Posted on 10/20/2010 8:28:50 AM PDT by ShadowAce
It’s common knowledge that almost every single geek hates Internet Explorer with a passion, but have you ever wondered why? Let’s take a fair look at the history and where it all began… for posterity, if nothing else.
Contrary to what you might think, this article is not meant to be a hate-fest on Internet Explorer—in fact, we’re pretty impressed with the hardware acceleration and new features in Internet Explorer 9—but keep reading for the whole story.
We’ve all been so used to thinking of Internet Explorer as that slow, buggy browser that is behind the times, but it wasn’t always that way—in fact, way back when, Internet Explorer pioneered many innovations that made the web what it is today.
Here’s a quick tour through the easily forgotten history of the infamous browser:
1996: Internet Explorer 3
This version of the browser, introduced in 1997, was the first browser to implement CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Yes, you’re reading that correctly—in fact, it introduced many new features like Java applets and sadly, ActiveX controls.
1997: Internet Explorer 4
IE4 introduced a blazing fast (at the time) rendering engine as an embeddable component that could be used in other applications—this was a lot more important than people realize. This version also introduced Dynamic HTML, which allows web pages to dynamically change the page using JavaScript, and added Active Desktop integration.
Even more weird? Seems like nobody remembers this anymore, but IE4 was actually cross-platform—you could install it on Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX—and by the time IE5 was released, IE4 had reached a 60% market share.
1999: Internet Explorer 5.x
Microsoft invented Ajax. Wait… what? That’s right, it was this version of IE that introduced the XMLHttpRequest feature in JavaScript, which forms the underlying technology behind every web application you’re using today—you know, like Gmail. Of course, the term “Ajax” wasn’t actually coined until years later by somebody other than Microsoft, but this release supported everything required to make it work.
So Yes, Microsoft Innovated
From IE3 until IE6, Microsoft used all their resources to simply out-innovate the competition, releasing new features and better browsers faster than Netscape. In fact, Netscape 3 Gold was a buggy piece of junk that crashed all the time, and Netscape 4 was extremely slow and could barely render tables—much less CSS, which would often cause the browser to crash.
To put it in context: web developers used to complain about Netscape the same way they complain about IE6 now.
The trouble all started when Microsoft integrated IE into Windows as a required component, and made it difficult to uninstall and use an alternate browser. Then there was the whole business with them exploiting their monopoly to try and push Netscape out of the market, and a lot of people started to view Microsoft as the evil empire.
Microsoft Stopped Trying
By the time Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in 2001, complete with lots of new features for web developers, since there was no competition and they had a 95% market share, Microsoft just stopped trying—seriously, they did nothing for 5 years even after Firefox was released and geeks started migrating left and right.
Microsoft-Specific Features
The whole problem with Microsoft’s innovation is that much of it was done in ways that didn’t follow the web standards—this wasn’t as big of a problem when Internet Explorer was the only game in town, but once Firefox and Webkit came around and started following the standards correctly, suddenly it became a huge problem for web developers.
Security Holes and Crashing
Since Microsoft decided they didn’t need to try anymore, and they didn’t keep up with the competition from Firefox and other browsers, bugs and security holes just cropped up left and right—really terrible ones, too. For instance, this code is all that is required to crash IE6:
<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>
In fact, the screenshot at the beginning of this section was a live example of testing out this particular bug.
IE7 and IE8 Were Too Little, Too Late
It took 5 years after IE6 for Microsoft to finally get around to releasing IE7, which added tabs and made the browser slightly more tolerable, but for web designers it was still a nightmare to deal with, and only complicated the issue since now you had to make pages render correctly in two lousy browsers instead of just one.
It took another 2.5 years for Microsoft to finally release Internet Explorer 8, which greatly improved CSS support for web developers, and added new features like Private browsing, tab isolation to prevent one bad page from taking down the whole browser, and phishing protection. By this point, most geeks had already moved on to Firefox, and then some of us to Google Chrome.
