things I want to cordon in another browser altogether.
Windows 11 hasn't given me grief in my so far ~1.5 years of daily driving it, and I don't necessarily hold Edge's nagging against it since it's browsers catfighting each other. Chrome and Firefox also act likewise when given the chance.
I will note that I have Windows Update completely blocked and disabled via Group Policy, which means my system settings never get reset under the guise of "updates" every month unlike most people's setups. In fact, I'm still running 21H2, NT kernel version 10.0.22000.1281.
Windows 11 is quite well behaved if the administrator actually wields his administrative powers, as it turns out.
IMHO, I haven't tried Windows 11 yet but having to disable system updates for being able to preserve user configuration says all I need to know about the quality and moral behind that OS. Also, with the due respect, unless you have other measures in place for covering security, I think disabiling system updates is a terrible choice from a user perspective.
The only attack surface I care about are web browsers thanks to JavaShit becoming a practical necessity, but fortunately those are much simpler to update compared to an entire operating system. Even Edge keeps itself updated since it handles its updates separately from Windows Update.
Everyone's threat models are different, mine simply doesn't care about most system-level vulnerabilities. I have had far more of my time and nerves wasted in the past by Windows Update compared to the supposed threats those updates protect against; the cure is worse than the disease.
>I will note that I have Windows Update completely blocked and disabled via Group Policy, which means my system settings never get reset under the guise of "updates" every month unlike most people's setups. In fact, I'm still running 21H2, NT kernel version 10.0.22000.1281.
What is your plan here? Do you manually update after some time, or do you plan on running that version until you reinstall Windows 11? Do you reinstall with an updated ISO?
I update when I feel like the endeavour is worth doing (eg: specific kernel or DirectX updates I want/need) and I can allocate sufficient time and energy to address inevitable downtimes stemming from borkages and unwanted setting resets.
Generally I don't reinstall Windows as I don't mistreat my Windows installations. As we speak, I've got a 15-year old XP install and an 11-year old Windows 7 install running perfectly fine on their machines (a Pentium 4 and i7-2700K machine respectively).
It gives me a known, unchanging environment that I can rely on to serve my needs day in and day out. My computers are tools, and the operating system is subservient to its administrator who is absolutely not Microsoft. I do not appreciate my computers reinstalling their operating systems every damn week without my knowledge nor permission.
Been working this way since Windows Update has been a thing, and I've never been let down. Judging by the many tales of people getting grief from Windows Update, I'm perfectly content to continue as I have. I will run system updates when it pleases me, and no sooner.
That Microsoft refuses to separate security updates from feature updates, so they can treat regular users as beta testers (and worse), is not your parent's fault. Your gripe is with the wrong party here.
I wouldn't say that. If party A creates a problem for party B, does that mean I have to agree with every possible response from party B? Can I not disagree with both of them?
Potentially letting criminals control my machine in order to avoid giving slightly more control over my machine to Microsoft than they already have seems like the wrong choice to me.
If I was so concerned about Microsoft's updates that I would even consider this option, I would be urgently looking to replace Microsoft as my OS vendor. And if that wasn't an option (because lock-in) I would hold my nose and choose Microsoft over organised crime.
Yup. I use my computer to achieve things, whether extraordinary or mundane. I could run most of my software through WINE or some form of virtualization on Linux, but at the cost of jank. Why would I bother with inferior experience for sake of dogma? It's not even all my software either.
>Corporate compliance?
While compliance doesn't apply in my case, doing business dictates my computer be generally compatible with the other party's computer. So that means Windows and Office.
>Familiarity?
Yup. Windows is reliable, MacOS is limited and Linux just wastes my time.
1. Bigger battery life
2. Decent PDF reader such as STDU, music player such as foobar2000 - if running all of these under Wine the battery life is going to become even less
3. If the computer is not needed to be connected to the Internets even occationally, there is no better option than W7.
Frankly, I think that's more of a Linux problem than a Wine one. You're right that Linux is overall worse at power management than OSX or Windows, but Wine itself is extremely light on any OS it supports. On a resource-constrained machine (eg. >2gb RAM), I'd imagine that Wine would be less resource-intensive than native modern Windows would.
