[HN Gopher] Internet Explorer is EVIL! (2002)
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Internet Explorer is EVIL! (2002)
Author : kdklol
Score : 24 points
Date : 2023-08-01 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (toastytech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (toastytech.com)
| Daub wrote:
| Part of the same site is an excellent GUI museum...
| http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
| adamrezich wrote:
| submission title needs "(2002)".
|
| previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23013001 (April
| 28, 2020 -- 118 points, 75 comments)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| I thought that for a second, until I actually went to the page.
| Lol
| adamrezich wrote:
| it actually is from 2002 though https://web.archive.org/web/2
| 0021001000000*/http://toastytec...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It's the same page. This post needs [2002] in the title.
| disillusioned wrote:
| I know enough about the antitrust situation wherein Microsoft
| essentially forced IE on everyone in a bid to drive Netscape
| (successfully) to irrelevance, but I guess I don't really
| understand _why_?
|
| Can someone with more of a sense of history elucidate me as to
| what Microsoft's motivation was around this, since IE itself was
| always free? I guess I need this expanded out to a greater
| understanding of the context of the _why_ behind the browser wars
| in general: was it all part of a long game that leads to
| Microsoft hoping they can drive relevance and revenue from
| ancillary upsells like Bing/Bing Ads/Bing Cash/whatever? None of
| that was even on the horizon... so was it part of some bigger
| recognition that the computer and operating system was going to
| be essentially a pure vehicle to a browser and thus reduce the
| dependency and importance of the OS itself? I mean, that's what
| happened anyway, I'm just asking for what drove them to insanity
| with IE dominance?
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/we...
| drc500free wrote:
| Tech companies want to commoditize their complements. This
| creates a profit-less dead zone around them to prevent
| disruption by adjacent technologies.
|
| https://gwern.net/complement
| KevinMS wrote:
| > Can someone with more of a sense of history elucidate me as
| to what Microsoft's motivation was around this, since IE itself
| was always free?
|
| MS saw the web browser in general as a potential "platform" and
| direct competition to their OS monopoly and they wanted control
| of it by crushing competing browsers. It sounded a little crazy
| at the time, but years later, here we are with chromebooks and
| google apps and other examples that run everything in a
| browser.
| echelon wrote:
| We're better for that competition. It led to the rise of
| Apple, Google, and so many other companies.
|
| The antitrust folks need to do the same to Google Chrome.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| People look at Netscape through rose colored glasses. Netscape
| was a buggy piece of shit at its height. It was so bad that
| nerd wars happened on comp.sys.*.advocacy groups where people
| judged the robustness of an operating system based on how well
| it handled Netscape crashes and memory leaks.
|
| Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the
| operating system and negate the important of the Windows API.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the
| operating system and negate the important of the Windows API.
|
| For context, Netscape themselves also claimed this would
| happen. Marc Andreesen famously said Netscape would "reduce
| Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers".
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Netscape was a buggy piece of shit at its height.
|
| Yes, it really was. But to their credit, they finally
| realized that they couldn't fix it, released the source, and
| set up Mozilla to run with it instead. And we got Firefox,
| which became the best browser at the time.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Only the last point was the why.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The first point was that Netscape was horrible. If it had
| been better, people would have gone out of their way to
| download it.
|
| When the first version of IE for the Mac was released, it
| was much better than Netscape and was considered the most
| CSS compliant.
| icedchai wrote:
| I used to run Netscape on a Sun workstation running Solaris,
| supposedly the pinnacle of late 90's Unix stability. It would
| segfault literally every half hour.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Of course my poor little Mac running System 7 didn't stand
| a chance in all of its non memory protected, cooperative
| multitasking glory.
| baz00 wrote:
| Same. It'd hose the whole X stack sometimes. That's how I
| learned about STOP+A.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the
| operating system
|
| Thank god that never happened! Can you imagine how huge the
| browser would get? How limited apps would be? How much
| control the browser maker would have?
| wjb182 wrote:
| Microsoft was surprisingly prescient in attempting to move to
| the walled garden and attempting to control the stack from top
| to bottom. Although it never panned out, the original vision
| for IE and MSN was that Microsoft would get a piece of all
| sales that took place on the platform, be it physical or
| digital. IE being the standard browser also pushed adoption of
| things like FrontPage, IIS, and BackOffice, and all of the
| proprietary vendor lock-in features they carried with them. I'm
| not sure to what extent Microsoft ever really feared that web
| browsers threatened their OS monopoly, but viewed it more as a
| chance to carry their dominance into a new lucrative market.
| echelon wrote:
| > Microsoft was surprisingly prescient in attempting to move
| to the walled garden and attempting to control the stack from
| top to bottom.
|
| And we stopped them and the world was better for it.
|
| Now it's time to repeat the process for Google and Apple.
|
| Competition is fundamentally important to healthy innovation.
| Look at how long we've been stuck in smartphone
| incrementalism - no new players can even enter the market.
|
| Now Google is trying to control the web with WEI, AMP,
| exclusivity deals, and other anti-competitive garbage.
|
| Nevermind the fact that most people now do their computing on
| smartphones, that the smartphone stacks are becoming payment
| stacks, that app stores are taxes on innovation, and that
| these companies are removing the ability for new companies to
| build healthy platforms.
|
| It won't be long before they tax going to Starbucks and
| justify it because phone wallets are a core part of physical
| commerce.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > And we stopped them and the world was better for it.
|
| Not completely. IE kept market share for a reallllly long
| time because of the strategic incompatibilities they put
| into how they implemented standards. Ensuring that they
| kept their market share by smaller companies only targeting
| IE with their web apps.
|
| I still run into apps occasionally that only work in IE!
