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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."
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
don't be so fast to kill it, it's improved quite a bit recently... it's not like there's that much software around used in it's original form from 15 years ago...
yeah, pretty much. I think everyone who uses IE doesn't know they're using IE, and if they do, they probably don't care about how old it is. Everyone else doesn't use it. But think about it this way -- its not that IE is turning 15, its that the Browser Wars started about 15 years ago, and despite some lull in the middle, seem to be just as heated and relevant as ever.
The only thing that's really changed in 15 years is that Netscape faded into the shadows and went guerrilla as Mozilla, and Microsoft's attempts to wage conventional war against it just ended up providing Mozilla with more ammunition. Its now stronger than ever.
Like Vietnam, only lamer.
do you remember what it was like being 15? i bet ie's plotting to get opera in bed or something :)
oh man i'm getting old... shoudl've been "plotting on operas, firefoxes and chromes asses"... this way it'd be insightful at least...
I remember being a college student back in 1993 running Mosaic and Pine from our university's Unix architecture. Ah, those were the days!
The upcoming version won't work on Windows XP - which is still very very popular.
Its like they're not even trying...
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 -
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
yes but we all not what happened to Netscape. We can only pray IE suffers the safe fate.
That it gets abandoned, and a team of open source coders picks it up?
yes but we all not what happened to Netscape. We can only pray IE suffers the safe fate.
That it gets abandoned, and a team of open source coders picks it up?
And greatly improves it, and uses it as a wedge to prod other browser developers into developing faster/more open/more extensible/more standards-compliant products?
Yeah. that's what I'd like. Pipe dream maybe, but it would be nice.
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.
So many thanks for the billions of wasted man-hours that were spent on supporting your badly implemented standards and attempts at world dominance.
Oh, how is silverlight doing, by the way ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Perhaps not, but most people are still using XP, hardly anybody has moved to Vista or Windows 7.
I would agree that "hardly anyone" might apply to Vista, but it most certainly does not apply to Windows 7.
Remember to maintain your supply of
It does not matter when the first copy of XP was sold, it matters when the last copy was sold. You cannot drop support for something that you sold a few months ago just because it has been on sale for 8 years and there are two newer versions.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
On an Atom 330 with nVidia's ION, Windows 7 is more than usable.
Remember to maintain your supply of
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
He was also much older and much thinner than IE...
Remember to maintain your supply of
Pretty accurate - and that's from a long-term Opera user.
Shame that Opera sees such little take-up. It has 99% of the functionality of the common addons for Firefox already built-in (and has for years), it is a damn sight faster on low-end machines than Firefox, it's cross-platform, it's got a built-in mail client that is more than good enough for the average joe (with super-fast searching for EVERYTHING), and it's normally first with any innovation (WebM, Acid-compliance, HTML5, etc.) - hell, for the last version they discovered myriad websites with a common javascript bug that preventing them providing a 10.x version number in the user-agent, so they had to stick with 9.8 and some extra gumfph elsewhere to tell you the real version number. No other browser's spotted that yet.
If someone could tie Pidgin into Opera, I'd never need another bit of software again.
I believe the earliest versions of these browsers didn't even have any CSS support.
Even now all browsers don't fully implement standards - there is still a lot of red on this chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(Cascading_Style_Sheets)
So a bit to go to the solved problem.
Actually, the first public beta of Safari was January 7th 2003 according to Wikipedia. The first public point release of Firefox (or rather, Phoenix as it was called at the time before the great renaming controversy) was Phoenix 0.1 which was released in September 2002. So Firefox/Phoenix preceded Safari by about 3-4 months.
Firefox came out with many very usable, relatively stable point releases that I was using as my regular web browser long before it was at 1.0 (it is certainly true that Safari 1.0 preceded Firefox 1.0 by several years, but you know how open source projects are about labeling something "1.0"). In particular, by the 0.6/0.7 releases in late 2003, it was the default browser in some Linux distributions, and my regular web browser for daily use.
The only reason I bought Windows 7 Pro 64-bit was to feed my gaming addiction with support over 4GB of RAM and presumably being the next majorly supported platform. It was the least amount I could give to Microsoft to legally continue my habit (the XBox is over twice as much, and they get licensing fees, etc.) I only use it for a game PC and all the rest of my life is in Debian. I wish they'd sell a Windows, Gamer Edition that doesn't have the movie maker and all the other crap I'll never use. I'm still finding things that I need to remove that seem to be put in only to annoy the living shit out of me.
So while I "bought" it, I wouldn't consider the stripped hulk of what I now call Windows 7 something I "use".
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I would agree that "hardly anyone" might apply to Vista, but it most certainly does not apply to Windows 7.
Why not? Windows 7 users are still a definite minority.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
And IE 5.5 for Mac wasn't the same as IE 5.5 for Windows. jDeepbeep was wrong about the version, but he's right about the developer nightmare point.
In a large number of cases, because its a corporate machine where the corporation has a critical webapp that breaks when you try to run it on anything other than IE6. There's a LOT corporations out there like that.
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.
Does that mean we can charge it as an adult now?
Er... yeah, if you leave the default memory cache enabled - Opera does its own in-memory caching where some other browsers rely on the underlying filesystem to cache for them, and Opera loads QT which counts as "memory used" on Windows but not under the vast amount of Linux distros that already have it in memory to be shared. There are a million and one ways to tweak Opera, which is another plus for it, including disabling quite a lot of functionality that you wouldn't want active on low-memory machines.
Opera on my computer, as an upper bound, never takes as much as an equivalent FF process with the same windows open. I have memory (in fact, all) caching disabled.
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.
It was included in my Professional edition... either via the disk or a covert update (because I didn't see anything about the DVD maker in the update summaries.)
Which brings me to another issue I have with Win7... I removed the Libraries and Favorites links from Explorer and they keep pushing them back in during updates. I wish there was a layer of user settings that even Microsoft has to abide by.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Hardly anyone has upgraded? I don't even think I know anybody personally that hasn't upgraded from XP to Vista or 7 by now. Even the entire IT department at work is now running on 7 and all the servers are running Server 08 R2. Also, the college I graduated from last Spring is imaging all the mandatory leased student laptops with Windows 7 this year by default.
Yes, but life outside the Microsoft campus is a bit different...
There's no place like
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.
I'm glad they didn't implement those form elements, because once they implement a part of a standard, their implementation becomes the rule. If they implemented HTML5 form elements now, that essentially means marking the current HTML5 draft as finalized. I don't think that would be good for HTML5.
er... your statement basically says "he was right but he was wrong."
In this case, it can only be one or the other, and as per your latter statement, he happened to be wrong.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Actually, under 64-bit Windows, 32-bit processes get a full 4GB of address space. Devices and kernel-mode drivers use addresses > 4GB. That's a nice benefit of 64-bit Windows even if most of your apps are still 32-bit.