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Internet Explorer Turns 15
An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Microsoft's Internet Explorer turned 15 years old on Monday. The company recently said it would launch the Internet Explorer 9 public beta version on September 15, 2010. The software giant launched the first version of the browser, Internet Explorer 1, on August 16, 1995. It was a revised version of Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed from Spyglass Inc."
...kindof post-mortem...
and no body cared.
Thailand! Look out boys, Microsoft will be out on the town soon!
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
Has Internet Explorer thought hard about what it wants to do with its life? It's very nearly all grown up, isn't it time to think about college?
Despite your countless security holes, bad implementations of web standards and all these bad browser-dependent HTML codes caused by you, you really gave all these laymen in the world a simple way to explore the Internet. And glad to see that you're improving.
Whatever. We all know that Netscape Navigator was king back in the mid-90s.
Living With a Nerd
I remember being a college student back in 1993 running Mosaic and Pine from our university's Unix architecture. Ah, those were the days!
Microsoft licensed Mosaic under the promise of paying Spyglass royalties based on revenue. But then MS released it for free and Spyglass got nothing. This must be one of Microsoft's finest deals.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Aside from stability and security fixes, what's really changed in web browser technology over this span of time?
I mean, sure, tabs are awesome. But has there really been anything else over the past 15 years that has merited us being up to IE version 8 and talking about the beta of IE 9? How is the web browser not a solved problem yet?
(I'm sure there's more than just tabs. But there's no better way to get a topic going than to ask a provocative question based on a somewhat flawed premise.)
Do it Microsoft, I wont mind trying out IE9 on my Mac or Linux box.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
that there was a time when people actually fled in droves to IE the way they are switching to Firefox and Chrome.
Anyone who wonders why IE 6 became the de facto standard just needs to find a download of Netscape Communicator.
... Debian turned 16 today.Gosh, I thought people on /. cared more about things that have actually made an impact to the world of computing than IE.
It'd be time to have it put down.
Safari was out before Firefox.
Do it Microsoft, I wont mind trying out IE9 on my Mac or Linux box.
From a developer standpoint, it sounds like a nightmare. Anyone remember IE6 on Mac?
Reply to That ||
Even after 15 years, illegally tying MSIE to Windows is still happening. This anti-competitive activity has hurt standards, hurt competition, hurt the economy and held back the net.
There is even a form to report ongoing anti-trust violations, there are so many.
If M$ executives and employees would have ditched MSIE if security or performance were an issue. Opera and even Safari are far and above superior, if closed source is an obligation. Keeping MSIE in place AND keeping pieces of it throughout the OS show that there is no intention of MSIE being there to benefit the end-user in anyway. If we add up the cost over 15 years of all the MSIE malware in one column we will have an astronomical sum. If we then total the combined costs of all Opera, Netscape, Cameleon, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror malware in another column and subtract that total of non-MSIE costs from the MSIE costs, we will still have an astronomical sum. Based on quarterly malware damage, the sum is probably in the range of 100's to 10's of thousands of billions of dollars. The Apollo program to the moon itself only cost 25 billion and we got integrated circuits out of that. Even for the unrealistically low sum of 1 billion dollars, what kind of rocking Free Software distro, applications or infrastructure could have been created? Even building a full distro from scratch we could have a full kernel, drivers, utilities, desktop, services, and applications for less.
You can put a stop to this and advance technology, economy and security by not feeding the Windows monopoly any more market share. Tagging this one as "antitrust".
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
PNG is also about 14 or 15 years old, but IE still cannot handle its color correction chunks (gAMA, iCCP) properly:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/png-gammatest.html
Anyone remember IE6 on Mac?
Hey, I remember IE on HP/UX...
I still have the 'I downloaded Internet Explorer" Tshirt that MS sent me for being one of the first 10,000 people to download IE 3, on Oct 31, 1996, IIRC.
1990's called, they want IE's find dialog back.
August 16, 1990
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Does that mean we can charge it as an adult now?
Are there any calculations of the amount of damage Microsoft has caused to the world at large with Internet Explorer ?
Ie. the consequences of the bad design decisions and the unethical business practices that were used to push,and keep, IE in the market ?
not trolling. I would seriously like to know if anyone has ever attempted this.
Is it just me, or does "software giant" sound like a monster that should be in Kingdom of Loathing ?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
It's called listening to your customers and not dictating to them what they want. Now I don't use it, but XP is still widely used, because it got "good enough" for companies and individuals to use and rely on. Same with upgrading hardware. If what you have is good enough, not broken, and does the job, there is no overwhelming need to upgrade, even if the hardware guys want you to.
Comes a time that corporations and stockholders, etc should put the fork down, push back from the table, and realize they have eaten enough, and go into maintenance mode. Still make some money but not the boatloads they got used to. Like GM..just realize you got bloated, and cut back a lot to stay relevant. Reach a level of market share and be content with that, because all corporations can't endlessly grow forever and two days, it just isn't possible, and it is ludicrous to expect that.
The planet has given hundreds of billion$ to microsoft..perhaps it is time they wound down and enjoy what they made so far and not expect this huge gravy train to go on forever.
"In dog years... it'd be time to have it put down."
And in Cypress tree years it's barely a toddler. What's your point?
On a side note, I'd hate to be your dog. Do you stand by the door with a rifle and wait in gleeful anticipation of that glorious moment when your dogs turn 15?
Turns 15% of CSS compliance?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I have tried the IE9 Previews, and I was not impressed as much as I wished.
Yes, there are rounded corners and canvas. But the real meat, the HTML5 specification has been lacking, such as HTML5 Form elements. I just tried again with html5test.com and it gives me 96 out of 300.
