Not only that, but back the MS explicitly wrote their web pages to break other browsers. This would have been late 90’s early 2000’s.
I remember the time that ms.com would not work on Opera with the user-agent set to Opera, but would render just fine with the user-agent set to IE.
That goes beyond poor support and well in to deliberate action territory
Satya Nadella has entered the chat.
I wonder how many organizations have Windows 7 ESU as a percentage compared to ones that do not.
My world is not around desktops, but server OSs and virtualization, and I’m shocked that I still run into people running 2008. 2012 is bad enough.
Couple years ago, we had to migrate some servers for an organization and they still had a 2003 physical machine and one virtual. I was like, you better pray that this works… It did, but man…
Talk about a massive risk just running those things. At least they weren’t acting as IIS servers. I have seen that in the last 5 years, too.
It’s not snotty to point out how shitty the product was, how slow to load pages, how it routinely broke web standards to try and enforce it’s own proprietary Microsoft standards (a very common practice for Microsoft and others), and how they leveraged connecting it to the OS and giving it away for free to undermine their chief competitor in the late 90’s, thus ensuring Netscape would sink like a rock and they would dominate, rather than let the market choose, which was also one of the last times anti-trust laws were actually enforced.
None of that is “Snotty.” Those are facts. Undisputed. Snotty is mocking it on its way out, and I’m fine with being called Snotty. Fuck that half-baked, jack-assed, spaghetti coded pile of web browsing farts.
This was a bad thing?
When it was done to ensure their dominance in the industry by taking the losses because they made up the money elsewhere, at a time when Netscape was being underwritten by sales and didn’t have an OS to lean on, yes. They essentially gave it away to run Netscape out of the market, not because they were offering a better product. We’ve since come to view “free software” as a given, but it wasn’t the norm at this time period.
Maybe Netscape just had a shitty and unsustainable business model?
Back in those days getting on the Internet and on the web really, really sucked and seemingly simple things like including a browser with the OS made it much more accessible.
Yeah, Microsoft did some shady things to exploit their browser monopoly and they got smacked by the government for that. But I don’t think them helping to bring the Internet to the masses by packaging a free browser with the OS was inherently a bad thing.
Netscape’s failure brought us far better browsers in the end at least.
At the time, it was a solid model that everyone used. They DID have a shitty tendency to add features and then not fix bugs in those features, so that’s fair enough.
I swung over to Opera (had a cost) first, then eventually Firefox when Opera started fading away. By then, free had become part and parcel of the landscape. But that had, for all intents and purposes, become the only way to compete with Microsoft since ie was free. It’s good for consumers that other organizations were willing to take the cost hit to produce competing browsers, because the web would have been shit if we’d been ie only all this time.
Now, to be fair, the standards you are referring to in 90’s corporate computing and networking didn’t really exist. The term PC as used today is the short form of “IBM PC compatible”, and exists because Microsoft had no qualms about letting its proprietary DOS run on any old BIOS, to the horror of the IBM execs who signed the deal to let Microsoft write their DOS.
But yeah, corporate IT and lockdowns were why I was such a fervent Mac user in the 1990s, as I was able to get more done without having to go beg for access. I never experienced DLL Hell, though some system extensions could be wonky (System 7 grognards know what I am talking about), but I had less problems getting onto the company Novell NetWare network and from there into the Internet than the guys with the PC’s had.
One way Apple was for a long time nonstandard was in the fonts and the colours. Both Apple and Windows had 256 colour palettes, but only 216 of them were common between both. And Apple only had Arial if you had Microsoft Office installed, Helvetica being the preferred font. Or other ways that Netscape did things differently. Heck, we Mac users were happy to get Internet Explorer for Mac, as it was a different beast and until Safari came out the best browser for the Mac.
Yeah, I was a Mac user when Apple was doomed. I lived to tell the tale. And am typing this on a Mac.
Well, it was bad in that it was an explicit move to kill the company Netscape by making things unusable with any browser that didn’t have their proprietary code. Documents reveal that Microsoft was willing to take a huge financial hit to drive a perceived competitor into bankruptcy. And it was also an explicit attempt to make the World Wide Web beholden to Microsoft Windows: no more Unix, Linux, NEXTStep or Macs allowed.
It was free in the sense of free cigarettes to kids. Only free enough to get you addicted.
EDITING TO ADD:
I am surprised no one here has mentioned that the computer in their GIF is a Commodore Amiga, a system that never, ever ran Internet Explorer unless you got the IBM compatible card for the Amiga 2000. It seems Microsoft, even in announcing its death, can’t avoid making an IE announcement that isn’t embarrassing in some way.
It’ll be lurking forever, much like how Microsoft was hiding their own copy of Flash. (Not hiding it very well. Third-party apps could still access it. So I ripped it out manually.)
The main pain is that all flavors of Microsoft browsers share the same damned registry settings.
I remember coming across a website a few years ago that worked in IE but not in other browsers. Closer examination revealed there was an element of the form <a="blah> missing the closing double-quote – so everything except IE just interpreted everything after the first double-quote as one giant string, instead of assuming that the string wasn’t supposed to continue beyond the closing angle-bracket.
And that’s probably technically correct, but no one’s ever going to use a closing angle-bracket in that context, so it seems needlessly user-hostile. But that’s probably just the nature of coding.
HTML is pretty loosey goosey if you want it to be. Hell, technically you don’t need any quotes and it should parse fine. But it’s not really a good idea to do these things.
Or just a heroically flexible interpretation of the standards.
Shitty and unsustainable business model? What, like charging for their software? Well, they couldn’t compete with free but that model can be a whole other level of shitty if you’ve got an hour… :blink:
As to the far better browsers thing, yeah, now there’s Firefox. 
Goodbye Internet Exploder. You were dead to me when I realized Browser Helper Objects (BHO) were a thing, frequently sketchy, and silently corrupting my computer without me actually having to accept a download or click on anything. You were dead to me long before it was made official.
That’s right, kitty, bury it deep.
(－‸ლ)
It has literally cost you money.
Every substantial website for the last twenty years has had to accommodate IE’s legion of non-standard behaviors.
Some of these were deliberate, some were bugs, but IE was too important to ignore, but also not dominant enough that other browsers could be ignored.
All this wasn’t quick, it wasn’t easy, and it sure as hell wasn’t cheap. It’s also not over (even though for the first time this year, my new projects no longer need to support IE) since now essentially every website on earth includes pointless code just for IE. We’ll be weed-whacking that stuff out of codebases for many more years.
TL;DR: in the last two decades, IE has been directly responsible for (at least) millions of extra billable development hours in website production and upkeep.