![image[21]](http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/image2110.png "image[21]")
Just because we’re geeks doesn’t mean we hate everything that’s inferior and outdated—in fact, we often love retro computing—that’s why we love Atari, NES, Commodore 64, etc. We take pride in our geek knowledge. So why’s Internet Explorer a different story?
Here’s a couple of reasons that fueled our hatred of the buggy browser, and finally put us all over the edge:
Supporting IE is Like a Fork in the Eye for Web Devs
Here’s a sample of a day in the life of a web designer: You spend hours making sure that your page looks great, and you test it out in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and even Opera. It looks great, awesome!
Now you open up IE and the page looks like somebody put it into a blender and hit the Whip button. Then you spend double the amount of time trying to fix it to look tolerable in IE6 and IE7, cursing loudly the entire time.
Geeks Forced to Use Internet Explorer
And here’s where we come to the real issue—the whole reason that geeks can’t stand Internet Explorer:
Geeks everywhere were forced to use Internet Explorer at work even when there are better browsers, forced to support it for corporate applications, forced to make sure web sites still work in IE, and we couldn’t convince everybody to switch to a better browser.
Geeks don’t hate something that’s inferior—but they do hate it when it’s forced on them.
Thankfully it seems like Microsoft has finally learned from their many, many mistakes in the browser world. They are below 50% in the market share wars, and they’ve finally learned to focus on using web standards.
Internet Explorer 9 is about to be released, it’s got a shiny new interface that looks a lot like Google Chrome, blazing fast hardware acceleration, and supports HTML5 surprisingly well—in fact, it’s so much better that 34% of our readers said they will switch to IE9.
Microsoft is billing Internet Explorer 9 as the browser that’s going to change the world, and they aren’t wrong—they just aren’t mentioning that they were the only ones holding the web back with their anemic browsers. And now that mess is finally over.
I love that pic
Just MHO, of course, but that's what it seems like to me.
When I use someone else’s computer I am always shocked at how many ads are on pages that I use everyday. Adblock is truly the best addon ever.
I just installed Adblock after trying to get an answer from MS as to how to stop those “mouseover” popups from happening. Other than disabling scripting, they didn’t have an answer. More and more frequently, those mouseover popups are ads.
Adblock stops them.
Incidentally, I had firefox on the computer for a couple of days, and it did the same thing. Looks like advertizers have found a new “feature” to exploit. and Adblock has found a new solution.
I just installed Adblock after trying to get an answer from MS as to how to stop those “mouseover” popups from happening. Other than disabling scripting, they didn’t have an answer. More and more frequently, those mouseover popups are ads.
Adblock stops them.
Incidentally, I had firefox on the computer for a couple of days, and it did the same thing. Looks like advertizers have found a new “feature” to exploit. and Adblock has found a new solution.
Now, if FR weren’t so slow, I wouldn’t have double-posted.
>Everything you’ve described is about structure.
Indeed, structure /= undesirable.
Looking at spoken languages, structure is quite important for conveying meaning; thus the differences in:
I’m so afraid.
I’m afraid so.
and
So[,] I’m afraid.
All of these are valid English, and all have different meaning.
I’ve heard that Chinese is a ‘structureless’ language insofar as noun/verb placement.
>New geeks (fresh graduates) prefer the lack of structure, which means more freedom, and less debugging.
An incorrect assumption, on their part, IMO.
Take ‘typeless’ languages where you have to test everything’s ‘type.’ (i.e. Is_Number(), Is_Letter(), Is_whitespace(), Is_HexNumber() style tests.) And the automatic promotion can give odd results, strongly-typed languages with the ‘Variant’ type show this same susceptibility.
Less debugging can come from MORE structure, such as Ada’s strong-typing, where the compiler simply will not compile violating code.
>Just MHO, of course, but that’s what it seems like to me.
It seems that way to me too; though the programming-friends I talk to about it generally seem to be swayed toward [some of] my viewpoints after they gain more experience.
I suggest a web search for “Windows (version you use) TCP/IP Registry Entries”, as always, tweak the registry with care and with a backup.
I agree with everything you’ve said. I must admit, it took me a couple of years to appreciate structure and strong-typed languages. But they are great for producing well-written work, within their framework.