| jsight wrote:
| Netscape had some fairly crazy, ill-conceived ideas of
| basically turning the Navigator ecosystem into an OS
| replacement, at least for the shell.
|
| Netscape itself was terrible, but MS saw danger here, since it
| would effectively commodotize the underlying OS.
|
| They went after it just hard enough to get antitrust oversight.
| TBH, they didn't need to go that aggressively. The whole thing
| looks a little ridiculous in hindsight.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| MS was exactly right. The browser has commoditized the OS to
| a very large degree.
| fossuser wrote:
| I swear I read the Netscape guys went to Microsoft hq in
| Redmond and posted signs all over the campus mocking Microsoft
| for being stupid and missing the web.
|
| Rumor was Gates saw one and thought they were right so pivoted
| to destroy them.
|
| Don't poke the bear I guess?
|
| I can't remember where I read this or how true it's likely to
| be, but it came to mind.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| In my memory it was the other way around?
| fossuser wrote:
| Maybe? I did find this from 1997:
| https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Microsoft-Pulls-
| Pran...
|
| I thought I'd read that came after Netscape started it
| though? I could be wrong.
|
| Some more info here:
| https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/
|
| > "Then, Marc Andreessen began talking up Netscape not just
| as a browser, but as a new, cross-platform operating
| system. He went as far as saying that in the future,
| Netscape would reduce Microsoft to a set of "poorly
| debugged device drivers."
|
| > Gates did a quick about face in May of 1995. He sent out
| a memo to all Microsoft employees titled "The Internet
| Tidal Wave." In it, Gates outlined a new future for his
| company, one connected extricably to the Internet. His
| paranoia for competition was also clear. Netscape, Gates
| demanded, was a company that Microsoft would need to "match
| and beat.""
| makeitdouble wrote:
| On the "why", I'd look at it the other way round: there was
| absolutely no downside for MS for a very long time. Any money
| they'd "lose" on browser sales were largely compensated on OS
| sales (even as they also were pushing basically free OS
| distribution by letting piracy run rampant, also giving them an
| insane OS share).
|
| With no penalizing cost and no consequences (the DOJ had a
| first anti-trust probe that led to nothing. If the US did
| nothing they assumed no one else could stop them), there's just
| no reason to not shoot for the moon and go for total market
| domination.
|
| It's only after hitting the EU antitrust case and the later US
| cases that they changed course and factored the new costs in
| their strategy.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| Any platform is threatened by any app that becomes bigger and
| more important than the platform itself. They invested in ie
| for the same obvious reasons that Apple tightens control over
| apps on the AppStore. When you spend more time in an app like
| Netscape then windows is less relevant and you'd be more likely
| to use some other platform that could still run Netscape.
|
| ChromeOS takes it a step further where the platform is the app
| you used most on from the PC.
| icedchai wrote:
| Netscape 4.x was incredibly unstable, literally crashing every
| half hour. IE was the only usable browser for most of the early
| 2000's. Microsoft didn't drive Netscape to irrelevance for no
| reason... they absolutely had a better product. I briefly
| worked at a company run by former Netscape people, and even
| they used IE.
| javcasas wrote:
| IE successfully killed Netscape, then proceeded to do nothing
| for 10 years, not improving, not fixong bugs and
| vulnerabilities, showing that the only effective way of
| constructing applications would be desktop applications. I
| mean, windows-only desktop applications. Or maybe ActiveX
| windows-only webpages.
|
| Then Firefox came from the ashes of Netscape.
| code_duck wrote:
| It's very simple: at the time, MS controlled the market for
| consumer and office computing. There was no such thing as Bing
| and Google was just getting started. Apple was not doing well,
| and mobile phones as we know them didn't exist yet. They
| understood browsers to be a platform that could replace desktop
| software, potentially making Windows irrelevant, and they
| wanted to hold back and/or control the web platform.
| WeAddValue wrote:
| In the late 1990's I worked at a large bank's Online Retail
| Banking website running Netscape's iPlanet webserver on Unix
| (AIX). Being ~25 years ago, I'm a little foggy on the technical
| details but at a high level we started getting complaints from
| customers running IE having trouble connecting to our website.
| The reps from Microsoft blamed iPlanet, said it worked fine
| with Microsoft's IIS webservers, and had almost convinced the
| bank's senior management to simply replace iPlanet with IIS as
| it would be the trouble-free webserver for use with the most
| popular browser, IE.
|
| Nobody on the tech team wanted that so we launched into a major
| tracing & debugging effort and eventually found that a change
| in IE caused it to start doing the SSL handshake slightly
| different if it thought it was connecting to a non-IIS
| webserver. Netscape provided a patch and we were able to keep
| iPlanet on our beefy Unix servers instead of migrating to a
| farm of IIS servers on tiny Windows servers (they weren't all
| that powerful in the 90'). This was about the time that the DoJ
| was going after Microsoft for non-competitive practices. I
| recall that someone on our team sent an email to DoJ telling
| them of our experience, but I don't think they ever got a
| reply.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Internet Explorer is evil (1996)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26399746 - March 2021 (80
| comments)
|
| _Internet Explorer Is Evil (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23013001 - April 2020 (75
| comments)
|
| _Internet Explorer is evil_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4740890 - Nov 2012 (10
| comments)
| veave wrote:
| [flagged]
| krembo wrote:
| Reminds me of the story that Microsoft could kill Google in its
| early years of it would just add an ad blocker to IE. Those days
| G was heavily, almost totally, profiting from adwords/adsense.
| Dwedit wrote:
| It is still possible to use Internet Explorer. You just need to
| remove the BHO that's responsible for auto-closing the program
| and redirecting you to Edge.
| aio2 wrote:
| The question is: who still wants to use Internet Exploder?
| tamimio wrote:
| Japan!
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(page generated 2023-08-01 23:01 UTC)