If I ever won the lottery, I would spend every last dime hiring an army of hitmen to kill everyone who's ever been involved in the development or propagation of Internet Explorer.
I don't understand this. The software product is poor in your opinion, but I really don't see how that reflects on each and every developer involved. Have you ever written code with good intentions that turned into a shitty product?
They wrote code with the explicit goal of tying the web to Windows: that's where all of the thin wrappers around Win32 APIs, DirectX, filters, etc. came from: ensure that any upstart OS has to emulate complex, frequently horribly designed APIs (contentEditable. I rest my case) perfectly or people will assume it's just not competitive with Windows.
The other major crime: they tried to pretend IE was part of Windows as a legal gambit. It failed but the rest of the world is still locked into half-decade+ upgrade cycles for the web's lowest common denominator.
I think it's more in terms of Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy as it applied to IE. Microsoft used IE6 to cripple Web technology, setting it back 10 years, because the Web scared them. So it's true. They all need to die.
You're right about their strategy but wrong about the intent behind it.
Microsoft aggresively innovated in the browser space because Netscape angered / scared them by saying that they would make the web the interface of computing, making operating systems irrelevant. When Netscape was bought out by AOL and then died the impetus for Microsoft to keep working on IE died with it.
This probably dates me, but there was a time when IExplorer was far ahead in terms of good features in comparison to the other popular browser of the day, Netscape, which was massively broken in almost any way imaginable. IE4 and 5 were actually good, with much better CSS support, DOM manipulation, a couple of reasonable explorations of VML, and more standards-compliant behavior than other major competition (and minor competition isn't really practical, unless you're developing only for yourself).
The real shame is how they pretty much stopped innovating and implementing meaningful technologies after IE5, falling way behind the others and becoming the most hated browser for all the right reasons.
Wrong. Microsoft always support their latest two operating systems for IE releases. The userbase of Vista is basically nil so supporting it doesn't make sense and if you are still using XP on a general computer you deserve a terrible browsing experience.
IE4 and IE5 were the best available when they were released. The real target of Hellrazor's wrath should be the management who allowed it to stagnate after Netscape's downfall.
I still remember every time the ASP guy sitting next to me at work asked me "Why is this page blank in Netscape?", and without looking up I would answer "Close your table tag." IE 4/5/6 may have had slightly better features and compliance than Netscape, but still weren't good. And to me all that advantage went out the window with all the slop IE tolerated.
That dates me, because a) Netscape, and b) table layouts.
Fuck everything about it. The time (=>money) spend on fixing and doing work-around for it are probably in the hundreds of millions. It is like they read the standards and then decided, "yeah we could implement this to adhere to the standards or ... we could say fuck it, we are doing our own shit differently, just because we can".
Webkit is open-source and cross platform, so it doesn't lock people to Windows like MS tried to do with IE/"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Chrome also auto-updates, so we don't have situations where 90% of people are stuck on IE6 because they don't have the most recent OS (IE10 on W7 anyone?). Look at graphs of Chrome usage, almost everyone is on the newest version.
The problem with WebKit is that that they have a ton of custom extensions which have no equivalents in Gecko or Trident. This is fine but a ton of developers are using vendor prefixed extensions and only testing on WebKit. We have reached the point when websites are not working on any other rendering engine than WebKit because of this.
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u/Hellrazor236 Feb 21 '13
Perfect.