> I have Windows Update completely blocked and disabled via Group Policy, which means my system settings never get reset under the guise of "updates" every month unlike most people's setups
That sound unhinged... “so I we handcuffed our manager in my dungeon last year, and since the team has been doing great work; frankly our boss is quite well-behaved if the scrum master actually wields their power”
> I will note that I have Windows Update completely blocked and disabled via Group Policy, which means my system settings never get reset under the guise of "updates" every month unlike most people's setups.
Better to use a long term servicing channel (LTSC) than disable Windows Update entirely.
The LTSC versions of Windows only get security updates, not feature updates.
So annoying! I use a thing to disable edge, but I also had to turn off some scheduled tasks to update it and spam open tabs.
Another abhorrent Microsoft Windows 11 feature is the tacky ads plastered all over the beautiful Lock Screen images. Oh, check out this beautiful picture {GIVE US MORE MONEY FOR COPILOT TO TAKE YOUR MIND}!
> Outlook 98 used IE 4 to compose and render HTML e-mail messages (rather than just translating to RTF) as well as a summary page of messages, tasks, and calendar events called "Outlook Today". Everybody was perfectly happy to ignore the fact that this opened up Outlook to all of the bugs and exploits present in IE 4.
This one is funny in retrospect, because nowadays we would probably say that replacing a custom parser with a standard out-of-the-box runtime is a better tradeoff for security, as long as it is a full replacement suited for the task, and you are not greatly extending the functionality/looseness of the spec[^1]. Outlook 95's RTF format was likely afflicted by all sorts of vulnerabilities that are still undiscovered today, simply because it was less audited than modern Chromium and Firefox versions that get near-weekly security updates.
These days we have several interesting solutions that support this idea:
- The deprecation of Flash and replacement with HTML5 ports and Flash emulation via WASM - This has probably done a huge blow to the number of RCE exploits on the web.
- Firefox uses PDF.js to display PDF files inside of the web sandbox. We have wasted a ton of CPU time doing this, especially when compared to Okular - a particularly energy-efficient PDF reader, but Firefox having a builtin web-sandboxed PDF reader has likely has saved many users from the numerous RCE exploits in outdated version of other reader software.
- The proliferation of Electron and CEF. This has been troubled in terms of security due to lack of consistent updates for many applications, and because it's more privileged than web browsers it opens up a new attack surface for applications that could have just been true web apps -- however, when done correctly, using a standard known runtime allows important bugfixes to be centralized. But this is another one that has wasted a ton of CPU time for what is usually a more complex solution.
- The switch from C to memory-safe interpreted and bytecode languages, and the later un-proliferation of these as folks mostly switched to Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Lua, and Javascript
So, some great solutions, along with some technical debt we're not satisfied with. The core problem with all these solutions is that they risk putting too much weight on one failure point.
---
^1: The fact that they shipped IE4 in Outlook 98 with known exploits is very bad on this front
I loved those screenshots from my youth, but my smile quickly faded when each of the "bad stuff" Microsoft used to do back then are currently embedded into every aspect of our digital landscape by ... Google, of course! Look at them covering all their bases and making sure anything that isn't Chrome doesn't feel up to task ... or just simply making sure that one way or another, you end up seeing their ads.
My pet theory is that all the people responsible for the things Microsoft did in the 1990s and 2000s moved to Google. Hence Chrome being the new IE, dreadful product names and endless product churn and rebranding. Google must have gone through at least as many chat apps as Microsoft went through media stores. Google Talk, Chat, Messages, Duet, Allo, Hangouts, Meet, Meet (original) vs. Microsoft PlaysForSure, Zune, Media Player, Live Music, Xbox music…
Hardly comparable. IE was as influential as it was due to its massive market share (95% at its peak). Even now Safari is only 13% on desktop and 25% on mobile. Chrome is at 61% and 65% respectively.
Chrome is the new IE because it can set de-facto standards due to its market size.
Because ‘Works best with Chrome’ is the new ‘Works best with IE’. It’s such a monoculture that sites don’t bother to test on anything else.
Because Google takes a leaf from Microsoft’s playbook and degrades performance of its platforms on other browsers, e.g. Firefox and YouTube.
