> but it's true that they were always technically advanced and competent releases.
Wow. Historical revisionism if ever I saw it. Netscape imploded like the fall of Rome, rent by incompetent business leaders and crumbling from unassailable technical debt. IE defeated the competition by anti-competitive practice, then had no competition as their opponents scored all of the own goals. Mozilla was a slow rising Phoenix from the ashes of that catastrophe.
From there, Microsoft did what big companies do best, having destroyed their competition. Absolutely… sweet… stuff all. Years of nothing. Technically advanced? Competent? Ha I say! If miserly underinvestment is now “technical brilliance” I weep for the youth. Thank goodness that competition eventually returned; but there are reasons every single human who could jumped on chrome when it was released.
I don't know which timeline you are from, but even at v3.0 IE was noticeably ahead of Netscape Navigator, both in terms of speed and stability. Trust me, I browsed the internet back then on a 486 with 16mb. Every little speedup was noticeable.
At 4.0 the gap widen. While IE's rendering speed got even faster, its integration with Active Desktop etc. slowed down the start up in Windows 98. Netscape got even slower across the board. It's funny that even without the fancy features Netscape 4 was slower than IE4.
By 5 the dust was largely settled. Netscape was on rapid decline and IE5 optimized/got rid of all the IE4 crap in Windows 98SE. My desktop (Pentium III 800Mhz) was faster with 98SE' IE5 than IE4, which was much better than Netscape 4.0.
I’m from the timeline that is slightly older than you by the looks of it. The first couple of releases of IE were garbage, and I would argue it was IE4 where the writing was clearly on the wall for Netscape. Mind you, if Netscape had continued apace, then it should have been fine. 1995 Netscape Navigator 2 was full of promise and life. A little bundle of hopes and dreams. IE2 around the same time was the Cuckoo in the nest. Ugly, dishonestly planted, and soon taking all the nutrients from the Netscape hatchling until it withered away.
Ahh Microsoft; ever were you the great teacher on the reality of power.
IE4 is the first what I would call "recognizably modern" browser, because it's the first browser that has a concept of "reflow" accessible through Javascript. I recall writing some Javascript attached to a button that would add another row to a table, and that new row would have a button in it with attached Javascript that would add a new row. Yeah, it's not how you'd do it today, and I crashed the browser more than once trying to do this sort of thing, but it worked like you expect a browser to work today; a row was added to the table and the page reflowed around it.
Prior to that, nothing worked that way. What limited page modification there was after formatting couldn't ever cause a reflow, and you couldn't even do all the things that couldn't cause a reflow, either. Reflows were simply not a thing through Javascript. (Deferred image loading could cause reflows, and a few other special cases the browser would handle, but you didn't have generalized access to it.)
Netscape tried to compete but they clearly couldn't. They tried to build a "layer" concept, which was ultimate just several chunks of page that could be completely rewritten, but couldn't be reflowed as we'd use the term today. It was a weak concept that was very difficult to use for anything.
IIRC, Netscape qua Netscape never solved this. It was only after Firefox that it could compete. There was a long time where IE was really the only recognizably-modern browser.
It, too, fell behind, its internal architecture becoming simply too limiting. But there was a period of time where it was legitimately the best browser, no matter how anyone may have felt about it.
If memory serves, Opera was always more performant, they just got hosed by dominant web sites like hotmail, msn, etc. intentionally breaking the css/markup being served and other websites that used explicit browser sniffing and would refuse to load real content for anything but IE.
> rent by incompetent business leaders and crumbling from unassailable technical debt.
I think you've mistaken this for a brand-off between IE and Netscape. Netscape got very, very bad, then died. That allowed IE to stop working at all on the browser, and even to use their bugs as a moat.
I am the first one who started using Firefox as soon as I had any notion of anything and haven't used windows for 15+ years (Linux+Mac now), but it's also true that when a new Internet Explorer was released I (and all) web devs were relieved because soon most people would be using it, and the web compatibility was good with those (pity you if you had to support older IE though). They even went ahead and invented some features of the modern web. Would they be faster with more competition? Undoubtedly. But the hate from webdevs was mostly from the trailing users still stuck in IE, not for whenever a new release was launched, that was a good event.
Note: I don't dispute they were slow, anti-competitive, etc., just that now from a tech point of view IE seems garbage, but that's a false believe and when a new IE launched it was decently competent.
> just that now from a tech point of view IE seems garbage, but that's a false believe and when a new IE launched it was decently competent.