Clem: What do you mean?
Barney: Err....Because someone told him to. Now: Why did the long-hair cross the street?
Clem: Umm, because someone told him NOT to.
Barney: Oh, well, you heard that one.
Clem: No, I.....
You must be thinking of “Ah Clem”. ;)
“Hey, man, he broke the president!”
:’) StumbleUpon for example.
>I agree with everything you’ve said. I must admit, it took me a couple of years to appreciate structure and strong-typed languages.
You know, I think I was kinda the other way around. I taught myself on Pascal, with little more than the compiler and the user’s/programmer’s guides that came with it. {good old TP}
A few years later (2 or 3) I began my formal programming education; and that was where I was introduced to C/C++. Having been spoiled by the TP compiler which gives you decent error messages, I quickly came to hate C syntax.
One particular incident that stands out in my mind is, for a particular very-low level/intro programming class, I had a homework all ready to go and and decided to pretty it up and expand the commenting a bit... when I was finished with the minor revisions the compiler rejected the source with an incomprehensible error message saying “number radix out of bounds,” showing this error to the instructor proved unhelpful, as even he could not tell me what it meant. As you’re probably thinking, it turned out to be that the 0 I had prefixed onto an array index, in order to line up a series of such indexings, changed the meaning of the number to be octal and the compiler was trying to say that ‘08’ doesn’t exist in octal. {I actually found out that’s what that error message was saying while reading the Unix Hater’s Handbook some years later.}
And, thinking about ‘structure’ in general it is precisely the feature that allows formal logic proofs and the “mathematical trick” of induction. Any programmer who scoffs at the utility of THOSE has no business in the field.
An article I’d recently read popped immediately to mind when I read your reply:
http://www.eetimes.com/design/eda-design/4008921/Expressive-vs-permissive-languages—Is-that-the-question-?pageNumber=1
>But they are great for producing well-written work, within their framework.
Indeed.
Just take a look at an implementation of the Queen-positioning problem (placing 8 queens on a chess board in such manner that none endangers any other) implemented in imperative/procedural vs Rule-based, vs logic-based programming. The difference is amazing and, IMO, shows the value of “choosing the right tool for the job” in the realm of programming as well as the power of changing your perspective on a problem may make a solution easier.
.
Here’s a tip - Minimize the FF to the taskbar and then bring it back. The memory allocation gets cut by at least 2/3rds.
If you push something hard enough, it -will- fall over.
>>If you push something hard enough, it -will- fall over.<<
Everybody knows that’s Fudd’s First Law of Opposition.
I was a COBOL programmer for a couple of decades. I was taught in the early 80’s to create structured programs using nazi-Shneiderman (sp?) charts. A friend of mine that eventually went on to teach powerbuilder years later told me that the COBOL programs I wrote were actually object oriented.
Anyway, back in the day there were two programmers in my shop that were each given the task to write “sister” programs. One had been trained as I was (Joe), the other just came in cold, but was one of the smartest guys I have ever met (Bill).
Bill was furiously coding while Joe was just writing stuff on paper and bench testing pieces, etc. Bill was laughing at how he was almost done coding while Joe was still putting pencil to paper. Interestingly, once Joe was done with paper, it took him a single day to “type in” the program, and a few hours to get a clean compile. It took him two days to clean up and debug.
Meanwhile, Bill was still trying to get a clean compile and it took him two MORE weeks to debug. And still, what he ended up with was spaghetti code that was a maintenance nightmare.
But Bill was smart and learned from his mistake. He learned structured coding techniques and created some very nice stuff before he went on to become an IMS DBA.
IMO, structure is everything.
AutoCopy, DownThemAll, Cool Previews, BBCode, Cool Iris, MR Tech Toolkit, Drop Anywhere, Ghostery...and the list goes on. I use about 50 of them all the time. Tweaks that make Firefox........wait for it.........
AWESOME.
’ve never used IE as my regular browser. I went from Mosaic straight to Netscape Navigator.
Brings back memories. An alternative to NCSA Mosiac was Arachnid, light, fast, and free.
Mel
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