Because Google have a fundamental conflict of interest between allowing an open web browser and making money from advertising. See the upcoming changes to block ad blockers and initiatives like FLoC. The more Google need to show growth and squeeze out more profit, the tighter things will get locked up.
Saying Safari is the new IE is just saying it doesn’t support all the features you’d like, while ignoring what made IE IE, which was its overwhelming market power.
Old greybeard moment: I remember all of this and how people on newsgroups (Usenet) defended Microsoft, said that the IE integration in the OS was a technical requirement and not an MS tactic.
It clearly was a deliberated tactic to retain power, just like Chrome is today (even if they look less evil)
The amount of sucking up to Microsoft, and hero worship of Bill Gates 1995-2010 (or thereabouts) was absolutely astonishing. I always felt at least some had to be paid for, but nobody has ever confessed to stuff like being part of Waggoner Edstrom's propaganda machine.
I’d love to know whether the act of integrating your web browser and your file browser did in fact have any engineering-level benefits or if it was more like a big mess of impedance mismatch.
It probably allowed their engineers to code the design bits in an easier language (imagine, HTML vs C++!), allowing them to iterate and customise the design more quickly.
It's probably in the same vein as how phone apps that need a new feature quickly may decide to simply start a WebView.
Microsoft hid their web views well in many places. The special decorations rendered by Windows explorer were largely done through HTML, but they managed to make them feel native.
I think their efforts to make their own browser-based controls feel like native controls was what proved thst Microsoft did actually want the web control for convenience.
Sadly, these days that native feel is hard to come by. UI toolkits are now super complex and the "solution" seems to be to port the entire UI toolkit to a Javascript runtime, then not maintain that for a while and let it deviate from the native standard, and launch a new Javascript runtime to make up for it. Updating anything in the OS has become easy, so you don't need to design give years ahead. In two years, you can just roll out an update and change the look and feel of the built-in applications.
This may be controversial, but I think Microsoft was right here.
Their browser was kind of shit when it came to sticking with preexisting standards, but if it weren't for their XmlHttpRequest, who knows what the web may look like. Their security disaster of a browser helped advance the web, not to build an ecosystem or bring possibilities, but to keep their monopoly.
IE's webviews saved a lot of developers from having to write or purchase a bespoke input parsing/formatting/(de)serializing formats whenever rich media features were required. It standardised the API in a way that allowed all developers to assume support was present, similar to the way DirectX could be assumed to either be present already or be a quick install away on any recent GPU in a time when every GPU manufacturer developed their own bespoke GPU API. Plus, Microsoft was already known for its backwards compatibility for developers (well, unless you were an early web developer, I guess).
Firefox showed that the inclusion in the OS doesn't mean Microsoft gets to have a monopoly if the competition is good enough. Then Chrome came and ate Firefox's lunch.
Microsoft's mistake was probably that they were so blatant about everything. They did things because they wanted a monopoly, and weren't afraid to tell others. Google dresses themselves in lies and deceit calling everything "open" and claim they want to "advance the ecosystem" when their true goal is to hold an iron grip on the internet and the devices connecting to it. Anyone who thinks operating system vendors like Apple and Google aren't at least as evil as 2000's Microsoft has fallen for their tricks. Even Linux has this control issue; just look at IBM/Red Hat trying to prevent people from switching to alternatives, or Oracle anything.
"Web Browsers really make poor client application runtimes for all but the most basic of things."
I found this the most amusing line of the post, given the current state of many staple desktop applications. Besides games, how many programs these days are designed to run natively on desktop as opposed to in a browser? It feels like the default is now browser-based!
Both can be true though. The fact that with a pile of duct tape and spit you can get it to work doesn't mean that web browsers make really poor application runtimes for all but the most basic of thing. It's horrible how all this stuff works under the hood, it's just one kludge on top of another, the fact that it's mostly abstracted away doesn't make it is suddenly all good.
Besides the highly questionable business ethics discussed in this article, IE just plain sucked. On one medium-sized project I worked on back then, I calculated that around 30% of the code was there just to work around various IE bullshittery.
I have to smile when I see young people complaining about Safari incompatibilities now. You have no idea, young padawans. :-)
IE had the right box model years ahead of everything else, a better way of doing embeds, an element transformation language that's still ahead of anything you can do with CSS, .... Sure it wasn't "standards compliant" but I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't.
