Comments on: What If…..IE Never Happened?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 20:20:41 +0000

If IE had never existed, we would still be stuck with the buggiest base that was NS 4.7 – or worse the joke of the century: Netscape 6.0.
People should stop whinging about Internet Explorer. Opera, Firefox and others are still way far behind and although IE has its flaws, the other browsers just plain suck.
If IE had never come out, DHTML would have not evolved as far. Nor would have script languages and other useful things.
Microsoft have simply been giving other browser makers a kick in the butt to perform better and evolve faster.
As I haven't tried IE7 yet, I can't say a thing about it but the fact that I don't trust new MS applications until they are 2 years old in the production market.
See you in two years.

By: Jim Courtney

Jim Courtney — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 23:50:48 +0000

Today Alec Saunders has posted his comments on Dvorak's article, pointing out that the browser was a feature but not a stand alone product. Having been involved with some early browser development efforts, I have posted a prologue giving some history leading up to why Spyglass was launched. I have then provided my brief observation on where browsers would be today without IE. [Now if the good folks at Google could just be convinced that Blogger needs to include TrackBack as a feature I would not have to write this comment.]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 20:37:43 +0000

On another note, Firefox is not much of a shining achievement. It mostly protects us from ourselves. It's like a stripped barebones browser, which is what helps keep the security up. Notice you CANNOT use ActiveX without a plugin, etc.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 20:35:21 +0000

I think a better question could be, “What if Microsoft DID secure the deal with Netscape?”
Then perhaps both companies would be in a better position, IMO.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:33:48 +0000

Netscape was heading down a bad road and would have eventually died. Did we all forget communicator? That very product was where IE outdid Netscape and took the lead. Bundling it with the OS was a huge part of it, but if Netscape hadn't put out a horrible product, IE would have had a lot more trouble taking off.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 16:50:29 +0000

Pointless. The debate at MS was not whether to turn the Titanic onto the superhighway. The debate was when, and whether to do so through a browser or through an OS. The fragmented approach taken simply mirrors the software industry as a whole, which has a tedious tendency to believe its own hype.