I think, perhaps, we are talking about different eras. When IE came on the scene in the mid 90s it was garbage. Anyone tech-savvy was using Netscape and laughing at the pitiful entrance from Microsoft. Netscape was vastly superior and had a huge runway (so it seemed). But the thing is, MS bundled the browser with the OS and called it the “internet”. Click here for the “internet”. How do you compete with a free app installed on the desktop of every computer? Netscape had an existential crisis on their hands and legal wrangling over anti-competitive behaviour was never going to be fast enough to save them.
Behind the scenes things were already chaos and the code was an irredeemable pile of technical debt (or so the story goes, I’ve never looked at the code). New Netscape versions came out, but the rapid improvements of the early years were gone. It was a buggy unstable mess that seemed to get worse with every release while IE got better (not great, but the trajectory was clear). Soon even nerds like me were using IE because Netscape had jumped all of the sharks. By the time we were partying like it was 1999, IE was the only game in town. And then MS called the internet “done” and went back to throwing chairs and yelling “developers” a bunch.
I’ve never been a web dev, but I expect that the pain of those lost years where MS cared little for standards due to lack of any meaningful competition, could have been dramatically shortened. I’ve always hated www, ever since it devoured my beloved gopher and brought on the eternal September, but it’s a real testament to the power of standards that this inefficient, ugly, slow but ubiquitous method for deploying content has been so successful. Once Microsoft and Adobe finally got out of the way.
I mean, Netscape did implode, and Microsoft was anti-competitive, but...
IE4 introduced DHTML, i.e., the paradigm that the entire HTML document is on the DOM and you can modify it with JavaScript (and style it with CSS, which is also on the DOM).
IE5 introduced XMLHttpRequest, i.e., the foundation of the modern SPA.
Both of these were major advances in web development, and websites started requiring (or preferring) IE because they wanted to use that stuff.
From there, yeah, IE6 was mostly bugfixes and webdev languished until Chrome came around (with Firefox being great, but not enough to topple IE.)
Sure, IE4 was the turning point where you couldn’t laugh at MS any more and Netscape was only referred to in terms of “what the hell is up with Netscape?”. Still, that “4” in the title means it had taken a bunch of “much worse than Netscape, but we know how to cheat real good” versions of anti-competitive behaviour before we got to this point. Might Netscape have survived had MS not been the amoral business demons that they were?
Of course, MS were still competing at that point and shear kinetic energy of the behemoth got you through the next couple of releases. Before how many years of nothing? And internet years are like dog years, it was basically infinity time before chrome burst onto the scene to actually move things forward again. Where might we be right now, if MS hadn’t have been able to leverage their OS install base and complete lack of integrity to kill Netscape dead before it had a chance to threaten their business model?
> but there are reasons every single human who could jumped on chrome when it was released.
...Advertising? Antitrust action?
Because, let's be honest, Firefox had been around for a while, and Opera was there even longer. The people who waited until Chrome for to jump ship were, mostly, people who hadn't heard of an alternative.
Chrome was fast and minimal when first released while Firefox famously ate all of your memory. No matter how much you had, it would eat it. I remember being mocked for the number of tabs I would always have open, but secretly, they were just jealous that it was actually possible.
This was in the days of “don’t be evil” and people even liking google. Firefox had its advocates, but it wasn’t the simple “just way better than IE” that chrome was. I shamefully moved from Firefox to chrome. For the tabs man, I needed those tabs.
> No matter how much you had, it would eat it. I remember being mocked for the number of tabs I would always have open, but secretly, they were just jealous that it was actually possible.
Confused about this comment. At all points during the history of even single-process Firefox, as far as I know, it could handle far more tabs than Chrome, as in not even worth comparing. Chrome would start actively falling apart at 100 tabs. Firefox could eat up all of your memory with 20 tabs, but would only be marginally worse at 1000 tabs.
Firefox died because it systematically started eliminating all of its advantages over Chrome and imitating it in even superficial ways, and became openly user-hostile as it became completely financially dependent on Google. Imo it had only a little bit to do with Chrome's performance, which was often based on visually cheating and assuming that nobody needed more than 20 tabs, but also had tab isolation so the browser wasn't always hard crashing. Still, plenty of people are impressed by a quickly appearing unresponsive UI, plenty don't need more than 20 tabs, and hard crashes suck.
> For the tabs man, I needed those tabs.
I needed tree-style vertical tabs, so I was locked in because Chrome wasn't flexible enough to build them.
And the thing was, in those days when Firefox was a memory hog, it was a 32-bit process. So it was limited to a max of 4GB anyway. It made efficient use of that 4GB and worked surprisingly well with 1000 tabs, even though there were inconveniences now and again. By this time, buying an extra 4GB of RAM for Firefox was pretty cheap.
Ironically, Microsoft wanted a web based Outlook, and thats what essentially gave birth to XMLHttpRequest, which was a huge factor in web apps becoming a thing, and launching the web 2.0 era that saw IE get unseated by competition.