> I don't remember Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox ever changing their behaviour to match a standard, they just got their behaviour declared as the standard and ignored the cases where they didn't.
This is not even remotely true. There’s thousands upon thousands of bugs publicly available in Bugzilla showing fixes to standards conformance, not to mention the Acid Test and things like that.
As far as “got their behaviour declared as the standard”, in several important cases the opposite is true. The reason why Netscape 4 was so terrible with CSS is because there were two competing approaches for styling – CSS, which Microsoft had already started implementing; and JSSS which Netscape had already started implementing. The W3C picked CSS, and Netscape scrambled to catch up by transcoding CSS into JSSS as a stopgap measure. Which is also why Netscape 4 lost CSS support when JavaScript was disabled.
Not only that, but IE4 was the first browser you could do, what we would now call "web apps". It had a stable javascript implementation and css, which let you create and edit elements dynamically. It really paved the way of how we do things today.
and IE5 introduced dynamic web requests (originally ActiveXObject, then as the familiar XHR) which was way better than holding open a long page response
There was also a way of doing it with the DOM that Mozilla implemented. I don’t recall the specifics, it was something like you would instantiate a new Document object and then call open() on it with a URL. It ended up being abandoned when XMLHttpRequest was made the standard by WHATWG I think.
It was also possible in earlier browsers by using hidden frames. User interaction or a timer would trigger, then you load the frame (which contained dynamically generated js) and then call the javascript you'd just loaded.
XMLHttpRequest long predates the foundation of WHATWG. XMLHttpRequest was introduced with IE5 in 2001. WHATWG wasn't founded until 2004, when its first mailing list started.
If you check my comment again, I’m saying it was abandoned after WHATWG formalised XHR. It existed a long time before that. I think XHR was a little earlier, but they were roughly contemporaneous. And of course, people were doing XHR stuff before XHR existed with things like invisible iframes, but those were just hacks.
Kind of both, it's lagging behind Firefox and Chrome for sure but the most annoying for me isn't really that but the bugs on basic web features. It definitely feels less stable, you never know what the next version will break.
Because instead of one company with 95% market share, it's two companies with 50% market share each. This makes every argument more complicated since you have to refute "if you don't like one you're free to buy the other"
The defining aspect of Internet Explorer’s impact on the WWW is that, once Microsoft killed Netscape and Internet Explorer 6 gained >95% market share, they shut down development for five years. When Firefox started to become popular, they restarted development.
That’s more than five incredibly long years where front-end web development was dragged down to an absolute standstill by Microsoft. Even the subsequent Internet Explorer 7 was just a quick patch job to fix the weirdest rendering bugs, add some CSS selectors, and add tabs. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 7 (released in 2006) dropped out of use that web developers could rely upon post-2001 CSS, and it wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 (released in 2009) dropped out of use that web developers could rely upon post-2001 JavaScript. In that entire 2001–2006 span, the most significant forward motion that happened was a slight change to how a couple of HTTP headers were handled if the user had installed Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Safari, even on its very worst day, is not even remotely on the same scale as the horrific effect Internet Explorer had on the industry. Anybody telling you that “Safari is the new IE” simply has no clue whatsoever what Internet Explorer was like to deal with back in the day. Browser support for absolutely everything was at a complete standstill for most of a decade because of Internet Explorer.
Safari has all of the iOS users locked to it in a level that not even a campaign to get users to switch browsers would liberate them, cause you are literally not allowed to make a competing browser in iOS.
In a way, but as long as Apple doesn’t have a 95% market share it’s not an abuse of a monopoly like it was with MS. As such, Apple cannot use embrace, extend and extinguish tactics either. Google can and could, given Android’s dominance in some markets (eg. ~95% in India), though globally its share (~70%) is not enough to allow really abusive tactics.
Marketshare is only one factor. In mid-late 2000s, you could have pushed users to install Firefox and then Chrome and say IE is not fully supported, didn't work with enterprises but for captive audience and startups it made sense. Now that isn't an option as users can't migrate away from Safari. So, it is worse now, Safari will decide the baseline and if it doesn't support some feature that you need, you'll have to let go richest x% customers or move to the walled garden.
