In connection with the withdrawal of the Internet Explorer browser from the market, co-founder and director of Vivaldi, Jon von Thachner recalls his story and explains why the loss of this browser is not a loss in reality.
On August 17, 2020 Microsoft decided to get rid of the Internet Explorer browser. The company continues to develop its browser called Edge, which originally came with its own eponymous engine, but the original Internet Explorer will no longer exist in the browser world.
One would be sorry that another browser engine is leaving the Internet. Competition always helps the development of web technologies and the addition of innovations to browser engines, it's hard to argue with that.
But in reality, the loss of Internet Explorer is not something negative for all netizens. I can say that the disappearance of the Presto engine was a much greater loss, but in the case of the disappearance of Internet Explorer, the Internet only gets better, even Microsoft finally realized this.
Internet Explorer: maintain, develop, destroy
The first version of Internet Explorer was based on the original Mosaic browser code , licensed from Spyglass . In fact, Microsoft was late in entering the new market. Initially, they wanted to create their own world wide web, but as with other attempts to create a proprietary Internet by giants such as AOL and Compuserve, they have failed.
Seeing the dynamic growth in popularity of Netscape , Microsoft knew they had to do something, and they did. By purchasing a license for the Mosaic code, they set off using their infamous tactics "To support, develop and destroy» ( "Embrace, Extend, extinguish»).
The essence of their tactics was as follows. First of all, they actively engaged in supporting the then existing web standards and gradually attracted a community to their camp that was engaged in the development of these standards. Then they cut off the oxygen to Netscape by embedding Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system and making it harder for everyone else to access it, thereby quickly gaining the upper hand in the browser market.
Then they began to "improve" and expand web standards, completely ignoring the opinion of the standards development community. During that period, they brought technologies such as ActiveX and Silverlight to the market, and other browsers could not work with services and websites that use these technologies.
At the same time, they began to include additional proprietary components in their own HTML / CSS / JavaScript implementation, which made life much more difficult for web developers. As a result, many website builders were forced to optimize their designs for the "special" standards of Internet Explorer instead of open, generally used web standards, which made life difficult for developers of other browsers.
Microsoft is about to take over the entire Internet
At this time, my friend Geir Ivarsøy and I began to create our own browser Opera .
As a competitor to Microsoft, we felt the company's aggressive tactics against other browsers.
It was impossible to achieve a default installation on computers with the Windows operating system. Various projects in which we tried to solve this problem, organized jointly with companies such as Compaq or Intel, have been closed due to threats from Microsoft. At the same time, we were experiencing compatibility issues with websites pioneered by the Redmond giant. I can list a few such examples:
- Microsoft ( 4) , Cookies . , . -, BBC, Opera , . , , Microsoft «».
- Microsoft Opera MSN, , Opera, , XHTML. XHTML, — .
- Microsoft sent a modified CSS file from its servers to Opera users, thereby creating incorrect display of text on pages. It was really stupid, so we laughed and released a special version of Opera Bork , which distorted the display of articles on MSN services as if the text were written by a Swedish Chef from the Muppets. It worked - Microsoft stopped doing such petty sabotage.
But at the same time, there were more and more websites on the Internet where we were experiencing problems. With Microsoft's increasing deviation from web standards and their dominance in the browser market, many websites have started asking to use only Internet Explorer to access their content.
At the time, Microsoft was very close to taking full control of the Internet.
Microsoft's tactics backfire
Microsoft killed Netscape, and even though the Mozilla browser came to replace it, it could not have a noticeable impact on the market in those days.
Fortunately, Microsoft's tactics have backfired on itself. They stopped developing the Internet Explorer browser starting with the sixth version, apparently in the hope of gradually transferring all users to the use of Silverlight technology.
At the same time, Opera, Mozilla and Apple, with the support of the World Wide Web Consortium, decided to join forces to improve open web standards. Together, we created HTML 4 that took the power of the Internet to the next level.
Gradually, the total number of users of alternative browsers began to grow and Microsoft resumed the development of Internet Explorer, but now they are in the role of catching up. Still being a monopoly in the market, they came under the cross control of the antimonopoly services of the United States and the European Union, which significantly reduced their ability to unfairly fight competitors.
In those days, Microsoft found itself on the verge of a forced separation by using its dominant position to destroy a competitor in the form of Netscape, so they had to play in a fair competition, where they expectedly began to lose ground. All of a sudden, inconsistency with standards went from being a market advantage to being a serious problem.
Web standards first, then Internet Explorer
From that point on, more and more websites began to write code in accordance with web standards, and only then made additional amendments to support the "features" of Internet Explorer.
Now Microsoft is faced with a problem that it itself created. It has become very difficult for them to maintain both open web standards and their own deviations from them at the same time. In the end, they made the decision to ditch their own flawed old code and move entirely to support only open web standards. But doing this work from scratch is very difficult - it is a huge amount of code, and there are also a lot of websites on the Internet that track the name Internet Explorer in the data about the browser and give out the modified code for such a browser. Eventually Microsoft decided to switch to the Chromium engine...
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must say that it is too early to write off Microsoft. Antitrust organizations are now focusing more on giants like Google or Facebook, and we can see that Microsoft is taking advantage of the moment to gradually try to steal other users by making it difficult for other browsers to be the default browser on the operating system through updates and policy changes.
At the same time, it's nice to see Internet Explorer fade into oblivion. I am a strong advocate that users always have a choice, but Internet Explorer is not a choice that has ever been useful.
Posted by Jon von Tetzchner
Photo: Aron Visuals , Unsplash .