What I'm afraid is once the make it public they have to start to create backwards compatibility updates, I mean there were several rendering quirks compared to Chrome and FF which required to create yet another conditional IE CSS. Somehow one of my sites causes the text in iframes to drop in to non-cleartype rendering for one, which is a bit archaic. Once they make it to stable, are they willing to update it often to keep it as standards compliant rather than making yet another quirk mode?
So please, Microsoft, update the IE9 often would you?
So, all this time that IE has been screwing my computer, has it been some form of underage violation?
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
IE 1 - 3 Were garbage compared to what Netscape was offering at the time IE 4 was substantially better than Netscape Navigator. With IE 5 crushing it as Netscape imploded.
Microsoft was late to the game but threw everything at it to crush their competition. They had much better technology once they got to IE 4. (They also used other business tactics to run Netscape out of business with OEM agreements and giving away their web servers).
The CSS we complain about - Microsoft invented it. The Browser wars took HTML from a markup that didn't even have tables to close to what we have today. The Standards were a joke. Each browser came up with innovations and then copied their competitors. Standards were an after effect of what web developers adopted (down with Blink). Websites were best with IE or best with Netscape.
Once Microsoft drove Netscape out of business they just sat there and didn't put any effort into it like any Monopoly - there was no reason to.
The Standards bodies created a host of specs CSS 2 and 3 being some of the most important that differed from what Microsoft had in IE. This was different from the rubber stamping of the implementations we had before during the browser wars. I suspect a combination of better design and(just sour grapes - do it differently just because). Microsoft largely ignored the standards, in their mind they were the only browser and were the standard.
So IE just sat there with a slow release cycle and no desire to implement the standards - they had VML implemented so why bother with SVG - a paper spec when they have an actual implementation for years. Microsoft was busy trying to address all the security problems of their features first mentality with the trusted computing initiative and not making any forward progress on functionality.
So While Microsoft idled, Firefox and WebKit/Safari grew. The Standards bodies continued to work now they were a head of the browsers now, not way behind. Microsoft woke up to see its market share slipping and suddenly It's Browser wars II
Now Microsoft has a couple of problems keeping up
1) Backward compatibility - this is arguably a good thing as it keeps you from breaking old stuff, but also makes fixing older 'quirky' behavior.
2) Release cycle tied to OS - the slow release cycle compared to the opensource alternatives means their browser is always behind.
3) Standards games - It's not all Micosoft's fault - the standards bodies don't always play fair. Why does IE not have Canvas? When every other browser does? Because Apple has a patent on it. Apple's agreement with W3C is to license that patent once it becomes a standard (not just a proposal) but until canvas is an official standard, Microsoft is open to lawsuit if they implement it. But while the all the other browsers are implementing Canvas (opensource bodies don't have any cash to lose if Apple files a lawsuit ) their not pushing it through the standards commitee to make it official. This leaves Microsoft as the odd man out.
The IE team is working hard to catch back up, but the above 3 points are holding them back. Windows 7 is a decent OS so finally we have a chance of replacing all those OEM Windows XP computers still running IE 6.
Microsoft signed a deal with the company to pay based on numbers sold and when they started giving it out free to put Netscape out of business, they didn't pay. Microsoft had to be sued to get them to pay for the units shipped even when they had billions in cash. Microsoft even started paying ISP's for IE units shipped to eliminate Netscape Navigator from the market. That was the famous, "kill the baby" tactic.
And 15 years later, Microsoft and IE still suck IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I think it was John Dvorak who pontificated: "How long will IE be free? Until Netscape is out of business." He was right but it continued to be free and ironically would be challenged by the son of Netscape in Firefox, arguably a safer/better browser. The only compelling reason to use IE is to correctly render bastardize sites that were coded towards it or in companies that don't allow other browsers. Other than that, it serves little use.
...is that it's a huge thorn in the side of all those web developers and designers that choose to inflict their particular choice of technology on us.
If it wasn't for ie6 we'd all be up to our necks in the css as well as all the varied and highly exotic flavors of html that these miscreants constantly promote.
Html5 is going of the rails anyway (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jun/0277.html & http://burningbird.net/node/108) but it's internet explorer that would've saved us were this not the case.
So people please - don't try to inflict your unwelcome code on the internet and Happy birthday internet explorer!!!
where you definitely should not open the presents.
Anything after it was horrible and everything before was really crappy. When I use IE on slashdot the cpu usage goes through the roof, not so with Firefox or any other browser, why does IE suck up so much CPU for mostly text page slashdot. I find myself having to bounce IE multiple times each day when I have to use it. On my home PC i use firefox and haven't looked back.
The Ie versions, from 6 to 7 to 8 have all sucked because they were giant bloated hogs. IE 5.5 seemed to be somewhat fast and not AS bloated, it still have as many security holes as a block of swiss cheese, but at least you could run windows update from it without crashing your PC.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
As a birthday present, can we get it a nice hard drive in which it can go die?
Here, have a blaster.
After all the moral damage and sleepless nights IE has caused to the web developer community with its "quirks", if I was one of IE developers, before I started working on IE, I would require being accepted in kind of "anonymous witness" program by FBI where like in movies they relocate witnesses of criminal cases and their families to different location and completely change their identities.
::bx
Right now I can't see anything that the dominance of IE have left us.
Microsoft IE 5 included XMLHTTP, the foundation for AJAX.
Why can't it just die already? Is it really so hard for ms to pull the plug?
it needs to be taken out to the woods and kindly shot
. My anus turns 50 .
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
It won't matter how good IE9 is I won't be using, loading it, recommending it or any other shit. MS should be made to pay up for all the web designers' time that has been wasted with conditional comments and will continue to be wasted because those old versions just don't die.