See, the thing is that you are not thinking of each companies incentives. Google makes money out of the web. Apple and Microsoft make money from people using their operating system. They don't want web standards to be more powerful and to replace native apps.
And the market share doesn't matter, cause for iOS users, 100% of them use Safari, and you are not allowed to build a competing browser for it. This freezes web standard development, since it is a major player in the space the is literally against improvement in the space.
That's exactly where we are at now, it's not like you can tell users to use something else whenever Safari breaks something on every new release, you have to use workarounds.
For the vast majority of use cases today, you no longer have to spend most of your time adding hacks for every kind of browser just to get a page to render correctly. That's pretty huge. Say what you will about the shenanigans corporations pull on the web today, it's far less painful to make a web app now. (Overcomplicated, sure, but overall less painful)
This statement holds true on desktops but not on mobiles.
Apple cripples Safari (and other browsers) on iOS, and mobile ads are an abomination on all platforms if the user is not savvy enough to know how to block them.
I miss when the IE5.5 reference was all I needed to use (worked somewhere that mandated that browser). I don’t recall any big issues with it but we did as little JS as possible.
That mindset made it impossible to upgrade from IE6, if you kept away from a dynamic front end it was a bit easier. That said the current landscape is worse, the javascript tooling can make old apps impossible to improve upon just 5 years after release unless you have continuously worked on it.
"Standards compliant" is a bit of revisionists history. Mid 90s were wild west of browser development. Netscape and later MS were releasing browser every 6-12 months (fast for the time). Standards were defined post-hoc. JS, CSS, ActiveX, Applets were all created along-side or before standards. MS practices were mostly ruthless and some illegal, but as a product it was in later times similar to or little better than Navigator.
> Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based". This, of course, got Microsoft's attention.
"[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers."
-- Marc Andreesen, then CEO of Netscape
Microsoft was right to worry. The browser is the only app most people use on the laptop today.
What should they have done? I'm asking this not as a rhetorical question, to justify their behaviour, but because I think it's interesting, and they still haven't answered it.
One of my computers has Windows 10 (I know it is getting close to end of support... in theory, they will support it since lots of companies still sit on it).
Microsoft still tries to add back Edge as the default browser after every patch. They always reset your setting silently (how is this shit even legal?)
Also IMHO nowadays they are pushing updates much more often and those constant updates slow down the computer to a crawl - they do this because they try to force you to upgrade. Seriously the amount of updates nowadays is incredible - and as an user you simply cannot disable windows update due to multiple dark patterns (e.g. windows ignoring the settings in the windows update menu... + you you cannot disable the service since there is another service that turns it on).
Windows keeps downloading patches when you do something else - every few days the computet becomes unusable and requires a restart.
To add insult to in injury: windows 11 requires computers with this new bios, so even if you gave up and wanted to pay microsoft their extortion money... you cant, since the new Windows wont work on your older computer.
Seriously due to updates every few days random services take 10% of processor time, or updates eat all internet bandwith.. even when every windows update is turned off.
The only solution is to use hard to audit programs from the internet that can disable updates completly. [Downloading such things is nor very safe... so I dont do it]
Yes I scanned the computer for trojans - its the updates that make it slow.
My old machine used to play doom and browse websites randomly slows down every few days because they use a dark pattern of patches that try to convince you to throw away a perfectly fine computer and buy windows 11. Which wont even work.
So I wonder what is a safe way to disable windows updates? It makes the computer behave normally (e.g
.if it has no connection for 3 weeks of behaves ok for 3 weeks. Connect to inetenet - updates...)
So today, instead of building their own infrastructure, and using free (as in freedom) OSS for their organizational software needs, governments and public agencies pay massive amounts of taxpayer money, that could be put to use elsewhere, in licensing fees.
At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. I don't think this would even raise an eyebrow now. They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers. /s of course this is a problem developers do not need to deal with anymore!
The Microsoft we are dealing with now gives you warnings if you are trying to install another browser and makes it difficult to change your default browser. And in that space Apple has done way worse: breaking internet standards by deprecating flash (and other unsupported features), banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely. And using their dominant position to force the deprecation of internet standards is another thing google is not shy about either.