Page updates without reloading (AJAX) were a pretty novel thing at the time. Threaded conversations too. And 1 GB of storage! Not 10 MB like others! For free! This was back during peak "Google is actually amazing" era too.
> Wow. Historical revisionism if ever I saw it. Netscape imploded like the fall of Rome
It looks you concede the fact that IE was clearly better in its 4.0-6.0 releases than its competition (chiefly Netscape), but hate this fact so much, that you then still somehow dispute it.
MS had its usual anticompetitive practices, but that does not disqualify the fact that IE was at the time also technical state of the art.
(My teenager MS hating me at the time reacted similarly and stubbornly used/advocated Netscape/Opera anyway).
> It looks you concede the fact that IE was clearly better in its 4.0-6.0 releases than its competition
Yes, but only because they cheated. They poisoned their opponents and claimed victory after they fell over. Just because the new releases showed steady improvements while Netscape was thrashing around in its death throes doesn’t mean they were “technically excellent” in any meaningful sense. And once it was clear that Netscape wasn’t going to be getting back up they completely stopped trying. That’s the bit I’m most annoyed about.
Microsoft's cheating had no influence on the fact that Netscape's engineering (and/or its management) messed up bad. The decision to do a complete rewrite (Mozilla) was the final nail in the coffin.
> Microsoft's cheating had no influence on the fact that Netscape's engineering (and/or its management) messed up bad.
I completely disagree with this. The unfair competitive advantage that MS created was directly causal in Netscape acting out of desperation. Desperate companies do desperate things. Often really stupid desperate things.
If they had continued with the dominant market share and comfortable revenue stream, they would have made slow comfortable decisions. Instead they made rash, desperate decisions and imploded.
Microsoft had no valid justification to take that much market share that quickly (Netscape was much better for the first couple of versions). They could only do it because they could leverage their OS.
If it had been a fair playing field, the outcome might have been very different.
It’s a common misunderstanding: because something is the dominant technology it must be good in some way. The history of technology, not just computers but all technology, repeatedly and consistently shows otherwise.
>Microsoft actually stopped development of IE, saying the job was done
Despite being a technology enthusiast who was paying attention at the time and who heard this when it happened in various discussions and articles, now some twenty years later this is hard to source!
So it wasn't that users refused to upgrade their installations of IE, it's that Microsoft insisted for a long while there would be no IE releases past version six, since it was now a part of the operating system and the team they had had had been disbanded to work on other parts of Windows and Office by that point. It was only when enough bugs were seriously impacting Windows and the emergence of Firefox and Safari that they started taking serious aim at fixing those bugs and releasing later versions of IE, seven and so on..
The job was done in terms of market share achieved, and thus they divested their resources elsewhere. The mistake was to not invest more seriously in further development when Chrome gained popularity.
No, you're wrong. IE was a superior product, and a lot of Microsoft haters tend to forget this. Netscape was buggy, slow, and bloated compared to contemporaneous versions of IE, and IE had more features like better CSS support, IFRAME, XmlHttpRequest and the fastest Java runtime out there. Yes, Microsoft made a better JVM than Sun, and Sun's response was to sue.
> IE was a superior product, and a lot of Microsoft haters tend to forget this. Netscape was buggy, slow, and bloated compared to contemporaneous versions of IE
Now explain Opera. I remember seeing the lengthy blog post by the CEO of Opera demonstrating how Microsoft was deliberately messing with the browser when users tried to access Hotmail and other Microsoft controlled sites. It's a matter of historical irony that Google used some of those same tactics on Microsoft later when they were trying to make Windows Phone a thing.
>IE won the browser wars -- fair and square.
There was nothing fair about it. Microsoft went so far as to tie the browser to the system in order to compete. It messed with compatibility to screw with users of competing browsers.
You can snow people who didn't live through it, but you cannot snow those of us who were there and did.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. Netscape was incredibly buggy and unstable. Anyone remember the Netscape 4.x days where it crashed hourly? In the early 2000's, there was only one viable browser: IE 6. It was like this for a long time.
Wow. Historical revisionism if ever I saw it. Netscape imploded like the fall of Rome, rent by incompetent business leaders and crumbling from unassailable technical debt. IE defeated the competition by anti-competitive practice, then had no competition as their opponents scored all of the own goals. Mozilla was a slow rising Phoenix from the ashes of that catastrophe.
From there, Microsoft did what big companies do best, having destroyed their competition. Absolutely… sweet… stuff all. Years of nothing. Technically advanced? Competent? Ha I say! If miserly underinvestment is now “technical brilliance” I weep for the youth. Thank goodness that competition eventually returned; but there are reasons every single human who could jumped on chrome when it was released.